(alternate title: STAR WARS: EPISODE V - THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK)
Released 20 June 1980
Directed by Irvin Kershner
Starring: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Anthony Daniels, David Prowse, Peter Mayhew, Kenny Baker, Alec Guinness, Jeremy Bulloch, John Hollis, Julian Glover, Kenneth Colley, Michael Sheard, Michael Culver, Frank Oz (voice), James Earl Jones (voice)
Rated PG for sci-fi action violence.
124 minutes
Winner of 1 Academy Award, Nominated for 3, Recipient of 1 Special Category Award:
Best Sound - Bill Varney, Steve Maslow, Gregg Landaker & Peter Sutton (Win)
Special Achievement Award - Brian Johnson, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren & Bruce Nicholson (for achievement in visual effects)
Best Original Score - John Williams (Nominated; lost to FAME)
Best Art Direction - Norman Reynolds, Leslie Dilley, Harry Lange, Alan Tomkins & Michael Ford (Nominated; lost to TESS)
Box Office
Estimated Production Cost: $18 million (some sources differ; $18-33 million)
Box Office Gross (initial release only): $209 million
Lifetime Box Office Gross (including 1982 and "Special Edition" re-issues): $290.4 million
Worldwide Box Office Gross: $538.3 million
65th Highest-Grossing Film of All-Time (domestic)
129th Highest-Grossing Film of All-Time (worldwide)
12th Highest-Grossing Film of All-Time (adjusted for ticket price inflation)
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK is rightly considered one of the greatest movie sequels of all-time, ranked alongside the likes of THE GODFATHER PART II and THE DARK KNIGHT, however, and I realize this may ruffle some feathers, it is a sizable step down from its predecessor. It's the sequel you wouldn't expect from the jubilant, pop-culture pastiche pulp adventure that was STAR WARS, but taken as part of a trilogy, it's a natural fit. STAR WARS works as a stand-alone story, while EMPIRE does not; instead it expands the universe that Lucas created and reinvents the story of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Han Solo as a larger, three-act epic space opera. In doing so, it sacrifices its narrative heft by playing the middle chapter which must primarily service a later climactic third, but why EMPIRE excels where other middle films do not is its devotion to intimate arcs that carry great emotional and psychological heft in place of a grander narrative.
It's famous as the "dark sequel", a frequently-imitated model (ironically, Lucas' next production, INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, was probably the most misguided of the continuing dark sequel approach), but it isn't excessively dark. It has a harder edge than its predecessor, and the climax is undoubtedly heavier. As part of a three-piece structure, the heroes must discover ahead of the ultimate battle that their victory will be hard-fought, they must sustain a real loss to rebound from in the third chapter. It isn't cynical, and downbeat doesn't quite describe it either, but it's thought-provoking.
It is a dark time for the Rebellion. Although the Death Star has been destroyed, Imperial troops have driven the Rebel forces from their hidden base and pursued them across the galaxy. Evading the dreaded Imperial Starfleet, a group of freedom fighters led by Luke Skywalker has established a new secret base on the remote ice world of Hoth. The evil lord Darth Vader, obsessed with finding young Skywalker, has dispatched thousands of remote probes into the far reaches of space...
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK is set some time after STAR WARS, during which time Luke, Leia and Han have continued the war against the Intergalactic Empire as leaders in the Rebel Alliance, but now based on the icy world Hoth, the Rebels are in retreat. Lord Darth Vader has become obsessed with Luke Skywalker, the young Rebel pilot and Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi's last apprentice who destroyed the Death Star, and is hellbent on capturing him. The Rebels are forced to evacuate their base on Hoth when Vader, after discovering the base thanks to a probe droid, launches a massive assault. Most of the Rebels survive to fight another day, with Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and C-3PO escaping aboard the Millennium Falcon, while Luke and R2-D2 take an X-wing to Dagobah, where the spectral visage of Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke he would find Yoda, the great Jedi Master who taught him, and will complete Luke's training. Han, Leia and the others find themselves trapped in the midst of Vader's fleet with a faulty hyperdrive, so they're forced to evade the Imperial forces through a perilous asteroid field until they can make it to the nearby Cloud City for repairs on the gaseous planet Bespin, run by Han's old associate, Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams). Luke finds finds Yoda, a small, green creature, performed through a puppet by legendary Muppeteer Frank Oz, who struggles to train Luke, who is reckless and impetuous. Luke learns more of how to control the Force, but when he foresees danger for his friends, he defies Yoda's admonitions and flies to Bespin, where Han, Leia, Chewbacca and C-3PO have been betrayed by Lando and captured by Vader as bait for Luke.
