Why Empire Strikes Back is the worst Star Wars movie (and how The Force Awakens can make it better)

At some point in the last 30 years, The Empire Strikes Back became the unanimous choice for best Star Wars film. This hasn’t always been the case, but the question seems, at this point in the history of the series, largely settled. A recent survey of favorite Star Wars movies with over 80,000 votes had Empire the runaway favorite with 41% of the votes, 10% more than A New Hope and Return of the Jedi combined (to say nothing of the prequels (but seriously, Revenge of the Sith with 21%?)). On top of that, the web is littered with blog posts and articles that argue for the “top 10” reasons Empire is the greatest Star Wars film, often citing the complexity of the narrative, the quality of the script, and the emotional richness of the story for its success.

I won’t pretend you haven’t read the title of this article, so I won’t pretend that I’m not about to counter that sentiment. But before I do, I need to point out that I don’t dispute the greatness of Empire; in its own right, it’s a fantastic film, and of the Star Wars movies, it stands apart from the rest in its individual greatness. The issue, though, is how far it stands apart. Because while Empire is an amazing movie, it’s a bad Star Wars movie. And that’s not it’s fault — it’s the fault of the rest of the films.

Because for Empire to be the best Star Wars film, it needs to be like those other films, but just a better version of them. In other words, we’d need to be able to first look at all the films, identify their commonalities, and then demonstrate that not only does Empire share those traits but it also exemplifies them in their most perfect form.

As an example of this line of thinking, take Goldfinger, the third and (in)arguably best of the James Bond films. It does what the best Bond films do — diabolic villains, clever gadgets, absurdly named Bond women — and does them better — Goldfinger and Odd Job, an Aston Martin DB5 with ejector seats and smoke screens, Pussy Galore. It hits all of the major beats of a Bond film, but its hits them loud and it hits them better.

For the argument to work that Empire is the best Star Wars film, it has to a) feature all of the characteristics of “typical” Star Wars movie, and b) exemplify the best version of all those characteristics. That argument could have been made somewhat successfully before the prequel trilogy was released, as the sample size was smaller and defining a what it means to be a Star Wars film was more of a judgement call since you were dealing with less and more conflicting information.

That’s because the original trilogy is a bit of a strange mix of films. A New Hope successfully walks a tightrope between Buck Rogers camp and inspired vision, between Saturday-afternoon serial and classic mythology — it’s a magical film that feels much more than the sum of its parts. Empire, however, is a dark, character-driven narrative, more concerned with exploring emotions than new worlds (although it has some pretty awesome ones — Hoth, Dagobah, Cloud City above the gas planet Bespin). And Jedi is, well, hard to pin down: it’s got multiple awesome and epic set pieces (Jabba’s sail barge, the speeder bikes, the final Death Star assault and Ewok battle) but also it has, you know, the Ewoks and some unnecessarily complicated plotting that drags the film down (the Death Star’s not done — oh wait it is! Shields are down — no wait they’re up — no wait they’re down!). Compared to Empire, it never makes the same emotional commitment, and it can’t achieve A New Hope’s campy charm.

So we’ve got a campy, a serious, and a cheesy film. With just these movies, it’s possible to suggest that Empire simply achieved what the other two films could not, that it was the culmination of the vision Lucas had for the movies but couldn’t, himself, execute.

But this all changes when the prequels are brought into the equation, for adding those three new films to the original canon shifts the balance of the series. While the prequels are uniformly terrible, they are, at least, consistent: consistently shallow insights into contemporary politics, consistently over-plotted, consistently reliant on unnecessary special effects, and consistently targeted toward 5 year olds (even though I understand it, it’s like a knife through my heart when I hear my daughter laugh at Jar Jar).

So instead of just three wildly different films — different enough that it’s possible to draw your own conclusion about what a “good” Star Wars film ought to be — we now can add three more films which show Lucas’s true — albeit terrible — idea for what the franchise should have been: overwrought political allegory made for kindergartners, packed with as many special effects as possible.

Read this way, it’s easy to see Jedi fit that mold as well, although it does a better job than the prequels of achieving the same overall goals. With this in mind, the only logical choice for best Star Wars film has to be Return of the Jedi, not Empire. And the worst Star Wars film can only be Empire, because it bears so little resemblance to the rest of the series.

How The Force Awakens can shift the balance of power

My argument rests on a fairly simple premise: most of the Star Wars films are actually childish and not that good, so if you create a criteria for “greatest Star Wars film” based on that fact, Empire is the outlier because it’s actually good. Empire was likely the furthest from Lucas’s vision, yet ironically it’s the favorite of fans. This didn’t trouble him, of course, so he created the films he wanted to when he sat down to write the prequels.

But as a fan, J.J. Abrams is much more likely to follow the popular opinion of Empire being the Star Wars film worth emulating; that is, striving for strong characterizations with genuine emotions is the goal, not cheap special effects and cute creatures. If that’s the case — and it’s not unreasonable to think it is — then Force Awakens will be much more likely to use Empire as its touchstone, not Jedi.

And if it does, then that’s one more film that can begin shifting the balance of power. The prequels decided the argument the first time in favor of Jedi and its furry friends; the sequels can rewrite history in favor of Empire, and place it back where it rightly belongs.