When I was four years old, my dad piled my brother and me into the back of our 1978 Buick station wagon and took us to the drive-in to watch The Empire Strikes Back. I trembled with excitement for the whole ride, and when we got there, I bounced around like a bumblebee on crank waiting for the sky to grow dark and the opening credits to roll. When John Williams’ brassy fanfare finally belted out from the speakers, I squealed and clapped my hands and climbed into my dad’s lap.
I promptly fell asleep and didn’t wake up until it was over.
I’d missed the whole thing, but it didn’t matter: my older brother had seen it, and my cousins and my friends, and they all talked about it—incessantly. When it finally came out on VHS, I felt like I’d already seen it, not once, but repeatedly. The Empire Strikes Back had seeped into my consciousness through osmosis.
Thirty-five years later, it’s still seeping in. Considered by many to be the gold standard for Part 2 of a trilogy, Empire was such a mic drop that it continues to serve as a blueprint for countless sequels, in print and on the screen. So pervasive is its influence that we barely notice it anymore; it’s as invisible and omnipresent as the air we breathe. It’s in our bones—and for writers, it’s in the bones of our books too, whether we realize it or not.
At least, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. All I know is that when I embarked on Book 2 of the Bloodbound trilogy, I didn’t have The Empire Strikes Back in mind—at least not consciously. And yet when I sat back and looked at the manuscript I’d just churned out, the echoes were unmistakable. Up to that point, I’d never realized how much I had internalized the lessons of Empire, but unbeknownst to me, I’d been a Padawan all along.
The experience really drove home for me just how successful The Empire Strikes Back had been at raising the stakes and ratcheting up the tension. More usefully, it also helped me highlight six clear ways in which Lucas and company made that happen.
Our heroes are split up.
While Luke, Leia, and Han spend most of Star Wars together, they’re wrenched apart in Empire. Han and Leia head off to Cloud City, while Luke makes his way to the Dagobah system. This traumatic separation heightens the sense of vulnerability. Luke is all alone on a creepy alien world facing perils unknown, while Han and Leia are cut off from the power of the Force, adrift in a hostile galaxy. The fellowship is broken, and our heroes are weaker and more exposed as a result.
The world is bigger, badder, and more complex than ever.
The galaxy expands in this second installment, offering us a glimpse at previously unimagined worlds. We trudge through the blizzards of Hoth, explore the floating towers of Cloud City, and prowl the fetid swamps of Dagobah, encountering varied nasties along the way. In so doing, we learn more about the Force as well as the machinations of the Empire, both of which turn out to be more complicated than we thought. This vast backdrop seems to swallow our heroes (at one point literally). And in case we missed it, there are plenty of environmental cues to hammer it home: immense, lumbering star destroyers; AT-ATs trampling puny rebel soldiers as if they were ants; Darth Vader looming ominously over Luke in Cloud City. All this serves to highlight how small and fragile our heroes really are, how overwhelmed.
The theme of the journey.
As in Lord of the Rings and many other epics, the characters in Empire do a lot of travelling, and this physical journey parallels character development. Just as the setting is growing and becoming more complex, so too are the characters, and as the world darkens, our heroes show their darker sides too (more on this below). This added scope and complexity is what gives the story its truly epic feel.
Evil comes from within.
Star Wars presents a fairly straightforward conflict between Good and Evil, personified by Darth Vader and Obi-Wan (who passes the lightsaber to Luke). But in The Empire Strikes Back, this black-and-white conflict quickly starts to acquire shades of grey, and one of the central themes of the trilogy—that good is constantly in danger of being corrupted—takes centre stage. Luke is no longer just a hero seeking to thwart evil; he’s in danger of becoming evil himself. And even if he doesn’t quite embrace the Dark Side and give it a big sloppy kiss, he’s definitely doing some flirting when his temper gets the better of him. Suddenly, it’s not just our heroes’ lives in danger, but their very souls. And failure looms larger than ever, because even winning (defeating Vader) might mean losing (being seduced by the Dark Side).
The enemy has a bench, and it’s deeper and scarier than we thought.
(This is a sports metaphor. That’s allowed, right?) We spent Star Wars more or less convinced that Darth Vader was the baddest badass in the land, only to learn… not so much. Empire introduces us to Palpatine, and we’re quickly given the deeply unsettling impression that Vader is the least of our worries. Could the epically scary villain of the first film be little more than a particularly talented slugger on Palpatine’s bench-o-baddies?
The late-breaking shocker.
Enough said, right? Bad enough that we crawl across home plate bloody, bruised and behind on the scoreboard. (Another sports analogy. Forgive me—the Blue Jays are doing really well.) On top of that, we end the film with our ears still ringing to this little gem: “I am your father!” Suddenly, our epic tale is also intensely personal. We’re hurting for Luke and fearing what lies ahead, knowing our hero is in for a world of pain and tough decisions in Episode III (or, you know, Episode VI). We’re disoriented and anxious. Most importantly, we’re positively starving for the next installment.
