THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
REDEFINED WHAT A BLOCKBUSTER SEQUEL COULD BE. HERE’S WHY THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY’S MIDDLE INSTALMENT IS STILL THE BEST…
These days anybody who makes a sequel to a hit
movie can’t wait to tell you that it’s darker and more mature than what came before. When The Empire Strikes Back took the Star Wars saga in a bleaker, entirely unexpected new direction, however, it felt as fresh and new as the original movie had three years earlier. This was a kid-friendly movie that turned narrative convention on its head by putting its big action set-piece in the first act, before ending on a massive downer that left the story defiantly unresolved. While it made significantly less money than its predecessor – until Solo, it was the worst performing of all the live-action Star Wars – it’s now regarded as the pinnacle of the franchise, the one where storytelling and drama lived up to the visuals. SFX looks back at five big reasons it’s long remembered…
A NEW ORDER “DO OR DO NOT. THERE IS NO TRY.”
IT’S ALMOST A CLICHÉ THAT NOBODY expected much from Star Wars at the box office – not even its creator George Lucas, whose canny move to negotiate the rights to any sequels turned out to be an act of incredible foresight. Once the first movie had become the biggest film of all time, a sequel was inevitable, but Lucas took the bold step of financing the film himself, using “everything I owned” as collateral. It was an incredibly risky move – he ran close to the financial wire on several occasions, with 20th Century Fox eager to swoop in to seize back control – but it meant Lucas was free to tell the story his way.
“This film was not a traditional sequel,” he said on The Empire Strikes Back commentary track. “It didn’t have a beginning and an end, [it had] a lot of big action sequences early on in the movie and it ends on a personal note. I’m not sure a studio would have gone along with that if they had their say.”
Lucas knew he wanted the sequel to be less goofy and more sophisticated than his hit original, but decided he wasn’t the writer or director to make it. He initially signed up Leigh Brackett, writer of Bogart/Bacall classic The Big Sleep, to turn his story into a script, but she died before completing the first draft. Lucas then hired Lawrence Kasdan (already at work on Raiders Of The Lost Ark) to take over, a decision that arguably led to the characters – with the possible exception of R2-D2 and Chewbacca – sounding like actual humans.
When it came to finding a director, Lucas went really leftfield, hiring his former University of Southern California mentor Irvin Kershner. “I immediately said, ‘I’m sorry but I can’t do this,’” Kershner told SFX in 2008. “I think that it would be silly for me to make a film that tries to better what you have done. George said to me, ‘This has to be even bigger than the first one – as well as being even better.’ Even then I still turned it down. But after a month of him phoning me, I finally agreed to go up to his studio.”
Kershner had no previous experience of special effects films, but he proved to be the ideal fit. Far more comfortable handling actors than his new boss, he was given freedom to direct the film in London, while executive producer Lucas stayed in California to look after the effects scenes, and shield Kershner from any studio politics. This dream alchemy of talent and creativity behind the camera has never been matched in the Star Wars canon.