THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #92

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)

The Writers

Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan; story by George Lucas

Why It's Here

I find myself today in the curious position of writing about a film about which I probably know much less than most of the fans who will be reading this. Someone once asked me what kind of Star Wars fan I considered myself. I answered, "The kind who's really an Indiana Jones fan." Though I acknowledge their importance to the history of Hollywood filmmaking (for better and worse), I have never been what I would call fanatic about the Star Wars movies. I have seen all of the films, of course, and even trekked out to the theatre for the '97 re-release of the original film (highlight: my buddy whispering to me five minutes in, "I don't remember Spaceballs starting like this," at which I laughed so loud I embarrassed myself). But I cannot quote chapter and verse from the films. I didn't grow up with pointy-edged Luke and Han action figures underfoot. I do not own the pictures on DVD, I've never read any of the books, and I only have one piece of memorabilia (the classic "Vader Was Framed" t-shirt). Sure, I went to the massive Star Wars Celebration convention in L.A. back in 2007 for a couple of days...but that's because I was working there, at the Barnes & Noble book booth. Point being, I am by no means a Star Wars freak (and by the way, why don't we have an all-encompassing word like "Trekkie" to apply to Star Wars geeks? We really need one. Jedi-sniffer? Sithhead?).

However, I bow to no one in my admiration of, ironically, the one Star Wars film I have never seen on the big screen: 1980's The Empire Strikes Back, frequently cited by critics and audiences alike as the deepest, darkest and richest of all the films in the series. In interviews, George Lucas has frequently stated that with the original 1977 Star Wars, he was attempting to fashion the ultimate cinematic myth, the apotheosis of all the creation narratives and legends that passed down through history to define the human animal as it found itself nearing the 21st century (insert obligatory George Lucas / Joseph Campbell reference here). The fact that Lucas was largely successful in this aim accounts for both the deep resonance Star Wars has held for filmgoers around the world and for the somewhat schematic nature of the first film's characterizations. Luke Skywalker is not a callow youth who rises to the occasion to become an unexpected hero...he's the Callow Youth / Unexpected Hero. Likewise Han Solo is the ur-Loveable Rogue, Obi Wan Kenobi the ultimate Mentor, etc. These characters struck a nerve with filmgoers worldwide not just because of George Lucas's storytelling, but because that storytelling struck deep chords embedded within our collective psyche about who we see ourselves as and how we came to be. With Star Wars, Lucas gave the world brilliant media-age mythical archetypes. The genius of The Empire Strikes Back, the reason it is the best-written of all the Star Wars features, is that it takes those archetypes and complicates them, gives them wrinkles...makes them human.

Of course, another reason it might be the best-written film in the series is that it is the only Star Wars picture on which Lucas does not receive a screenwriter's credit (here, he is only billed as "Story By..."). Even hardcore Star Wars junkies (Naboosters? No?) concede that the Achilles heel of the series has often been Lucas's own writing, his frequently hamfisted dialogue, his willingness to go for the occasional cheap laugh, his weakness for too-cute-by-half supporting players. On Empire, Lucas turned the screenwriters' reins over to two major talents. Leigh Brackett was a bona fide screenwriting legend, with credits on such classics as The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, and Robert Altman's screwloose adaptation of The Long Goodbye, all films marked by sharp dialogue and a deep understanding of character. Brackett worked on the earliest drafts of the Empire script, but she sadly succumbed to cancer before the film made it before the cameras. Her work was completed by Lawrence Kasdan, who would go on to write Raiders of the Lost Ark for Lucas and later become an acclaimed director in his own right with films like The Big Chill, Silverado, and The Accidental Tourist. Another sharp dialogue writer. Another character-driven storyteller. In short, another scribe, like Brackett, who could combine his strengths, which were sometimes in short supply in Lucas's own writing, with Lucas's impeccable feel for myth and dazzling vision of a new cinematic universe. The result: the most fully balanced, most "complete" screenplay for any Star Wars film.