Evolution
EMPIRE is a slow film, especially in comparison to its predecessor, but it really hits hard in its later scenes in Cloud City when the heroes are captured by Vader, Han Solo is frozen alive in a block of carbonite to be delivered to Jabba, and Luke finally faces off against Vader to a famous conclusion. Luke finally gets to fight Darth Vader face to face in the second film, and it's the most spectacular lightsaber duel in the original trilogy, much more aggressive and elaborate than the Obi-Wan vs. Darth Vader fight in the first movie. The use of sound, color and cinematography combine to enhance the power of the prolonged fight which begins in the same carbonite freezing chamber where Han was frozen, beautifully lit with blue and an orange glow emanating from the floor and masked with vapor, giving Vader an ominous, darkly shadowed appearance where he stands waiting for Luke. For a large portion of the fight, there is no orchestral score, enhancing the tensity of the fight with the perpetuating hum of the lightsabers, interrupted by the zaps of their collisions, and Vader's mechanical breathing. Vader's breath is continually present, even when Luke cannot see him, and the audience is left to constantly anticipate is reemergence. Luke is smaller and less powerful than Obi-Wan, clad in a tattered flight suit, sharply in contrast to the imposing figure of Darth Vader, tall and black with a flowing cape. The fight carries from the freezing chamber to a walkway of the city, and out above the city's massive central air shaft, with Vader using the Force to hurl large objects at Luke, and both swinging blows that cut through rails and structures with spraying sparks. The destructive impact of the lightsabers is emphasized throughout the fight, and although few viewers would expect Luke to be killed, the violence of this universe is ramped up considerably when Vader cuts through Luke's wrist, severing his hand along with the lightsaber it was clutching. Of course, not too many people were expecting Vader's famous revelation:
"Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father."
"He told me enough! He told me you killed him!"
"No, I am your father."
Cue the slowed Imperial March as it sinks in. I wasn't there and didn't experience it, but it's interesting that there was some debate over whether Vader was telling the truth, because there seems to be little doubt from the perspective of the movie itself. The revelation is allowed to sink in and reverberate through the remainder of the film as a wounded Luke deliriously moans "Father? Why didn't you tell me, Ben?", and the final scenes, as Luke's severed hand is replaced by a mechanical one, draw a comparison to Vader.
The change in director from Lucas to his old professor from USC School of Cinematic Arts, Irvin Kershner (Ermahgerd! Irvin Kershner!), is not especially apparent, because the purpose and interests of this film, primarily set by Lucas, are so different from the first film. It is more psychological and intimate, sometimes for better, sometimes to its detriment, and while the scope of the sequel is much more limited than that of its predecessor, visually, it's much more elaborate. The budget of EMPIRE was almost double that of STAR WARS, allowing for even more ambitious spectacle like the early battle on Hoth, which pits the Empire's towering AT-AT (All Terrain Armored Transport) "walkers" against the Rebellion's cool, tiny snow speeders. The snow speeders have a really cool design, but in the long shots using composite work, they're one of the more dated effects of these films. The AT-ATs, on the other hand, still look excellent, animated in stop-motion by Phil Tippet, along with the more flawed, but nonetheless impressive lizard/llama/bighorn sheep-mixing alien beasts of burden, Tauntauns.
The most impressive effects sequence in the film is the chase through the asteroid field, with free-floating space rocks of varied sizes that the Falcon and its TIE fighter pursuers maneuver through, along with a nice shot of a TIE fighter hit and spinning out of control as bolts of electricity wrap around it before it's exploded against an asteroid.
Although similar ground had been laid by Chewbacca, an over-sized being covered in hair who only speaks in bestial sounds, Yoda, essentially a Jim Henson Muppet, is a big leap for the Star Wars universe. Yoda is in very sharp contrast to Obi-Wan, the old Jedi sage comparable to the wise old wizard of fantasy stories. Yoda is small, goblin-like and eccentric, with a voice like Grover's on Sesame Street, and when we're first introduced to him, he's already testing an unaware Luke, basically messing with him to try his patience, and he's really funny. But after he's revealed as the greatest of the Jedi Masters, far from what Luke expected, he takes on a creepy edge crossed with a zen-like center. The puppetry is excellent, and Frank Oz makes the character funny and endearing, but what really make Yoda is the in the writing. He's a very strange variation on the kung fu zen master of martial arts films. Yoda doesn't speak merely in wise platitudes for motivational posters; he's a little kooky, a little creepy, but there's also a warmth there. The best known Yoda quote is "Do, or do not. There is no try," (which, by the way, sounds nice, but is it true?), and it's become a cliche. After Luke is unable to use the Force to lift his X-wing out of the bog it has sunk into, Yoda counsels him: "Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? And well you should not. For 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." Put that on a refrigerator magnet.
