![]() “Although the Death Star has been destroyed”? “ Although”? The sole aim of the heroes and heroines in Star Wars was to destroy the Death Star, a humungous planet-pulverising spaceship of crucial strategic importance to the Empire. “Although the Death Star has been destroyed, Imperial troops have driven the Rebel forces from their hidden base and pursued them across the galaxy.” “It is a dark time for the Rebellion,” says this prose preamble. My un-Jedi-like anger bubbles up even before the first scene – at the beginning of the ‘opening crawl’ of introductory text, to be precise. ![]() My grievance is that it also betrays Star Wars, trashing so much of the good work that was done three years earlier. My grievance with The Empire Strikes Back isn’t that it sticks to the winning formula established by Star Wars: that’s what most sequels do, after all. And while the screenwriters, Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett, did a clever job of revising and reshuffling our favourite scenes, that hardly compares to Lucas’s achievement of dreaming up those scenes in the first place.īut here’s where things get tricky. Switch around the order of those events, and you’ve got The Empire Strikes Back. Key events in Star Wars include Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) being knocked unconscious by a wilderness alien Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) being captured by Darth Vader (Dave Prowse’s body paired with James Earl Jones’s voice) Luke learning about the Force from a Jedi master in a remote cave a lightsaber duel that ends badly for the good guys a ‘scoundrel’ abandoning the Rebels before having a change of heart and a protracted battle between the ranks of the Rebel Alliance and the heavily armed Empire. Whatever issues we geeks grumble about when we’re discussing the numerous prequels and sequels, they can all be traced back to 1980. (I know we’re supposed to call it ‘A New Hope’ these days, but it was called Star Wars when it came out in 1977, so that’s good enough for me.) What’s more, it seems obvious that The Empire Strikes Back is the source of all the franchise’s problems. This might come across as a contrarian hot take, but it seems obvious to me that the best film in the Star Wars series is, in fact, Star Wars. ![]() ![]() Why Star Wars should have stopped at one film This article was originally published in May 2020. “It is because of the emotions stirred in Empire,” wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times when the film was re-released in 1997, “that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. Directed by Irvin Kershner, it’s the Star Wars episode with the highest score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes (94%) and from viewers on Imdb (8.7), and the one that is said to elevate the saga as a whole. It’s 40 years this month since The Empire Strikes Back was released, and for most of that time the second film in the Star Wars series has been enshrined as the best: the darkest, the most complex, the most mature. ![]()
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