Empire is neatly broken into the Hollywood-standard three acts, the act breaks signaled both by a change in narrative venue and, more crucially, by an impetuous, against-the-grain decision by the headstrong-to-the-point-of-reckless Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). As the film opens, "It is a dark time for the rebellion...", whose previous-film-ending destruction of the Death Star was a short-lived victory. On the run from the evil Galactic Empire, the Rebels are hiding out on a secret base on the ice world of Hoth, the film's first-act setting. As we see Luke battle the elements and a vicious abominable-snowman-like Wampa (the Star Wars films, like many classic myths, feature frequent digressions such as the Wampa attack that add nothing to the master narrative but work wonders in fleshing out Lucas's fantastical world), we also see the interaction of the characters we fell in love with during the first film, and we see the relationships have grown more complex, pricklier, more adult. Han Solo (Harrison Ford), the brash smuggler who came within a hair's-breadth of abandoning the Rebels in the last film, has cast his lot with the angels...or so it would seem, as he still struts around like cock of the walk as he continues to make noise about heading off on his own to face his destiny with Jabba the Hutt. Still, we know what's really keeping him around: his growing feelings for the equally stubborn but just as much in love Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher). Their tempestuous relationship, alternately passionate and head-butting, recalls many of the classic back-and-forth romances in Brackett's earlier work, not to mention the fuss-and-fighting romance of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, which I wrote about earlier in this series.

Luke, meanwhile, has evolved into an effortlessly commanding battlefield leader...but one whose youth and overconfidence, while frequently effective (no more so than when he takes down a mighty Imperial Walker with nothing more than a swing of his lightsaber and carefully tossed grenade), still seems likely to land him on the wrong end of a blaster one day. Which is why we hold our breaths somewhat when old Obi-Wan's voice comes to him and tells him to head off to the Dagobah System for Jedi training under someone named Yoda. After all, the last time Luke followed strong inner convictions into the unknown, he became a hero...but only after he almost got himself killed several times over. What if this time, there's killing but no heroism? The very fact that Empire invests us so much Luke's destiny indicates that Lucas's myth, under Brackett and Kasdan's guidance, is growing up. We're no longer so certain of the outcome of things anymore. There's room for doubt, hesitation, fear. Just as there will be for Luke down the road, making his role as our onscreen surrogate palpably intense.

In act two, while the Millennium Falcon engages in a little asteroid-field derring-do and a close encounter with some sort of toothy space worm (admittedly, Han, Leia, Chewie and the droids don't serve much narrative purpose in the middle part of this film, mainly being here to serve as Luke-bait set by Darth Vader in act three), Luke travels to Dagobah, which turns out to be a swamp planet inhabited mostly by fog and creepy underwater snakes. But it's here that he also meets a grizzled, pointy-eared little homunculus who turns out to be Yoda (Frank Oz), the great Jedi master who taught Obi-Wan Kenobi the ways of the Force. And it's here that the main narrative thrust of the original trilogy starts to come into focus, as Luke's struggle to master the powers of a Jedi are frequently sabotaged by his harsh self-judgments, inner anger and impatience.

Yoda, who sports not just the robes but the deeply focused inner peace of a Buddhist monk, calls Luke on the carpet on this almost immediately, in his tangled reverse syntax: "This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away...to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing." And if we didn't get the message enough, Brackett and Kasdan give us an on-the-nose but nevertheless effective fantasy sequence in which Luke faces the villainous Darth Vader in a dark cave (don't worry, more on him later) and beheads him...only to find his own face staring out at him from under Vader's broken mask. It's not only an elegant foreshadowing of a major story twist that we (at that time) had no idea was coming, but it's a show-don't-tell moment of the first order: Luke's worst enemy is himself.

The training sequences grow in intensity as Yoda's frustration with Luke's lack of progress builds, and the young man's path to Jedi mastery grinds to a halt when he receives a troubling vision of his friends in pain. Yoda warns him against going off to rescue his friends, trying to convince him that his intervention can only lead to greater suffering for everyone. Luke, ever-disobedient and thinking like a kid, says he has to do something just because they're his friends, and rockets off to the cloud-borne mining city of Bespin and to Empire's third act. Here, the film takes a turn into narrative territory that makes it easily the darkest film in the series. (Some might argue that 2005's prequel Revenge of the Sith rivals this for narrative blackness, with its dead younglings and Anakin on fire and all, but at least in that one, we knew everything would turn out okay in the end.) Expecting a welcome from his old pirating buddy Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams), Han and Leia instead find betrayal, as Lando has been blackmailed into complicity with the evil Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones and embodied, masterfully, by David Prowse). Han is frozen in carbonite to be taken to Jabba the Hutt. Loyal droid C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) is torn into pieces. Luke is driven into a desperate lightsaber battle against Vader, a battle the skilled but unpolished young warrior is wholly unready for. And he not only loses his hand, but also his entire understanding of himself and his world, as Vader reveals to him that his father, long believed dead at Vader's hand, in fact lies behind Vader's insectoid obsidian mask.

