Not the best Star Wars movie

Rating: 8/10 (17 September 2010)

You know what the dirty little secret about The Empire Strikes Back is? While many people would claim this is the best Star Wars movie, it really isn'tand it isn't even close.
Which doesn't mean Empire isn't a great film. The last 25 minutes or so are as good as anything in Star Wars and there's plenty before that to keep you entertained. But I think folks get caught up in how much bigger, bolder and darker this sequel is compared to the first movie and don't notice the little cracks that run throughout the story.
Empire picks up the story of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the rebellion against the Empire at least a few years after the events of Star Wars. The rebels have just settled in to a new secret base when Luke gets bushwacked by a snow monster and sees an image of Ben Kenobi (Alec Guinness) telling him to go to the Dagobah system and be trained by Jedi Master Yoda (Frank Oz). A probe droid leads the Empire to the Rebel base and after a big battle, Luke sets off for Dagobah while Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and company get trapped by the Empire and eventually have to flee to Cloud City, where Han's old friend Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) will help them repair the Millennium Falcon and hide from the Empire. As Luke trains, we learn that Darth Vader (David Prowse and James Earl Jones) is desperate to find Luke and considers his Jedi potential to be extremely valuable or extremely dangerous to the Empire. Vader eventually lures Luke to Cloud City, where we get one of the all time great revelations in movie history, and witness our heroes battle to survive.
Empire is definitely a bigger film than Star Wars. There's far more action on a much grander scale with more speed and thrills. But a lot of the big effects in Empire have not aged that well. Watching Empire, you can sort of understand how George Lucas became obsessed with going back and fixing things in the original trilogy.
This is also one of the boldest movie blockbusters ever. The story is basically about how our heroes fail over and over and over again and barely escape by the skin of their teeth. And these are real failures, where Luke and Han aren't smart enough or strong enough or good enough to succeed, not flukes or situations where winning is impossible. Empire is very much about how the characters we loved from the first movie fall short and get beaten down.
Which is one of the things that make it much darker than Star Wars or any other SW movie, except perhaps Revenge of the Sith. But that's not all. Star Wars was largely the story of Luke Skywalker growing from a boy to a man, but in a triumphant, cheerful, fairy tale sort of way. It's a hero's story. Empire is also about a boy becoming a man, but not in triumph. This is a story about Luke becoming an adult and learning that the world doesn't work the way children think it does. This is a story of lost innocence.
Empire is a great movie and I don't want to overly criticize it, but you can see some basic problems compared to Star Wars. It doesn't really have a central plot propelling things along. For a big budget sci-fi spectacle, Empire is rather like one of those art house films where stuff just happens to the characters. The story also breaks up the Luke/Leia/Han triangle suggested in Star Wars and leaves Leia with little to do in this film other than be the foil for Han's amorous advances. And while the story is more adult in some ways, it's also simpler. There was a lot of stuff in Star Wars that suggested a wider universe in which that particular story was only a part. Empire shrinks everything down and links everything together in a much less sophisticated way. Darth Vader also becomes almost cartoonishly evil in Empire after having a core of believability in Star Wars. Although, the story does do a good job of illustrating how being that evil is ultimately self-defeating. And there's a lot of little comedic bits crammed into the story, with most of it C-3PO related. It's not as bad a Jar Jar Binks, but it's a step down that road.
One of the other striking things about Empire is seeing puppet Yoda again after getting used to CGI created characters. There's no denying that while puppet Yoda looked great in 1980, now he really looks fake. But puppet Yoda actually seems more alive than the CGI Yoda of the prequels. Puppet Yoda looks fake but feels real, while CGI Yoda looks real but feels fake. It think it must be because puppet Yoda was mostly the creation of a single artist, allowing his talent and personality to shine through, while CGI Yoda was a product that was sort of manufactured by a large team.
A lot of people say Empire was as good as it was because people other than George Lucas played such a big role in making it. But noticing the weaknesses in Empire really only emphasizes how great a job Lucas did in Star Warswhich also emphasizes how poorly he did when it came to making the prequels.