Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

For people of a certain age, Star Wars isn't just a movie trilogy; it's a way of life. And as much as we older fans piss and moan about the 'new ones' especially Jar Jar Binks, that trilogy has a great following as well. But I'm of the generation who grew up with the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia. One of my earliest lusty stirrings was probably about Carrie Fisher in that outfit.

Like the James Bond movies and the Kirk-era Trek features, Star Wars was a regular fixture of Bank Holiday TV. Or it seems like it. When the digitally remastered editions came out in 1994, I bought the first film on VHS (one of many times I would purchase the trilogy - I think I'm up to four now, mainly because I bought the Special Edition DVD's and refused to shell out again for the original editions) and I got it home and watched it and I couldn't remember it. Sure, I could remember Empire and Jedi. Even back then I knew them like the back of my hand, but the original film was completely new to me.

But we're here to talk about The Empire Strikes Back. Released in 1980, bolstered by the massive success of the original film, it's a bigger, bolder film that practically invented the cliche that sequels need to be 'darker'. It's also helped by its positioning as the second part of a trilogy. Like The Two Towers (also incidentally my favourite Lord of the Rings movie) it is freed from the responsibility of set up and resolution. We already know the universe and the characters enough for the film to hit the ground running and with the climax occuring three years down the line (although allegedly not in the manner that Lucas originally envisioned) and it functions as the second of three acts beautifully.

The opening is a highpoint; the Hoth battle is unlike anything else posited in either trilogy and the AT-AT's are a uniquely Lucasian creation, the bastard sons of Japanese Mecha and his own twisted imagination. This is the man who, after all, invented a ship with the obviously ridiculous name 'Millennium Falcon' and made it the coolest thing in the universe. Like all good sequels, the Hoth opening offers a dramatic counterpoint to the opening of the first film on Tattooine; fire and ice (and the third installment flings it back again by returning to Tattooine) and then takes off into worlds unimagined. The first film is remarkably contained. We see Tattooine, the Death Star and (briefly) Yavin 4. There's no real sense of the universe outside of the frame beyond what the characters say (and there is some fantastic dialogue which paints the picture of galactic civilisation better than a hundred expensive model shots that Lucas could not afford on the restricted budget for the first film). But in Empire, the universe expands before our eyes and, unlike The Chronicles Of Riddick, which takes a film (in this case Pitch Black) and forges a universe so drastically divergent in feel and tone that it barely makes sense, it all seems to grow organically out of what has gone before.

The thing most people don't realise about the trilogy is that it's not really science fiction. It's not sci-fi either (the distinction being that sci-fi tends to be softer and more comic-booky, although describing something as comic-booky sounds like an insult and it's really not). It is in fact, despite all the spaceships and intergalactic intrigue, a pure fantasy. Like Iain M Banks' novel Against A Dark Background, it takes what are generic fantasy tropes and plays them out in an alien (literally in this case) setting. And it works perfectly. It might have seemed somewhat out of place had Lucas presented us with a human future, but by placing it 'a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away' (an almost as traditional opening to a fairy tale as 'once upon a time...') we accept the juxtaposition of fantasy onto sf because this isn't our future we're seeing. It's not even our past. (Supergirl will try something much similar a few years later, retconning the remains of Krypton into a lake in America, making Kara Zor-El a thematic sibling to Wonder Woman and the Lady in the Lake, while her cousin Kal-El gets a much more hard sf origin as the Ultimate American Immigrant - more on the Super-films later...).

So Darth Vader's revelation of Luke's parentage comes direct from the long and illustrious history of evil Kings having hidden offspring and is not just a hokey twist. It's one of those great cinematic moments, up there with "Rosebud!", to the point where it's surpassed its own origin and has become almost public domain.

Why is The Empire Strikes Back one of my favourite films? It's a difficult question to answer, living as long with the film as I have where critical judgement almost goes out of the window. In much the same way when it comes to the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond films, they have been part of my life for so long that critiquing them is almost like kicking a puppy. But it is a good film, it's certainly the best directed of anything in the Star Wars canon and it's the most human. Han Solo's "I know," in reply to Leia's declaration of love is so real that it still brings a lump to my throat. Han might be about to die but he's still trying to impress the girl he's so obviously head over heels in love with. It's this element of humanism that is almost completely lacking in the new trilogy (it only surfaces in Revenge Of The Sith, which takes many of its dramatic beats from Empire) and indeed, lacking in Jedi as well, which is more concerned with blowing things up than the lives of its heroes.