As mentioned previously, Star Wars is a fantasy series, rather than the sci-fi genre that it is sometimes mislabeled with, and EMPIRE has the feeling of an '80s fantasy film, combining Merlinesque mysticism and strange monsters in more ambitious themes and effects than its predecessor.
For a great many Star Wars fans and other such movie buffs, EMPIRE is looked to as the pinnacle of the series, surpassing the original in darkness, and in emotional and psychological complexity. In those respects, it's undoubtedly superior to its predecessor (although, "darkness" is not in and of itself is not an advantage), but taken in its whole against the original as a whole, EMPIRE is a weaker film. It must be noted that the films have distinctively different objectives, but where STAR WARS is concise and cleverly contained while also developing a whole universe bursting beyond the margins, EMPIRE has an imbalance between its sprawling psychological and emotional interests and a thin, slightly disjointed narrative. The dual story lines of Han, Leia, Chewbacca and C-3PO evading the Imperial fleet and Luke training with Yoda are independent of each other and each seem to be following a slow track for the full middle third of the film. However, when the two story threads are entwined at the final third, the payoff is solid and subversive, as Luke, in his rash effort to control his circumstances rather than himself (perhaps the central point of the entire Star Wars saga), attempts to rescue his friends and instead stands in need of rescue by them. It's more mature, more sophisticated, but it's not independently successful like STAR WARS and occasionally lumbers through the minimal amount of story in service of its more potent themes. EMPIRE is by no stretch a bad film, but against one of the most unified, precise adventures ever committed to film, its storytelling clockwork is a little bit rustier.
More troubling is the demotion of Leia, in the previous film as great a feminist hero as Hollywood filmmaking has ever delivered, now rendered the shrewish love interest of the series' most macho hero. Han Solo is a treasure of a character to be sure, but EMPIRE capitalizes on his popularity at the expense of Leia, who becomes a motivation in Han's story. Their relationship is pitched as a screwball comedy, Tracy-Hepburn interplay, but either Lawrence Kasdan's dialogue is failing to capture the essence of the original Leia or Fisher can't meet the demands of that role, because poor Leia is sold short by the sequels.
For whatever reason, EMPIRE is the least altered film of the trilogy in its Special Edition and subsequent cuts. Back in 2007, Lucas deemed it his least favorite of the series, perhaps to troll the fanboys who've been so unsparing in their backlash towards him since THE PHANTOM MENACE, or maybe he meant it sincerely (his understanding of his own early work has appeared bizarrely skewed from the popular consensus during the latter part of his career), but regardless, it would seem there isn't a whole lot that he feels requires further alteration. Most of it involves visual effects and audio touch-ups rather than whole new additions, although there's extensive CGI details of Cloud City's environment shown through windows which make those scenes feel less sterile and claustrophobic, which is fine, although a fly through of a "cloud car" feels flashy. One really weird, frivolous change involves new footage of the wampa, shot specifically for the Special Edition 1997 re-release, played by an actor in a suit to show the monster full-on rather than in the impressionistic fashion of the original version. The result of intercutting this new footage with the old footage of Luke, but without having Luke and the wampa ever appear in the same frame, is cheesy. The scene in which Vader contacts the Emperor via hologram is also a notable alteration, replacing the original's somewhat undefined character (Elaine Baker with superimposed chimp eyes and voice dubbing by Clive Revill) with Ian McDiarmid, the actor who went on to portray the character in all the following films, however, in the new footage, filmed alongside REVENGE OF THE SITH, the Emperor's makeup design is markedly different than as he appears in JEDI.
These alterations are generally less offensive than anything done to STAR WARS or RETURN OF THE JEDI, but in some versions of EMPIRE, a prolonged scream has been added to Luke's fall through the Cloud City air shaft, totally undercutting the drama of that moment.
Morality
Although the moral dynamics of STAR WARS are more complex than they're usually given credit for, the moral complexity of the original trilogy really comes to light in EMPIRE. The film pulls the rug out from beneath the audience's feet and muddies the waters with dark revelations of our heroes' frailties, and foreshadows dark things for Luke. In the central theme of learning to letting go and controlling oneself according to the will of the Force, EMPIRE emphasizes the darkness of Luke's fate if he does not achieve this core aspect of Jedi teachings. On Dagobah, as Yoda trains Luke, they arrive at a grotto, of which Yoda informs him, "That place is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is." It's an interesting notion that's never explored further in the series, that specific locations may have a concentrated light or dark presence of the Force, but regardless, the grotto has a hallucinatory effect on Luke and causes him to see Vader, who he decapitates easily, but when the mask on the severed head bursts open, it reveals Luke's face within; a moment that initially seems cryptic but is almost entirely unambiguous. At this point, it has not yet been revealed that Vader is Luke's father, but the scene serves a dual purpose by foreshadowing that revelation and suggesting what the future holds in store for Luke if he continues on his path of impatience and reckless heroism, while in turn, Vader's revelation also doubles as further reinforcement of that possible fate. An interesting point that also hints at the pervasive threat to Luke as he grows more powerful is held in the primary attire he wears for each film, progressing from a white tunic in STAR WARS, to a gray flight suit in EMPIRE, and ending with a black tunic in RETURN OF THE JEDI.