Over the years, many have criticized Hamill's acting in this moment of revelation, with its over-the-top facial contortions and bellowing screams of "Noooooooooooooo!" But Hamill's performance here brilliantly reinforces the narrative movement Brackett and Kasdan's script has been building to all along. In his essay "Sulking With Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth", Chuck Klosterman posits the idea that The Empire Strikes Back was the seminal coming-of-age film for Generation X, that it was the first film that introduced that generation to an adult understanding of the world, to the reality that good guys don't always win, that noble intentions are no guarantee of victory or happiness, that the bad guys can not only get the upper hand, but that they can be closer to who we are than we ever would wish. It's that harsh reality that Luke gets slapped in the face with in that moment, and his wailing, near-infantile reaction is thus perfect; it's the dying exclamation of Luke Skywalker the boy and the birthing scream of Luke Skywalker the man. No accident, then, that his next act is one that only an adult would be capable of...one of self-sacrifice, as he hurls himself from the spires of Bespin to his (expected) death rather than fold himself into the cold embrace of his demonic father. Brackett and Kasdan's script here aligns Lucas's myth with arguably the dominant myth-narrative of Western culture, as Luke, giving his life for the good of the world, becomes an intergalactic Christ figure. His fall from Bespin, and grace, is even stopped by a weather vane shaped like a large cross.

Of course, by now we all know what comes next, that Han's okay and Vader turns his back on the Dark Side and Luke stands up and claims his place as a Jedi. Oh, and there's Ewoks, much to the disgust of many. But in 1980, popular entertainments did not end on the kind of downbeat note that Empire went out on. Even knowing another sequel was in the works, audiences were nevertheless stunned to see a gee-whiz summer action blockbuster that ended with one of its main characters in the clutches of an enemy, frozen solid and possibly dead; a beloved sidekick literally torn limb from limb; and its hero partially dismembered and just emotionally upended by a revelation that might have struck a lesser man dead. Star Wars frequently gets blamed for the dumbing down of modern commercial cinema, for burying the narrative daring and experimental freedom of 1970s cinema beneath a welter of catchphrases and special effects. But Empire itself strikes back against these accusations with an ending every bit as unresolved and emotionally turbulent as that of the best films of that great decade. In that respect, it stands alongside Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, also released in 1980, as the last great 1970s-style Hollywood narrative feature.

Of course, Brackett and Kasdan's risk-taking screenplay would have been worth nothing if the movie didn't also deliver as superlative entertainment, and from the first frame to the last, The Empire Strikes Back is a complete blast to watch. Even with all the dark inward-looking and character moments, there's still stunning action sequences like the Hoth attack (maybe my favorite big-scale battle in any Star Wars film), memorably bizarre characters like the masked bounty hunter Boba Fett (amazing to consider what an impact this character made on audiences; watch the film again and you'll realize how little he really does here), and what is consistently the best dialogue of any film in the series, including my favorite all-time Star Wars line, Vader's comeback to Lando when he confronts the Sith lord about going back on their agreement: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." Suck on THAT, "Say hello to my little friend!" That's how a villain threatens someone! There's even, amidst all the darkness, ample room for humor, and it's not overdone like in the Lucas-penned Star Wars pictures, but just enough to serve as true comic relief. Indeed, with its balance of action, humor, romance, serious themes, compelling characters, and true narrative richness, The Empire Strikes Back is a throwback to the classic "something-for-everyone" Hollywood narratives of old, a testament both to Brackett's influence on the finished product and to the film's own sterling quality. If all the Star Wars films had been as well-written as The Empire Strikes Back, they just might have turned me into a true Jedi-Hard (hah!).

AWARD NOMINATIONS (BOLDFACE INDICATES A WIN): Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films Award, Best Writing; Writers Guild of America Award, Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium (I know, I'm as confused as you are...)