Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
dir. Irvin Kershner
Rated: PG
image: ©1980 20th Century Fox
In 1980, I would make my own much more low-key première onto the world stage two months and a few days after The Empire Strikes Back reignited Star Wars fever in movie theaters around the globe. I’m tempted to observe that I missed out on the feeling of anticipation that must have been palpable on the eve of the second installment of George Lucas’s blockbuster phenomenon rëentering the cultural zeitgeist. But I think I have a pretty good handle on what it was like. I’ve been through two additional Star Wars trilogy releases, both encompassing multiple years separating each new installment. And, of course, there’s the MCU, whose overlords have calculated with scientific precision the exact number of seconds between installments in order to achieve peak fan excitement.
Still, I feel like a baseball enthusiast who raves to an older fan about the greatness of a current favorite player. The older fan, the one with more historical perspective, only has to mention, in hushed tones, “That’s great, kid, but you never saw Mantle or DiMaggio swing a bat at the top of his game.” Part of the magic of the original trilogy lies in the fact that nothing like it had ever been done before in film history.
There’s a certain tension in that last statement. While it’s true that the cultural phenomenon of Star Wars was completely unprecedented – due in part to the newly minted blockbuster strategy of saturation booking on as many screens as possible – the sci-fi franchise owes so much to what preceded it.
I felt that debt much more acutely while watching The Empire Strikes Back, as part of The Texas Theatre’s screenings of the original trilogy, than I did during A New Hope. It’s no secret that Lucas modeled his space opera on much lower budgeted sci-fi serials of the 1930s, like Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers. These serials would play in short chapters released as one episode a week – prefiguring the broadcast television format by almost a decade – with each one being edited into a cliffhanger ending, ensuring that the audience had to come back to the theater the next week to learn the fate of their hero.
That serialized feel is certainly present in New Hope, but Lucas’s story for Empire, with a screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, really takes the concept into overdrive, ending with the most famous cliffhanger in all of cinema history. Each section of the picture feels like it could play in its own 15- or 20-minute vignette, ending in such a way that you’re compelled to come back to see the resolution: The battle of Hoth; Luke training with Yoda on Dagobah; Han & Co. evading the empire’s clutches with the help of an asteroid field; the introduction of Lando Calrissian and Luke’s climactic rescue attempt on the floating Cloud City of the planet Bespin.
The greatest achievement of Empire over New Hope is its infinitely grander scale. Every penny of the sequel’s almost three-fold budget increase turns up on the screen. To see it, you have to look no further than the introductory battle sequence on the ice planet of Hoth. The rebels – scattered by Darth Vader and the evil empire he (seemingly) controls after the freedom fighters destroyed the Death Star – have set up a command post on the frozen planet.
(As a side note, I was struck on this viewing by how impractical the choice of Hoth is by the rebel command. I realize they would want to make it hard for Vader to find them, but was there no more hospitable place in all the galaxy tucked away in hiding that they could have used?)
The stop-motion animation work on the Hoth sequence alone is enough to qualify Empire as an all-time great in the history of cinematic special effects. Legendary special effects artists and visionaries like Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, and Phil Tippett worked under the auspices of Lucas’s newly formed Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) company to complete the 600 or so special effects shots for the movie. By comparison, New Hope included some 360 such shots. Tippett’s pioneering stop-motion work to bring the AT-AT Imperial Walkers to life in Empire can be seen on a much bigger – and more disturbing – canvas with the recent release of his passion project, Mad God. That film took Tippett, off and on, over three decades to complete. If you love old school, stop-motion animation and an idiosyncratic, sui generis vision, seek out Mad God.
The 1997 Special Edition tweaks for Empire are probably the most subtle and satisfying of any that Lucas oversaw for the original trilogy. One example of that is the work ILM did to make the A-wing fighter control panels look more realistic. In 1979, during the original production of the film, something analogous to overhead projector sheets of the ship control panels were matted into the final image. Because of the technical limitations of the time, you could actually see the landscape that the ship was passing over through these control panel images. The new effects, achieved digitally, made the control panels 100% opaque, making it look like a real ship control panel.
