Uncanny Antman said:
If the script were different in other ways, sure. But if the only difference is Han dies, that does nothing for me. It'd as useless as Scott's death in X-Men III.
The original concept of Jedi was that Han would sacrifice himself, completing his arc, that once defeating the Emperor and saving his Father, Luke would ride off into the sunset to contemplate the futre of the Jedi order, and left Leia alone to deal with becoming the Queen-leader of the fledgling new republic.
Regarding the possible confusion of killing a character who had just been rescued probably an hour before, I can see that on the one hand it could seem odd, but I think it still could have worked. Han's character arc is one that moves from selfish and skeptic mercenary, to reluctant hero and finally one that believes in something greater than himself. In the original concept his belief becomes so strong that he does a 180 from A New Hope and sacrifices himself, i.e. suicide. The key is why/how he dies. Just killing him in a random explosion would have been pointless, but if he willingly sacrifices himself to save something, or more specifically someone, then his death has meaning and is compelling.
In the novelizations, Han's character goes through this metamorphosis in which he internally recognizes that the Rebellion is something bigger than any individual, and that it brings out the best in people which is proven to him when the friends he has made rescue him at the beginning of Jedi, he realizes that you can trust people and be part of something bigger than yourself, his facing death and his friends rescuing him from that death should be the catalyst that makes him new character. This is his arc, but his character is reduced to nothing more than a nutered joke in Jedi. He's passive and for the most part inconsequential to the story.
If I were writing the concluding chapter, Han would sacrifice himself not only to help the Rebellion, but it would have to be in order to save Leia specifically. The best stories have the characters motivated by something personal. Sure it would be great to have Han sacrifice himself to save the Rebellion, but what he really needs is to save Leia who is trying to save the Rebellion. By saving her, he saves the Rebellion. This is in essence, Luke's journey, he really is saving his father and by doing so, he is helping the Rebellion. To look at an example that is outside the Star Wars universe, the thing that makes Die Hard one of the best action movies ever isn't the action by itself, but the hero John McClane. He's not trying to stop the bad-guys specifically, he's trying to save his wife. His motivations are tied to an emotional investment. His personal motivations translate on the screen, make him relatable and give the audience something to root for because we all have that person in our lives we would die for that we can project and make the story personal.
The amazing thing is that this was Lucas' original concept, back when he had angst, anger and passion. After the success of Star Wars, Empire and the Indy franchise, along with his becoming a father I think he lost that perspective. My opinion is that he lost the fire in his belly and simply lost interest in the form of stories in which risk and reward could be tied together. He'd gotten a rather happy ending of his own with financial and critical success, he'd proven the studios wrong in his mind, and he had his children, life was good and the story that he wanted to tell wasn't of the individual bucking the system, because that was no longer his story, his story had become the happy ending.
