MOVIE REVIEW: Star Wars episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Science fiction was in a boom time at the beginning of the 80s, as a self-contained little indie movie in 1977 called Star Wars changed cinema forever. Riding the wave of the zeitgeist many film companies started funding science fiction and fantasy projects. In 1978 Superman: The Movie was dedicated to achieving realistic flying effects which made it a big hit, and Star Trek was brought back from the small screen to the big one for its first motion picture. We dreamed of the realms within the machine like those in the mid-concept TRON. Flash Gordon made an embarrassing splash in cinemas, but went on to become a cult classic (and formative to me, at least). Buck Rogers was back also— on the small screen, with my childhood crush Erin Gray in a starring role on “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” [TV-NBC]. An appreciation for science and technology had arrived as we began to learn more about the magic computers could do, as well as hearing our newscasters talk about the developing Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) as the “Star Wars” Program. And don’t even get me started on “Pac-Man Fever”, the precursor to video game addiction. It was the beginning of a whole new world, and little-boy me couldn’t wait to see what would come next.
And then we got hit with the news: Star Wars was getting a sequel. That didn’t make sense, as our heroes blew up the Death Star and saved the galaxy, right? While it seemed like the story was over, the first movie was a test: to see if audiences would respond well. Since home video was in its infancy, people watched Star Wars repeatedly over the course of a week during its initial run and ticket lines would extend around the block and down the street! It was assumed a Star Wars part 2 would be good…but for some reason it wasn’t good to the fandom in its day, for reasons we’ll go into in this review.
(SPOILERS for the biggest dramatic reveal since we learned who shot J.R. Ewing in “Dallas” [TV-CBS]; You’ve been warned.)
On the ice planet of Hoth, our trio of heroes — Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, The Big Red One [1980], Village of the Damned [1995]), Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher, The Blues Brothers [1980], Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back [2001]), and Han Solo (Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom [1984], Regarding Henry [1991]) — have set up camp in the Rebellion’s hidden Echo Base. When Luke goes missing on a patrol, Han goes searching in the eternal blizzard and finds a bloodied and beaten Luke moaning about his fallen master Obi-Wan Kenobi (Sir Alec Guinness, The Prisoner [1955], Kafka [1991]). Luke had survived an attack from a Wampa (a sort of alien Abominable Snowman) and would have frozen to death had Han not improvised: he uses Luke’s lightsaber to cut open his recently deceased mount to stuff him inside for the corpse’s remaining warmth. A Rebel scout picks them up, and they make it back to Echo Base.
Unfortunately Echo Base is not-so hidden, as an Imperial probe droid spotted their external power generator and reported back to the evil cyborg space-knight Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones, The Lion King [1994], Conan the Barbarian [1982]). Vader orders a contingent of Imperial Snowtroopers to hit the Rebels head-on, dispatching AT-AT walker units: gigantic four-legged machines that look like iron camels. As the Rebels fight a losing battle when the Empire strikes back, our heroes flee in two directions: Han, Leia, C-3PO, and Chewbacca take the Millennium Falcon and head for Cloud City — a floating mining city-station on the gas giant Bespin run by Han’s smooth-talking friend Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams, Undercover Brother [2001]) — and Luke with R2-D2 travel in an X-Wing to the swamp planet Dagobah, where the Force ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi told our young hero to seek the tutelage of the great Jedi Master Yoda.
Imagine Luke’s disappointment when he crash-lands on Dagobah’s swampy planet surface, only to learn the great Jedi Master Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz) is a little green space goblin no more than three feet tall. “Size matters not,” Yoda explains, as he uses the Force to telekinetically lift the X-Wing out of the muck. Luke is convinced, and begs to be taught. The swamp-bound Jedi Master knows a secret about Luke and is reluctant to teach him, but Force ghost Obi-Wan delivers a convincing argument for Luke’s benefit. Even during his punishing physical and mental training, Luke dreams of his friends in danger — it’s the beginnings of a Force power that senses allies across great distances. With the faintest whiff of Jedi training at hand and a blaster on his hip, Luke flies off in his X-Wing to Bespin to see why his friends are in danger…against Yoda’s sage warnings.
Luke’s instincts were right: Han’s been captured by Boba Fett and sold off to pay his debts to the alien crime lord Jabba the Hutt, Leia’s been captured, C-3PO’s been rebuilt after being disassembled, and all of Cloud City is under Imperial threat. It’s all a ruse to trap our young hero so Darth Vader can get close and turn Luke to the Dark Side of the Force, under direction of Sith Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid, Dragonslayer [1981], The Lost City of Z [2016]). Violence was the first approach, with a lightsaber duel and Force ability assault that cost Luke his hand. Failing that, Darth Vader tries to appeal to Luke’s attachment to the Skywalker family — the last of them dead in a Stormtrooper raid on Tatooine — revealing that he is also a Skywalker.
