The Magic of Movies - Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Part Three

Hamill’s acting is weak in general, but I think he holds up pretty well as a professional pilot just doing his job. There’s a confidence to what he’s doing and smoothness to the way he gives orders. The Battle of Hoth isn’t as well-plotted as the climax to A New Hope – the mission is simply to survive, which isn’t as interesting as “shoot this hole” – but there’s still a logic and clarity to it, as the fighters discover their blasters can’t get past the armour of the walkers, and Luke’s solution is clever. And I’m impressed that the whole Battle of Hoth is over and gone in ten minutes of screentime – criminally inefficient use of budget but brilliantly efficient storytelling..

(I had a toy of the Hoth battle, with a walker slumped over in the snow)

A little scene shows Threepio saying goodbye to Artoo (including the iconic line from Han: “This one goes here, that one goes there!”); these moments of humanity (or, uh, droidanity) really keep us emotionally invested. I love that Threepio is still fussy and prissy in his expressions of fear for Artoo; you just know that Artoo is blowing him off casually. The battle on Hoth keeps playing out; we actually see the bipedal Imperial walkers here, something I always forget because they’re explored so much more thoroughly in Return of the Jedi. 

It’s interesting that the Hoth sequence feels quite triumphant despite being a terrible loss for both Luke – who gets shot down – and the Rebellion, as they fail to defend the base and have to evacuate. I think this comes from the number of cool tricks Luke pulls off; ruining the walker, blowing up another one after being shot down (somehow blowing up the head despite his grenade being nowhere near there). There’s also the fact that the one humanized Imperial attacking gets killed.

At the same time, Han, Leia, and the rest flee together. One of the great things about the Hoth sequence is how we have multiple threads to follow as the things each character does can come back on each other. There’s some great comedy thrown in here with Threepio, all of it very cinematic; there’s a shot where he’s running towards Han and Leia, who run the other way, forcing him to awkwardly turn around, and he even gets a shot looking to the camera and muttering “Typical!”, before being pulled offscreen by Han like he’s being pulled off-stage by a giant hook (“Come on!”).

One of the things that keeps Star Wars feeling alive all these years later are all the little details; Han trying to turn his ship on, seeing it fail, and hitting it into submission like the Fonz is a great example (you’d believe this was an actual on-set problem Harrison Ford dealt with). The Millenium Falcon flies off just in time and Luke watches it go before leaving himself. I love the detail that Luke’s ship translates Artoos beeps and boops. Team Falcon then takes our attention; the movie cranks up the tension by taking away the lightspeed and the comedy by dropping tools and Han’s head.

Artoo makes a good pairing with Luke, being the pragmatist (or, if you prefer, coward) to Luke’s curious hero. Michael Moorcock remarked that a pulp story needs someone to team up with the hero with more material interests to balance out the hero’s abstract and dangerous heroism and put it into sharp relief. This especially works on Dagobah, which couldn’t be more outside Artoo’s comfort zone. With all the fog and liquid, Dagobah must be the most Jim Henson of all the Muppety stuff in these movies. Artoo swimming around with his periscope up is definitely something you’d get in one of Henson’s more serious works.

There’s something about playing off a puppet that improves an actor’s performance in ways I don’t understand; maybe because it makes acting even more of an act of play that any child could understand. There’s that famous anecdote where any Muppeteer very quickly has to get used to the fact that people automatically see a person instead of a puppet. I imagine there’s something like this going on for Artoo; I do love how offended he sounds after he spits out the swamp water.

Back with Vader, we get our first hint at what he really is when Admiral Piett comes to inform him the Falcon has escaped into an asteroid field; this is one of the great exposition scenes, actually, because it slides in the exposition under a really cool image that hints at where the story is going next. It’s interesting that it somehow humanizes Vader at the same time as making him more mythic; disability advocates report extreme frustration with the way disability can be villainized, something that absolutely comes up with Vader; ultimately, I think the movies come down on humanizing him, though for the full effect you have to watch the movies that suck.

The cavern sequence is fun, even if it does ultimately feel insignificant in the grand scheme of the plot; the most interesting part of it is that Han drops the line that he needs Threepio to talk to the Falcon. I’m amused by how pragmatic and offhand the line is; when his back is against the wall, Han is purely focused on the task at hand (that, and showing that Han and Leia are secretly hot for each other). The first couple of minutes with Luke on Dagobah, cleaning up Artoo and reflecting on how weird this is, also feel extraneous; I’m kind of shocked by how many ‘pointless’ or at least little scenes there are in these movies. It’s not that they’re bad, but they are distinctly lacking in that epic tone, or would be if they weren’t in extraordinary settings.

It’s very funny considering the sheer number of ‘epic’ works we see these days, where every line is workshopped, conveying a Big Idea, and delivered with intense conviction. As a random example, I watched the first episode or two of Sweet Tooth over my mother’s shoulders, and that has exactly that portentous feeling over everything. Star Wars has very great variation in feelings and importance that makes the epic parts stand out better.

For one thing, this is where we meet Yoda, and initially we think he’s an amusingly annoying little freak. This is another case where Hamill’s acting improves enormously because he’s playing off a puppet; his exasperation and irritation make a good comic foil to Yoda’s wackiness. This is also an early case of something that worked fantastically in this context being destroyed by a franchise; Yoda’s speech patterns are lifted from old samurai films, yes, but they’re also something that makes him disarming, so that the fact that he’s actually wise will stand out. When he talks like this in the prequels, it’s just annoying and slows the dialogue down.

Funniest moment in the scene: Yoda’s anguished “No!” when Luke takes his tool back. Though him beating the crap out of Artoo comes close.