In the light of Star Wars’ modern state, looking back at older films puts a depressing spin on nostalgia. Having been a half-decade or so removed from the last truly good film in the franchise (I’ll leave specifics up to the imagination) and perhaps more than two decades beyond the last one to have a lasting impact on the cinematic landscape, the galaxy far, far away that we’re all accustomed to appears rather bleak.
Yet the franchise’s defining talisman, The Empire Strikes Back, shines as spotlessly as ever, even 45 years after release. While it’s become popular to mince one’s ranking of the Star Wars films, as the internet loves to argue about nothing else more, anyone who has ever put Empire anywhere but first place is kidding themselves. It seems to be one of the only movies to ever possess the ability to remove the watcher from their current plane of existence and transport them directly into the frame. You’re a pile of snow on Hoth, a cloud on Coruscant; you get the picture.
Beyond the basic but legendary quotability, an underrated quality of a movie’s long standing impact, Empire stills boasts the most honest inspection of the series’ most consistent themes: breathless suppression, hapless hope, and damning love. The latter is what gets Han frozen in carbonite by the hand of the former; the middle ideal is what drives Luke throughout the entire series, though most intensely in Empire. Lying with a severed limb in the face of his newfound father, the same face that he thought he’d defeated just one film ago, Skywalker cries out in languishing denial.
He knows the truth as well as the audience does, but to see a character hold to his core trait, hope, in the face of such a truth… Well, that’s what makes him the arguable face of Sci-Fi cinema to this day. In another way, his wail is a war cry for the weary and defeated who suffer under similar such protocols as the one’s Darth Vader imposes. Whether in personal life or on a much larger scale, you can throw Empire on for anyone and, if nothing else, they’ll sink into the same silence during the father reveal scene that their parents did 45-years-ago. This unfailing sequence, upheld by undying longevity, is a capsule for the feeling that the entire film elicits. Everything great about The Empire Strikes Back is wrapped up into the one scene that still, to this day, nobody can forget. It’s a beautiful, once in a lifetime occurrence on the cinematic landscape. I’m not sure we’ve had anything like it — maybe not anything even close — since.
And that’s just one scene. Consider the aforementioned Han and Leia “I love you” moment in the bowels of Vader’s control, moments before Solo is frozen in carbonite and hauled out of sight for the rest of the film. Or the opening, surprisingly long detail on Hoth, from the quieter moments with Luke and Obi-Wan’s force ghost to the full-scale battle that displays an unreal mastery in practical effects and superimposed visual scale. If you shoot something in camera, it’ll always look good; Empire, both on Hoth and everywhere else, is the best example of that to this day.
Oh, and Yoda is introduced here. No big deal, right? This is a film with clips, cuts, and tidbits shared across social media in thousands, if not millions of forms, and it hasn’t lost a single stroke of popularity. Even as the franchise actively worsens and its output grinds to an almost complete halt, audiences set their watches back 45-years now and again to experience what really started it all. A New Hope was first, sure, but there wouldn’t be a Star Wars as it stands today without The Empire Strikes Back. The original definition of a classic, and unarguably one of the greatest, most influential movies ever made. Happy 45th birthday… here’s to a trillion more.
Grade: A+
