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

So Vader kills his Captain in cold blood. Interestingly, I hear that Kim Jong Un, current dictator of North Korea, has stopped executing men responsible for technical failures the way his father did specifically because, you know, people learn from mistakes, and killing the best and brightest for one mistake leaves you with the dregs. This is a great way for the movies to convey full character with one action, and is something Andor ran away with.

Han hiding the Falcon on the side of the Cruiser is a great little cinematic move; I’m not sure on whether or not that technically should work, but I’m willing to suspend disbelief for it. It’s the kind of thing that feels like it should work, like Han has found a gap in reality. It goes with him hiding under the floorboards of the ship back in A New Hope. It’s at this point that it occurs to Han to seek out Lando; I love how his response to the question of trusting Lando is a flat ‘no’, which tells you everything in six seconds or less. This also feels like Han being an adult for two minutes.

Luke’s training advances. It’s interesting that Yoda’s lifting of the ship advanced the story without really advancing the plot; it could have been lifted out without changing anything practically, but it renewed and tightened Luke’s motivation to become a Master Jedi, as well as our own emotional connection. Going back to those thoughts on plot and the thought of works being overplotted, this is where I see what they mean; one of the frustrating things about nerddom is how many people are obsessed with mechanical construction of stories over the emotional connection to it. Nerds seem to care more about how a story happens than why it does, when the ‘why’ is the whole reason we love movies like this. Gives a new spin to that Nietzsche quote, “With the right why, one can justify any how.”

Luke is struck by a vision of Han and Leia in trouble – once again, the sophistication to not show the vision of magic, just its effect on Luke – causing him to fall, as well as comically drop Artoo. It occurs to me how much Artoo gets banged around and humiliated in this movie; a strong contrast to him essentially getting superpowers in the prequels because kids love him, and it shows the greater level of craft in these films. This is a really great story moment for Luke; Yoda warns him helping them is possible, but if he goes, “you will destroy all for which they have fought and suffered”.

This is a really good expression of Luke’s story of reason vs faith. If you have a vision of your friends in serious trouble, setting out to rescue them is the rational thing to do, especially in the short-term. Yoda’s observation is that there are consequences and angles he hasn’t considered; a bigger picture outside the scope of what he knows (in this case, that Vader would obviously be chasing them to get to Luke). If you like, faith isn’t so much the belief you know everything as the recognition you don’t know everything, and trusting that your goal is right. And, of course, Yoda doesn’t say “You’re not thinking of the bigger picture” because nobody in history has ever responded well to that statement.

On Cloud City (or, more accurately, above it), Han is having trouble getting permission to land; it’s so funny to me that Chewie has the story of whatever Han did to piss him off, but because it’s Chewie, we effectively get the Noodle Incident treatment; Han’s embarrassed acknowledgement is so funny too. Lando’s introduction is classic cinema; my favourite example of the “faking out that a friend is actually an enemy” gag, if only because of the weird, jerky way Lando moves as he goes into hug Han (and Han’s look of bafflement and relief as he realizes what’s happening). Lando’s belief the Falcon is actually his own ship is also a great character beat (anything that ups the rivalry between two bros).

This also leads us into the weirdest arc in the movies: Threepio wanders from the group, stumbles across someone offscreen, gets shot (to the point of falling apart), and Chewie sets out to rescue him. There’s something so funny to me in two of the least human members of the party – two goofy sidekicks – end up teaming up in a way like this, particularly in its implication that Chewie is more sentimental about Threepio than you’d expect.

Back on Dagobah, Luke is setting off to go rescue Han and Leia, against the advice of Yoda – and, quickly, the advice of Obi-Wan. The cliche is that by this point, Alec Guiness had become completely fed up with Star Wars and was sleepwalking his way through it. I think this might be overstated; I think any issues in the performance come from him filming alone and in front of a blue screen for much of the time (Ian McKellan has said how miserable shooting The Hobbit trilogy was for this reason), but he still seems to be doing his level best. In this, Obi-Wan and Yoda make much of what I said before more explicit, if only because Luke has made this more urgent. It’s a really great moment of cinema, when the lights from Luke’s ship fade in and out as he takes off. 

Over at Cloud City, Leia and Han are worried about Luke. This is really good set design – calling back to both 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as Lucas’s own THX-1138, and setting up both Apple’s designs for its various products and the entire aesthetic that ballooned out of that. It’s good set design because it’s good storytelling, contrasting heavily with the used future aesthetic of the rest of the movie and letting us know Cloud City is more expensive and more controlled than anywhere we’ve been before. Only a rich person can afford to be so minimalistic.