Jeremy’s Tophunder №45: The Empire Strikes Back
When I was anywhere from 8 to 12 years old, my ideal weekend involved renting a Star Wars movie on Friday evening and watching it at least three times before returning it on Sunday. There was nothing that could top that short of going to a Red Sox or Celtics game. And even then, if you gave me both options, my answer would have been “can we go to the game and stop on the way back to rent Star Wars?”
And usually the answer was yes, because my Dad was (and remains) a pretty cool dude.
As near and dear as Star Wars is to my heart, and as often as I watch movies, I actually hadn’t seen The Empire Strikes Back in a while before re-watching it for this here purpose. And two minutes in, I had already groaned multiple times.
I can’t sugar-coat it. The 1997 re-master makes the movie worse. The CGI tauntaun and wampa are bad. Like, noticeably bad. Maybe I didn’t notice then, but it’s impossible to not notice now. Two minutes in, I was ready to second-guess myself. Should Empire be ranked this high? Am I ranking this purely on nostalgia?
Two minutes later, I proved myself wrong again.
The first scene with Han and Leia is amazing. I don’t know why I don’t remember the scene vividly, but watching it now, it might be the best minute of film in the entire series.
“Why are you following me? Afraid I was gonna leave without giving you a good-bye kiss?”
“I’d just as soon kiss a wookie.”
“I can arrange that.” [storms off screen] “You could use a good kiss!”
As a kid, I probably tuned way the hell out as soon as the Han & Leia soft strings music started playing. I don’t think I was oblivious to the love story, I just didn’t care. I mean, I’m 10 years old. I want to see lasers and explosions. I know the Empire is about to land on Hoth and stir some shit up, can we just get to the good parts?
The good parts are still good.
The siege of Hoth is still great, even though some of the visual effects now seem quaint and out of date. As the Millennium Falcon leaves Hoth and ventures into the Asteroid field and the music starts to build, the tension rises even more. And the whole sequence in Cloud City is one of the high points across all 11 Star Wars films (including Rogue One and Solo).
It’s hard to overstate how great the Cloud City visuals are, particularly the Carbon-freezing scene. The use of color, light, shadow, fog, music, everything. Everything feels and sounds and looks ominous. Each shot is framed beautifully. The original Star Wars trilogy relied mostly on special effects, set design, and costumes to be visually interesting. There are actually surprisingly few shots and scenes that stand out for composition reasons. There’s a simplicity to a lot of the visual choices that they made in those original three movies — the best examples probably being the throne room scene in Return of the Jedi or some of the opening shots of A New Hope. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great shots. But they’re great -because- they’re of relatively simple composition. The carbon-freeze scene certainly stands apart. There are a lot more layers in that scene, and it ends up as probably the most visually interesting scene in the original trilogy.
My favorite scene, though, is the lightsaber sequence with Luke and Darth Vader, in particular, when Vader ambushes Luke in the narrow hallway and forces him back out onto the catwalk. I can’t quite encapsulate all of my ideas about the scene without inadvertently ripping off Chuck Klosterman, so I’ll just quote him in full here from his essay on Star Wars from his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs:
One particular shot is filmed from behind Mark Hamill. Within the context of this shot, Darth Vader is roughly twice the physical size of Luke; obviously, the filmmakers are trying to illustrate a point about the massive size of the Empire and the relative impotence of the fledgling Jedi. Not surprisingly, they all go a bit overboard: Vader’s head appears larger than Luke’s entire torso, which sort of overextends any suspension of disbelief a rational adult might harbor. But to a wide-eyed youngster, that image looked completely reasonable: If Vader is Luke’s father (as we would learn minutes later), then Vader should seem as big as your dad.
That’s basically how I feel about it. It’s the crescendo that leads up to Luke having his hand chopped off, finding out that Vader is his father (shattering the illusion that Vader is the uniformly evil force that murdered his father), diving off the catwalk to an uncertain fate rather than turn to the dark side, and ultimately being saved at the last minute by Leia’s budding Force sensitivity and R2D2’s repair of the hyperdrive. But the real takeaway here is that it’s -not- a happy ending. Luke was soundly defeated. The bad guys won. The good guys lost.
That’s an element of a number of Good vs. Evil film series that I find fascinating. I think it makes for very interesting movies, often the best movie in the series. It happens here. It happens in the first Lord of the Rings movie. It happens in Avengers: Infinity War. It happens in The Dark Knight. Furthermore, most of these movies are geared (partially) towards kids. It’s an incredibly important message to be sending to kids, but usually one that they don’t fully absorb until later: Out in the real world, the Good Guys don’t always win. You’re gonna have to get used to that. It’s a message of perseverance and grit and fortitude and redemption. And do the good guys storm back to win in the next movie (or by the end of the series)? Of course they do. Because if the good guys all end up dead and the story just ends and there’s no sequel then the storyteller is just being a cynical asshole for no reason. But having that point in the story where it seems like the characters (and the audience) are losing hope is important. It inserts greater conflict into the story, and makes for a more satisfying ending.
To some extent, Empire is still being ranked a bit on nostalgia. The middle of the movie does drag, just a little bit. When Han and Leia are stuck on the asteroid (but actually inside a space slug of some kind), there’s a lot of character and relationship development, which is important, but not necessarily entertaining. Same with Luke on Dagobah with Yoda. That element is even more integral to the story, but when you’ve seen it 370 times already, it gets a bit old. There are still some great lines from Yoda when Luke tries to lift the X-Wing out of the swamp: “Do or do not, there is no try,” and the exchange that they share once Yoda lifts the X-Wing out himself. “I don’t believe it.” — “That is why you fail.” Other than that, though, there isn’t a ton in that stretch that keeps me interested when I re-watch the movie now. The first forty minutes are great, the last forty minutes are great, but the forty minutes in the middle are a B-minus at best.
On the other hand, The Empire Strikes Back held the title of My Favorite Movie Ever for a not insignificant portion of my life. There was a bit of an unofficial rule that I had when assembling the final order of the list, where any movie that I ever truly considered my favorite (i.e. not for a fleeting few days right after seeing it for the first time) couldn’t drop below №50. The Empire Strikes Back was my favorite movie for a solid five or six years, probably. And for the most part, it still holds up. Taking all of that into account, №45 seemed to make sense for me.
(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)
Here’s our progress on the list so far:
6. The Fugitive
17. Ocean’s 11
24. Apollo 13
45. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
47. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
67. Batman Begins
76. Finding Nemo
85. Seabiscuit
93. The Truman Show
