STAR WARS THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK SERIES

The original Star Wars followed through on the commercial promise of Jaws, but it was this sequel that set the standard for the decade where the model changed forever.

Though Jaws is credited with the dawn of the blockbuster age, it wasn’t as if studios immediately started filling up the summer with big-budget entertainments every week. The blockbuster was still in its infancy when The Empire Strikes Back was produced.

STAR WARS THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK SERIES

From there, The Empire Strikes Back can immediately barrel into a series of thrilling images and set pieces: Luke and his tauntaun attacked by a wampa, a creature that looks like a Rankin-Bass abominable snowman Han Solo (Harrison Ford) strikes out after dusk to track Luke down, facing temperatures so deadly that C3PO estimates a 725-1 chance of survival and a probe finally locates the rebels on Hoth, leading to a siege by Imperial walkers, war machines that can’t be penetrated by laser fire, but are vulnerable to harpoons and tow wire. (And not just any cliffhanger, but an actual setback, with key players of the Rebel Alliance separated and Luke Skywalker having lost a duel with Darth Vader.) All the throat-clearing necessary is a scroll informing us that Imperial troops are chasing rebel forces across the galaxy, and that Luke (Mark Hamill) and the freedom fighters are hiding out in the inhospitable ice world of Hoth.

Now that such serialization has become common, it’s easier to appreciate how Lucas and his collaborators – director Irvin Kershner, and screenwriters Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan – seized on the advantages of opening in medias res and closing on a cliffhanger. Photograph: Allstar/LUCASFILM/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar Lucas himself had a good handle on serialization – Raiders of the Lost Ark, which he would produce a year later, was inspired by old adventure serials – but many critics at the time were flummoxed, like the New York Times’s Vincent Canby, who likened the film to “reading the middle of a comic book”.īehind the scenes of The Empire Strikes Back. It’s a narrative with no beginning and no end, starting with the assumption that the audience that will know the characters and the events that preceded it and then further assuming the audience will comfortable without a conclusion. The first Star Wars was made as if there would never be another – and based on reactions to Lucas’s rough cut, success was far from assured – but The Empire Strikes Back was made with the next film in mind, which presented a storytelling challenge that was not common at the time. Yet it nonetheless feels so simple and pure and liberating, not least because the future of the whole unwieldy franchise can be forgotten for 127 minutes and the past is only the 1977 Star Wars, which here serves as the first act that does all the heavy lifting for a second that only has to step on the gas. Watching The Empire Strikes Back in 2020 isn’t exactly the same as watching it in 1980: the special edition, though not as aggressive as the other two in the first trilogy, has officially supplanted the original film and has a much glossier texture than other films at the time.

Star wars the empire strikes back