That’s right y’all: Darth Vader is actually Anakin Skywalker, Luke’s father — not dead as Obi-Wan told him, but fallen to the Dark Side. The evil cyborg space-knight fails to tempt Luke, but our hero would rather die than to believe the lies and serve the Emperor. Thankfully, our heroes show up to extract Luke and spirit him away to the Rebel Fleet. Luke gets a new cyborg hand, Lando & Chewie go looking for Han, and the Emperor now knows there is another Skywalker out there that’s younger and stronger in the Force: he’d make a perfect apprentice.
If you can believe it, people hated The Empire Strikes Back the first time around.
Audiences didn't like the ambiguous ending, how the bad guys won at the end, how Luke looked very different, and how Darth Vader and Luke were father and son. This was serious business, you guys: science-fiction audiences and the nascent Star Wars fandom would stop watching movies of such low caliber if this is how they were going to make them. There were letter-writing campaigns directed to wherever a letter could be and would be published to complain, dovetailing with a critical pan in almost every newspaper that chose to review the movie. The emotional investment of the audience alone drove the discourse and paid the bills, because people were HOOKED.
The Star Wars story release schedule of three years between movies would never be enough for anyone, as withdrawal from the science-fantasy world was real. Marvel Comics got the license to create a movie tie-in and all new adventures in the galaxy far far away, while a newspaper comic strip developed by many talented people— artists Russ Manning, Archie Goodwin, Alfredo Alcala, Steve Gerber, Carlos Garzon, and Al Williamson—ran in the LA Times Syndicate and a New York paper called the Watertown Daily Times. Thus a legion of loyal fans stuck around, complaining all the while, to see if the story would “fix the problems in this movie”. As I said before, hooked.
It was a wild feat to rise above being one of the most hated in the Original Trilogy (at that point) while remaining one of the most memorable. But how would an intended stand-alone movie wrap up its trilogy? The answer is more lightsaber duels, more space dogfights, more weird aliens, a movie merchandising opportunity that couldn’t be missed, a Black guy saving the galaxy, and what we believed at the time to be the final entry of the “Skywalker Saga” and the Star Wars Trilogy.
CHOICE CUTS:
- I think it’s pretty cool that Bespin is a gas giant with an oxygen shell, so people can step out onto the landing platforms without space suits.
- CAMEO: Blink and you’ll miss Julian Glover, who played Grand Maester Pycelle on “Game of Thrones” [TV-HBO], as a young Imperial officer during the assault on Echo Base.
- Shoutout to the late actor John Hollis (Superman II [1980], Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter [1974]) who played Lando’s aide Lobot, barely speaking but being so memorable.
- In several other movies, the big reveal about Luke’s parentage is delivered in homage — mostly for comedic effect (see the 1986 Mel Brooks movie Spaceballs). The best homage comes from 2002’s Reign of Fire, where a post-apocalyptic society re-enacts the big reveal for children born after the planet was nearly destroyed by the return of dragons to the modern world.
- The asteroid chase was amazing to behold, as Han’s natural piloting skill brings them through. It rhymes with the planetary ring chase in Attack of the Clones.
- PRICELESS QUOTES: The sound of Han screaming as he’s being tortured behind closed doors still sends a shiver down my spine, nearly half a century later.
- We need to talk about the giant space slug that tried to eat Han Solo’s ship: it’s a sentient silicone organism called an exogorth, and is surprising young for his species — over one billion years old. I did not know it had a name, but it’s called Sy-O.
- FUN FACT: This is the movie that gave us Willrow Hood, AKA “the Ice Cream Guy”, played by the late British-Pakistani actor Egbert Sen.
- Harrison Ford was trying to get his character killed off in this film, and he got his wish with being frozen in carbonite. The production team did not know if the actor would come back, so this would have been a convenient way to write him out of the sequel.
- FUN FACT: Mark Hamill got into a car accident between episodes IV and V, damaging his face. He underwent plastic surgery and it worked out fine, but attention was drawn to the changes when the “Star Wars Holiday Special” [TV-ABC] makeup team tried too hard to hide the actor’s scars — because it made him look like a creepy doll. The writers of this movie leaned into the scars, writing a scene near the beginning of the film where Luke is scarred in the face by a Wampa.
- Luke’s severed hand in the Expanded Universe/Legends continuity is used to create a Force clone of Luke called “Luuke”; that is not a typo.
- PRICELESS QUOTES: “The force is with you, young Skywalker, but you are not a Jedi yet.” — Darth Vader, putting fear into Luke before delivering one of the most brutal ass-kickings in cinema history.
- The name for the fictional substance carbonite (the material Han was frozen in for transport to Jabba the Hutt) was not trademarked, and now a company that does automatic computer back-ups to prevent data loss uses the name. It would have been better to use the name for protective shells, but that falls to the thermoplastic polymer called polycarbonate.
