Thirty Nine Years Since The Empire Strikes Back
Guess what? More Star Wars!
Guess what, it’s more Star Wars. After previously covering The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, Solo, Rogue One, and Star Wars, we’re now at the popular choice for the franchise’s high point.
Ok, so you’ve made the most successful movie of all time. A commercial hit that also transformed an industry and set alight the imaginations of children around the world while keeping enough adults onboard. Congratulations. Now how the hell do you follow that up?
Contrary to what he claims, it doesn’t take an awful lot of digging to find that George Lucas had no idea what kind of Star Wars films he would make after the first. The expectation was presumably that he’d attempt to largely recreate the first movie on a bigger scale, and provide us with another rip roaring adventure. He later attempted to do broadly this with the Indiana Jones sequels. But Lucas opted to take a different tack. Eschewing the general big scale movie model, he went back to the Flash Gordon serials that inspired him and made the Star Wars sequel not another movie but an “episode”.
This is the trick that both made Star Wars the lasting cultural juggernaut it became and also put off sections of the audience in 1980. Empire Strikes Back became the series’ consensus magnum opus on repeated VHS viewings between its initial debut and the theatrical rerelease in 1997. That’s where the movie feels special, as something you can just dive straight into after finishing Star Wars. It’s part five of a now nine installment saga, and it very much works as a centrepiece, twisting and turning the audience while setting up the next act.
But that’s not how it was seen at the time. There’s a definite sense from even the positive reviews from the time that this doesn’t really feel like a film in itself. Unlike everyone who loves the franchise, these were people who first saw Star Wars as adults. They mostly enjoyed the original film three years earlier, but it didn’t change their lives. What they got was a sequel that didn’t just hope for but outright demanded reverence to the original.
The case has been made in the past that Empire doesn’t have an ending, and I’ve always felt that was unfair. It lacks “closure”, but the characters have been on a full emotional journey, and it works in service of itself. What the film really lacks, though, is a true beginning. We’re essentially just dropped into the middle of what’s presumably a routine occurrence: the Rebel Alliance is hid out in the far reaches of the galaxy, escaping the Empire’s notice, but their time is about to be up. It’s not the film’s fault that Mark Hamill’s car crash led to some facial disfigurement that needed to be written into the narrative, but to devote the opening fifteen minutes to almost nothing but this is certainly a choice. The Hoth sections are bizarrely sparse in a way that it’s hard to imagine anyone who had only seen the original Star Wars expecting. If a studio had been giving notes on this, they would have surely begged for an exciting action sequence to kick things off, along the lines of a James Bond “here’s the end of his last mission” opening. The Last Jedi has a good one of these. But no, Empire just drops us in and expects us to stay along for the ride.
It’s the second act when things really move into a TV structure. Han and Leia are the focus of the A-plot in which they try to outrun the Empire, ending up on Bespin with Lando Calrissian, while Luke goes off to train with Yoda in the film’s B-plot. Serialised television as we know it today wasn’t a form that had really matured in 1980, but this format could fit any episode of a million shows from the past twenty years. Star Wars spent its running time following exactly one thread. Lucas’ previous film American Graffiti is closer in this structure but, as he’ll be the first to admit, the different plots in that film are not in service of a single greater narrative. This one is reaping a big benefit of serialised storytelling: the ability to explore different threads and revel in a little sprawl.
1977 was the birth of Star Wars the franchise, but it should be understood that 1980 is the launch of Star Wars the saga. The sequel could’ve been anything. It could have reaffirmed the series as light hearted adventure stories, as self contained throwaway afternoon fare. That it decided to go darker, more tragic, and more mythic has set the tone for everything since. In truth, as Lucas supposedly believed at the time, Empire Strikes Back didn’t need to be good to be a success. If it had been a lesser copy of Star Wars, that would have been fine. People would have had a good time then got on with their lives. Through some strange alchemy of Lucas, writers Leigh Brackett (who, for all the arguments, really did have plenty of the final film in her draft) and Lawrence Kasdan, and director Irvin Kershner, they made something actually transformative to the franchise. Return of the Jedi would try to recapture some of the swashbuckling spirit of the first, but even if couldn’t get away from the seriality of the story at this point. It is Empire Strikes Back that defines the tone and structure of this franchise, if Star Wars defined the world.