Although EMPIRE lacks a true conclusion, it is not a cliffhanger so much as it is a game-changer (for further elaboration of this concept, see StoryWonk's Star Wars and Story podcast on iTunes or at StoryWonk.com), having reset the pieces and the stakes for Luke's story. It's now a story of father and son. Through the entire course of the movie, Vader is pursuing Luke with total single-mindedness, which, outside of the now well-known knowledge of the coming twist, suggests that Vader recognizes Luke as the most powerful figure in the Rebellion and is intent on destroying him, literally or symbolically. It isn't until near the movie's end that we learn that Vader is not the traditional villain we took him for, and that his intent toward Luke is more complicated and intimately motivated than we supposed of which Vader was capable.
Mixing Worlds
Flash Gordon
The entire concept of Star Wars is owed in part to the Flash Gordon film serials from 1936 as Lucas decided to make STAR WARS after being turned down to make a Flash Gordon feature film, and while Star Wars is significantly weightier than the Earth-born athlete's pulpy adventures in outer space, the series still pays homage in many of its elements. Notable among these homages is Cloud City, similar to a flying city that played a prominent part in the Flash Gordon series, and the famous opening crawls that appear in every film in the series mimics crawls at the start of such serials recapping the previous installment's events.
Buddhism and Eastern Philosophy
The Jedi philosophy is heavily influenced by Asian philosophies and religions, while Yoda is based on the archetype of an old zen master, speaking in platitudes and unassuming in appearance before humbly revealing the considerable extent of his true powers.
WWII
In addition to the explicitly fascist aspects of the Imperial forces, Lando and Cloud City's struggles to remain a neutral party in the conflict only to be further and further imposed upon by an Imperial occupation resembles the plight of some European countries that attempted to remain neutral against the effects of the rise of fascism in the 1930s.
Top 5 of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
- Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader- Aesthetically, this lightsaber duel is the best in the original trilogy, beginning in the beautifully ominous blue and orange lit freezing chamber where Luke and Vader's silhouettes first clash, and becoming increasingly aggressive and messy as it carries out above the city's central air shaft. It's the most technically elaborate and brutal fight of the original trilogy, culminating in an already distressed and bruised Luke losing a hand (how's that for a PG rating?) followed by Vader's infamous revelation.
- Battle on Hoth- First off, the snowspeeders are just awesome, and second off, the AT-AT walkers (All Terrain Armored Transport) are just awesome, and third off, the whole scene is just awesome.
- My Dinner With Vader- One has to wonder just how long Vader was sitting in that dining room in Cloud City before Han, Leia, Chewbacca and Lando showed up, but however long, it was worth it. Plus, Boba Fett was probably off to the side with a bottle the whole time. Oddly, this scene and the carbonite freezing are the only moments in the series when Vader even acknowledges Han Solo.
- "Luminous Beings Are We"- Yoda's monologue: "Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? And well you should not. For 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."
- Asteroid Field- The effects for the scenes of Imperial ships pursuing the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field are still impressive, especially considering they were produced in a pre-digital age, and the elaborate camerawork gives no sense that the filmmakers were limited in their vision.
- Leia's Not as Awesome Anymore- Leia is such an amazing character in STAR WARS. She's a commanding presence, astute and cheeky with both her captors and her rescuers, and yet knows the right things to say at the right times. The development of romance between Leia and Han is the natural course to take, but EMPIRE picks sides in this, allowing Han to be the charming scoundrel as he should be, while reducing Leia to an obstinate vixen who tags along primarily as part of Han's story, rather than an active player in the narrative herself. Lame.
- Pacing- EMPIRE is undeniably a better movie than JEDI, but sometimes I'd prefer to watch the inferior film because it moves at a faster pace. There's a lot of emphasis and re-emphasis of themes, and some restructuring, but EMPIRE is a relatively cold film in the series that moves through a very little story at a slow pace before ramping things up at the final third.
- C-3PO- Are there people who think C-3PO is the better half of the duo of himself and R2-D2? If so, those people are probably sickos, because C-3PO is a dick (the darker side of little Anakin's personality must have been acting up when he programmed the droid's personality), and the decision to give him more of a spotlight this time around isn't terrible, but it's unfortunate. Along with the characters on screen, I mostly just wish he'd shut up.
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