When you break it down like this, it’s genuinely impressive just how systematically Empire ramped up the tension from Star Wars and set the stage for Return of the Jedi – especially considering that this list is almost certainly incomplete. I have no idea whether Lucas and company planned this out meticulously or if it was purely instinctive, but it’s hard to deny how successful the results were.
Which explains why, where I would normally be annoyed with myself for having unconsciously echoed so many themes from another work, in this case I gave myself a pass. Because every artist learns from the masterpieces, and there’s no doubt in my mind that The Empire Strikes Back qualifies as such. If you weren’t convinced of that the first time you watched it, take another look. “You will be.”
Erin Lindsey is on an epic quest to write the perfect vacation novel for fantasy lovers. The Bloodforged, Book 2 of the Bloodbound trilogy, publishes September 29 from Ace. She also writes fantasy mystery as E.L. Tettensor. Follow her on Twitter @etettensor.
I have so many emotions associated with this movie :) Funny thing is, I somehow didn’t see Star Wars until I was 14 (when the special editions came out, but actually when they came to the second run theater in my town) AND missed most of the pop culture osmosis. No joke, a friend of mine was joking around and spoiled the ‘I am your father’ revelation the day I went to see Empire Strikes Back. This still irritates me a bit!
The movie still blew me away though. It was what really made me ‘obsessed’. In fact, a lot of that is focused around ‘evil comes from within’ (along with the Han and Leia plot, as I was a hopeless romantic). I had been a little skeptical of the movies in the first place (figuring it would be more like a dumb action movie) and while the first one was definitely better than I had thought, it was the previews for the second one that really piqued my interest – knowing that Luke would have some kind of journey/temptation to deal with. And then, before Empire, they showed a preview from Return of the Jedi that showed Luke all in black and walking with Darth Vader so I really wasn’t sure what to expect!
The movie went by in a flash…I remember being shocked when the end credits came on the screen after the frigate scene. How could that be the end??????? Thankfully I only had to wait 3 weeks for the next one to come to the theater, not 3 years :)
I remember coming away from the film feeling a bit conflicted. Granted, I was really young, but the darker palette of Empire threw me a bit. It didn’t have the feel-good ending of Star Wars, and I remember being pretty bummed about that. I suspect some readers will have a similar reaction to The Bloodforged, especially because Book 1 has a pretty upbeat tone. In a certain way, it was actually seeing Return of the Jedi that drove home just how awesome Empire was — and not just because the latter was the better film. I think you can’t really appreciate Empire to its fullest until you put it in the context of the entire story arc over all three movies, because it’s only then that you realize how much complexity and nuance is added through that second, darker chapter. Which makes the triumph in Jedi all the sweeter!
We all want to write the “Empire” for our trilogies, don’t we.
The thing that strikes me about “Empire” all these years later is how well that movie alone would work as a mini-series. At least two episodes on Hoth with at least one entire episode based on the Battle for Hoth. The Escape, Luke’s training, Lando, the bounty hunters. So much potential. I secretly hope that they do it as a new book series.
The thing I like most about Empire is the the chase movie aspect. All you need is some banjo getaway music to complete the picture. Hiding and running and blasting, hiding and running and blasting—kiss—hiding and running and blasting. What a ride!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAaGlG0bsGM
Oh yeah, and there’s some nice Jedi stuff with Luke and the little green dude in there as well.
I’m not sure I agree “bigger world” is a trait that stands out in Empire; I think the first movie did plenty of implying that Star Wars took place in another universe and there was any number of crazy things going on there. But I’m glad you highlighted the enemy bench aspect. Much is made of the “I’m your daddy” bit, but people forget that when Vader got on his knee and actually showed respect to somebody we’d never seen before, that was almost as big a shocker. Who the heck could Vader possibly call “master?”
Empire’s ending hits exactly the right balance between satisfaction and anticipation. You feel like its own arc has been satisfied, but there were also enough non-cliffhanger loose ends (will they save Han? Is Vader really Luke’s father? What kind of chance do the Rebels have against the Empire, now we know about this Emperor guy?) to keep kids’ imaginations boiling for three years in a way the first movie didn’t accomplish outside of Vader surviving; a lot more to work with when you were playing with the toys. 1980-1983 really were the best years. Not one of the other movies accomplished the same for kids. Closest was the ending of “Attack of the Clones” that set kids free to imagine an entire range of battles to follow, but not really where the story went. My son cared a lot more about his collection of troopers than Obi-Wan or Anakin.
Star Wars may have implied a bigger galaxy, but we didn’t really get to see much of it. We spend most of our time on Tatooine and skulking about the Death Star. So the “stage” in Empire — the bits of it we actually see — is much bigger. For me, that really heightened the epic feel. Star Wars tells us that the galaxy is vast and the struggle is epic; Empire shows us.