Jabba had been chasing Han since before A New Hope. If Luke just were to break Han out, then Han would be back in the same thicket he was before: running from Jabba. The group was tired of that.
The plan is rough, yes, but in a confident way: "If we just get us all inside the palace, it will be like planting dynamite."
Was it dishonest then, for Luke first to ask Jabba nicely? No, I don't think so. If Jabba sincerely gave up Han, then that means that Jabba's heart would have changed and would no longer be chasing Han. Therefore both goals would have been reached without blood (free Han and end the hunt). I don't think Luke counted on this. But even though Luke had a plan B, the chance presented to Jabba was real.
Lando, R2D2 and C3PO are supposed to break out Chewie, fetch Leia and Han, then all escape and get picked up by Luke.
Luke is just winging it after everybody missed the rendezvous, as Leia underestimated just how long Jabba and his entourage could wait silently behind a curtain.
The lightsaber was carried in by R2D2 as a backup weapon for Leia, who also came up with the plan.
But seriously, little inconsistencies like these make me think Star Wars was just meant to be a kids’ movie and not a sacred document to be handed down and analyzed by generations like the Tanakh or something.
I saw The Last Jedi, had a great time, and came home to find Star Wars fans apoplectic about it, picking apart all kinds of things ("how does rey know how to swim?", "how does leia survive space?", etc). The original trilogy would never survive similar scrutiny.
I went to see a kids movie about space wizards, and that's what I got. It was fun.
Maybe it's just that the original trilogy slipped in to me before I got old enough to where I think about such things. Maybe it is a double standard. But I don't feel like it is. And that's all I have to go on.
But, I don't begrudge you enjoying the movie! Wish I felt the same.
i'll give you a hint: almost every piece of modern fiction is like this. look to the old masters for very very thoroughly fleshed out stories (there are hundreds of characters in war and peace and they all have full lives consistent with each other - no surprise it took tolstoy a decade to write it)
In another galaxy far, far away, the palace ended up as .jabba, a trendy coworking cafe. You had Boba Fett hacking away in the corner on his space-food delivery startup (bounty hunting's the day job), jawas on their ridesharing service (can't ever understand the damn drivers), C-3PO his AI blockchain chatbot, etc.
How: Time travel
Why: Money
Lando was not going to rescue Han. He was there just in case they needed backup.
Leia was going in to unfreeze Han. When they needed to get away quickly, they couldn’t carry him frozen, and he needed time to come to after being unfrozen. My guess is that they planned to hide out until Luke came in, or Leia planned to go “well I don’t know who unfroze him. Probably Chewy, but definitely not me, I am just a bounty hunter.” Getting caught was not a part of the plan.
The droids came in to sneak in the lightsaber. Luke knew they weren’t enough to pay for Han. Jabba would have never accepted that.
The plan for Luke was to mind trick Jabba. If that didn’t work, it was to grab his lightsaber and fuck shit up. He got caught because Leia got caught. If Leia was still set up as an undercover bounty hunter, and R2D2 was close by, he could have just started slicing and dicing. Instead he had to fight the Rancor.
In the end, it was sheer luck that Jabba was doing the typical villain thing instead of just shooting them on the spot. To be fair, he clearly had a weakness for being theatrical. That’s why he kept Han frozen.
But. Star Wars is full of ret conning by fans and by Lucas. None of this crap was thought through before filming. Well not a lot at least. I believe the basic plot was, but details were not. Like I don’t think that Lando’s character existed before ANH was filmed. Which does drive me kinda nuts because people hail SW as such a complete universe. In reality, Lucas did a lot of just random stuff in the first three movies and then it had to become canon, sometimes through really crazy explanations. See the gaffe with parsecs being a unit of distance and how what makes the Falcon so fast is it’s navigational computer (a detail that was never mentioned in any movies for any ship, including the Falcon), and not because they screwed up how measurements of space and time work to sound cool.
Jedi student training with an old, grouchy master on a far away planet? Check. Betrayal by a new character introduced during that episode? Check. Rebels trapped in their base, about to get attacked by AT-ATs? Check. Jedi student abandons training to rescue friends? Check.
Going forward, how ought The Plan be modified? Should they add a "now we roll a 20-sided die!" step, so future terrorists can never again be sure what'll happen?
Pre-9/11, if a plane was hijacked, it was flown somewhere and there was some sort of ransom; no one thought a plane would be hijacked and flown into a building, so no one resisted.
How Return Of The Jedi Should Have Ended https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdukWtJwlPU
For the same reason naval battles in the real world weren't always fought by ramming ships into other ships. Ships are expensive, hyperdrives are expensive, and more valuable as ships than as ballistic mass. It would be a waste of resources for it to become a common tactic.
It was a lucky gamble that paid off.
>Maybe it's just that the original trilogy slipped in to me before I got old enough to where I think about such things
The OT is just as ridiculous. The trench run on the Death Star makes no sense outside of the context of the World War 2 film it was lifted from, no one in their right mind would design AT-ATs with such a high and vulnerable center of gravity, stormtrooper armor clearly does nothing against teddy bears and small rocks, spaceships bank and make noises in space, etc. Even lightsabers are just "cool laser swords" and metaphors for "space samurai" but don't make a lot of sense as weapons in a universe with telekinesis and blasters. Actual samurai weren't stupid enough to use their katanas if they had spears, bows and eventually guns available, yet I don't recall ever seeing a Jedi sniper, or the lightsaber version of a naginata.
Sound military tactics and plausible design were never really a thing in Star Wars.
If a single ship could wipe out a whole enemy fleet via ramming in terrestrial naval battles, every real-world naval battle would be fought by ramming. Also we wouldn't have naval fleets, nor probably naval battles at all. The real reason we don't fight by ramming is that, at best, you get a 1:1 trade, and normally not even that much.
So, this explanation doesn't hold water for me.
All the inconsistencies you mentioned earlier are for sure cases where you have to suspend disbelief, but (most of them) at least seem internally consistent. That is, they don't reconcile well against reality, but they don't contradict other things we see in the story. I don't feel the same way about the end of the battle in TLJ.
The premise that because hyperspace ramming works, it should render all other forms of warfare in the Star Wars universe obsolete seems like nitpicking to me. Of course it works. It seems to be consistent with physics in the Star Wars universe - ships do travel through and interact with physical space while entering and exiting hyperspace, and collisions with realspace objects do occur (see Han Solo mentioning the dangers of flying "right through a star" in ANH.)
So if the tactic works in universe, but why isn't it used all the time? Because throwing starships at each other and risking the loss of your own personnel and equipment is a desperate and potentially suicidal tactic and not doing that is almost always a better idea. Far more things can possibly go wrong than can go right.
Plus, once it becomes a regular tactic, countermeasures will get developed to take it into account - the enemy will disperse their command and control capabilities into multiple smaller ships or attempt to engage from a greater distance or whatever. So despite being wasteful, it's also short-sighted.
Notwithstanding the real answer being that it wouldn't be as interesting to watch ships just kamikaze one another at lightspeed.
I think it is reasonable for ship systems to be programmed to avoid collisions when jumping to lightspeed. Manual override would be reasonable measure to pull that move.
I mean star wars arent so much scifi but fantasy in scifi setting. Battles would surely not be fought like this. But this had so many glorious plot holes and constructed fake moments...