It’s these kinds of subtle enhancements for which CGI is the perfect solution. They aren’t flashy – like the multiple (now cheesy-looking) giant creatures that Lucas added to New Hope – but they immeasurably help make the world of the movie a much more immersive experience.
There are some slight character changes from New Hope to Empire that disappoint. In Brackett and Kasdan’s hands, Princess Leia becomes much more of a damsel in distress than she was in the first installment. She flips out at the sight of the cable-chewing mynock creatures that doesn’t quite jibe with her demeanor in New Hope. It’s a not-so-subtle way of making her dependent on Han Solo, so that he can be her knight in shining armor, but it makes Leia a less dynamic, less interesting character.
At the same time – and I’m sure I’m going to give away my age and the cultural norms with which I was raised – the romance scenes between Han and Leia hit a sweet spot for me that harkens back to the best screwball comedies and rat-a-tat banter in film history. As I watched them slowly fall for one another, I was reminded of Gable and Colbert in It Happened One Night or Grant and Russell in His Girl Friday. Those films – and many other screwball comedies – allowed the female character to challenge traditional masculinity in a way Leia doesn’t get to in Empire, but their love story is satisfying nonetheless.
I actively hated Luke for a good quarter-to-half of Empire’s runtime. Maybe I’m too inclined to blindly follow orders, but each time Luke rolled his eyes or mocked one of Yoda’s instructions made me furious. His refusal of Yoda’s command to leave his weapons behind before entering the Dark Side-tinged cave made me want to stop the movie so I could talk some sense into the bratty teenager-like Luke.
In another example of the original trilogy being superior to its successors, Yoda’s mystical description of the force is damn near perfect in terms of explaining the bare minimum in order to make it magical:
“My ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.”
No need for Midi-chlorians or other pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. It also helps that the great Frank Oz – the inimitable voice behind Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and dozens of other cinematic creatures – intones these lines with the authority and mysticism of an expert yogi or transcendental meditation master. Oz’s performance here as Yoda is nothing short of magic.
John Williams not only reprises his greatest musical achievements from New Hope for Empire, he raises the bar with one of the greatest pieces of music ever created for the screen in The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s Theme). I will remember until my dying day the feeling of traveling to see The Phantom Menace and to attend a Star Wars celebration/convention in 1999, and blasting The Imperial March from the car my friends and I took to the festivities as we pulled into the convention center.
There’s so much more I could praise about The Empire Strikes Back: Billy Dee Williams crafting a pitch-perfect scoundrel in Lando Calrissian; Han’s harrowing Millennium Falcon escape from a slow digestion once he realizes he and his friends aren’t hiding out in a cave; Luke’s disastrous ill-advised confrontation with Vader.
As I wrote in the introduction to my essay for New Hope, I’ve never lived without Star Wars being in existence. I also have no memory of a time when I didn’t know that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. That’s the one thing I regret most about making it too late to the Star Wars party. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to be a teenager or 20-something and stumbling out of seeing Empire for the first time, in 1980, punch drunk from this astounding surprise revelation.
There were also the real-world conditions surrounding an unprecedented shock of an ending like that to consider. No internet, no fan sites for fan theories, only a vague understanding that you’d be waiting at least a few years before you could expect a resolution. It’s a resolution I’ll get tonight when I round out the original trilogy with The Texas Theatre’s screening of Return of the Jedi.
See you all back here next week for the thrilling conclusion!
Why it got 5 stars:
- I feel like I’m wading into sycophant territory here, but Empire reaches even greater heights than New Hope. The bigger budget allows for a grander scale. The shock twist/cliffhanger ending is among the most iconic moments in cinema history. Plus, it’s a damn good time.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I think there were some lines of dialog changed when Lucas swapped out the original actor playing Emperor Palpatine in the Special Edition for the canonically consistent Ian McDiarmid. Alas, it’s been so long since I’ve seen the original edit, I can’t be sure.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- This screening wasn’t as full as the one for New Hope. There were also several dudes who were excited enough that they felt the need to recite the dialog along with the movie. One guy enthusiastically turned to his date/girlfriend/wife to explain the lore of Willrow Hood and his ice cream maker. It was funny/annoying in equal measure.