The Empire's New Clothes Strike Back

Rating: 8/10 (22 December 1999)

The second in the initial run of Star Wars movies, and I must insist that their extreme popularity has always alluded me.
The original Star Wars film, A New Hope, is often cited as the greatest film ever made when such surveys are taken amongst the public and not amongst the critical fraternity. I mean, they're rubbish, surely? Yet all sorts of cod psychology goes up to justify what really are just Cowboys and Indians in space. Take a look at this religious analogy of The Phantom Menace:
"A man wearing a shawl, sporting long hair and a beard travels through a town collecting disciples. After many Biblical encounters they meet a man with the appearance of a horned devil who carries a Staff horizontally, like a cross. This is ultimately what kills the man, though his death helps to save his disciple. He dies so that his disciple might live." This is a description of the basic events of the film, and attention is also drawn to the fact that there are three generations of man in the film (Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin), like the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. And what is Phantom another word for?
In all honesty, that Christian analogy of the fourth Star Wars film isn't genuine - I made it up in two minutes while shopping for groceries. But it just shows how easy it is to craft a pseudo-intellectual subtext into what is a crass, sfx-crammed movie and palm it off as genuine critique. While even the most blinkered are shaky on Phantom's appeal, the fact that Star Wars makes a regular Top 10 appearance in the IMBd chart, trouncing even such greats as Citizen Kane, goes to show, to my mind, that people are scared to disagree with popular opinion.
As a film, Star Wars isn't spectacular. The direction is average, at best, while acting, and especially dialogue (George Lucas' major weak point) are one-dimensional. So this would leave you to believe it must be great science fiction then. It isn't. "Fetch the mind probe" utters Darth Vader at one point, without any hint of irony. Childish and vapid, this dumbed-down, popcorn Sci-Fi pales, surely, when compared with such greats as 2001, Planet of the Apes or A Clockwork Orange? Yet this "emperor's new clothes" effect even sticks to the sequels, causing the noxious "Return of the Jedi" to surf irksomely around the top 100.
Which brings us to The Empire Strikes Back. The only Star Wars film to date that jettisons formulaic plotting, comfortable in the fact that it follows a movie and it knows a movie will succeed it. Put simply, sandwiched in between "Hope" and "Jedi", Empire doesn't require the luxuries of a beginning or end, so is essentially one big middle. This can be off-putting at first glance, particularly an unresolved climax which can leave the viewer feeling like they've been cheated. Yet this is, by Star Wars standards, sophisticated and depth-filled, a massive slap in the face for George Lucas who had little input into this dark instalment. Though he supplies the story, the dialogue is given a human, more adult edge by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, while Irvin Kershner's direction jettisons the "point and shoot" fixations of "Phantom Menace" for genuine cineramic sweeps.
Strangely, with it's blood and mutilations, "Empire" wasn't given a "PG" certificate. But the internal nature of good/evil and the symbiosis between Luke and Vader (Mark Hamill, with the better direction, even threatening to act on occasion), lend this one a worthwhile backbone that means you don't "have to pretend you're a kid again" in order to enjoy it.
The most sophisticated and depth-filled Star Wars film, infinitely better than anything that followed, and leagues ahead of it's merely-average predecessor, it is quite beautifully filmed and the only one of the four that will always hold surprises on any number of repeated viewings.