I've always loved ROTJ it was the first SW movie I saw, and TBH I actually prefer it a little bit over ANH.
Even though I love the Ewoks, it is a bit ridiculous that they are able to defeat the stormtroopers with rock and arrows. I understand what they were going for, but I still find a little hard to buy that armor made for blasters (OK, it takes one shot to kill them, but that's besides the point), couldn't withstand literal sticks and stones.
There is some logic to it. Armour meant to protect against blasters is going to mostly be built for heat reflection and dissipation, not blunt force trauma. There's also the fact that Stormtrooper armor is cheep crap that doesn't even do what it's supposedly meant to.
Combine that with a native population that knows the terrain, is already adept at coordinated hit and run ambushes--one assumes to deal with Gorax, hence the catapults--plus of course the element of surprise. Their lack of advanced technology way have also been and advantage in the dense foliage. One assumes that targeting sensor key in on energy signatures to identify hostiles (i.e. people carrying blasters) without that, the troopers and walker drivers would have had to eyeball it. Given their natural camouflage and small size, that's easier said than done.
Also worth remembering that from a strategic standpoint, the Empire wasn't literally defeated by Ewoks so much as the Ewoks kept that one legion busy chasing them through the forest long enough to allow the rebels to do the actual Empire defeating.
The Battle of Yavin is the culmination of the rest of the film. You need those first two acts (Luke discovering his destiny on Tattooine, the Death Star rescue of Leia) for it to have dramatic weight or storytelling sense.
Sure enough. I only meant separate in the sense that Luke was dropped into an entirely new cast of characters without them being introduced except in the broadest possible terms.
ESB has a very non-traditional structure but Act 1 (Hoth) shows us the Rebels on the run, that their first victory was short-lived and act 2 (Degobah/Flight to Cloud City) builds character development and sets the stakes for the climax. RotJ however establishes very little necessary to the rest of the film in those first 30 minutes. We're shown that Luke has grown to be more capable with the Force, and that Lando has joined up with them, that is about it. Clearly they had to rescue Han, but I think a lot of us are just suggesting that it could have been tied into the plot of the rest of the film better.
IIRC something like that was in one of the earlier drafts but I think it was dropped because it felt too much like a retread of ANH's McGuffin, which the addition of a new Death Star was already flirting with.
Instead the build-up in act 1 is all about what the Empire was up to. Also worth keeping in mind that the Tatooine scenes only take up the first 37 minutes of a 2 hour movie. By minute 51, we're all caught up with Yoda, the Rebellion and the Empire.
In a way it sort of reminds me of a Bond or Indiana Jones movie, where it opens with an adventure already in progress before the actual plot kicks in. More hearkening back the the old serials from which Star Wars was initially inspired, where you'd often start an episode with the resolution the a previous cliffhanger which you may ot may not have actually seen before.
