The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
The darkest of the original Star Wars trilogy, The
Empire Strikes Back opens with a fantastic battle between the
Rebels (the good guys) and Darth Vader's Evil Empire in which
rocket ships zip around armoured juggernauts resembling
five-hundred-foot-tall camels on hydraulic legs with
death-spitting tongues. The action never lags after that, and this
sequel to Star Wars is more fun and more dazzling than the
original.
Officially the fifth episode in a planned nine-part series
(later dropped to six), The Empire Strikes Back opens at a
dark time for the Rebellion. The Death Star was destroyed, but
Darth Vader survived and has committed himself to crushing the
Rebellion.
Luke, Leia, Han and the rest are hiding out at a new base on
the ice planet Hoth. Luke ventures out across the tundra and gets
clobbered by a Yeti-like Wampa. While semi-conscious, Luke
receives a message from the dead-but-not-departed Obi-Wan Kenobi,
who tells Luke to seek out Jedi master Yoda in the Dagobah system.
Han rescues his young friend and gets him back to base, but an
Imperial probe droid has tipped Vader off to the Rebels' location.
A wave of armoured AT-AT walkers storms the base, forcing the
Rebels to flee.
Luke and R2D2 take off for Dagobah, while Han, Leia, Chewie and
C3P0 deal with a broken hyperdrive motivator, which prevents them
from blasting away in hyperspace. The roguish pilot takes the Millennium
Falcon through a dangerous asteroid field, finding a seemingly
safe haven in a large asteroid's cave.
On Dagobah, Luke crash lands in a swamp and runs across a
green, troll-like creature.
 Luke tries to get rid of the pesky
little fellow, but the creature reveals himself to be 900-year-old
Yoda (pictured at left) - twenty-six inches high with pointy ears, sad eyes, and a
Hobbit-like demeanour, brought to life by Frank Oz, creator of The
Muppets.
After some convincing from the spirit of Obi-Wan, Yoda
agrees to train the headstrong young apprentice.
Back in space, Han has launched back into the asteroid field,
but the Imperial Tie Fighters are still on his tail. He takes off
for temporary refuge in old pal Lando Calrissian's Cloud
City.
After a seeming betrayal, Han, Leia, Chewie and Threepio are
led into the clutches of Vader. Luke senses their peril and leaves
his training prematurely, against Yoda and Obi-Wan's advice. The
young Jedi-in-training arrives in Cloud City too late to save one
of his friends, instead finding himself in mortal combat with
Vader, from whom he learns a painful truth about his past.
The Empire Strikes Back ended on a fairly dark note,
setting up the final instalment in this trilogy, Return of the
Jedi, three years later.
None of this unpleasantness, of course, stopped the legions of Star
Wars fanatics from crowding cinemas around the world when The
Empire Strikes Back opened in the summer of 1980. It had been
three years since the first instalment, and the Force was still
with George Lucas' creation, pushing the new film onto the list of
all-time money-makers.
For this second (or fifth) instalment, Lucas turned over
writing and directing duties to Lawrence Kasdan and Irvin Kershner,
respectively, choosing instead to oversee things as story writer
and executive producer.
The success of the first film also allowed his team at the
newly-christened Industrial Light and Magic to create even more
impressive special effects than those found in the first film. And
again, sales of Star Wars merchandise skyrocketed, as AT-AT
walkers and Snowspeeders topped every kid's "must-have"
toy list.
The 1997 Special Edition of The Empire Strikes Back
added a few more shots of the Wampa, threw in some windows in
Cloud City and altered a few lines of dialogue, but this remained
the least changed of the three films. In the minds of many, it had
the least room for improvement.
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