DARK
HOURS, LONG BEFORE DAWN by Bennett Campbell Ferguson
Above:
Luke (Mark Hamill) is trained by Yoda (Frank Oz) in the second “Star Wars”
movie. Photo © Lucasfilm Ltd., 20TH
Century Fox, and Walt Disney Pictures
As shadowy as a Grimm fairy
tale and as pumped-up as a pricey videogame, “The Empire Strikes Back” (which
is the second installment in the original “Star Wars” trilogy) is frantic and
moody enough to exhaust even the most resilient filmgoer. “Right now I feel like I could take on the
whole Empire myself!” a giddy pilot squeals in the film’s first act. In this movie, such flowery innocence rises
only to shrivel under the harsh freeze of tyranny.
“The Empire Strikes Back” commences on the ice-coated
planet of Hoth, where Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the noble Rebel Alliance
have erected a stronghold. In the first
“Star Wars,” Luke sought the Alliance out of hunger for revenge on the sinister
entity known as the Galactic Empire; now, he fights alongside the Rebels
righteously (most memorably in an early battle between soaring “snow speeders”
and the Empire’s lurching robotic tanks).
But something is gnawing at Luke. In a rabid snowstorm, he glimpses the ghost
of his old mentor, Ben Kenobi (Alec Guiness).
Luke already knows how to pull the trigger of a laser gun, but Ben wants
him to take up the mantle of the samurai-like Jedi Knights. “You will learn from Yoda,” Ben declares,
“the Jedi master who instructed me.” And
so Luke forsakes his friends and steers his spaceship far from the cold
confines of Hoth and deep into the forests of swampy Dagobah, where the
aforementioned Yoda (a wizened green puppet voiced and nimbly controlled by
Frank Oz) makes his home.
In a poignantly cranky fashion, Yoda guides Luke through
a string of challenges designed to sharpen his mental and physical
resolve. Just as importantly, he tells
his (rather whiny) pupil of “the dark side”—a powerful force that he says is the
embodiment of anger, fear, and aggression.
“Is the dark side stronger?” Luke asks in a sweat. “No,” Yoda tells him. “But quicker, easier, more seductive.”
That’s
the crux of “The Empire Strikes Back.”
In the first “Star Wars,” all was a cinch for Luke; he was right, the
Empire was wrong, and the destruction of a dastardly super weapon was the key
to his happiness. Yet “Empire” is
morally blurrier, as shown by a dreamlike duel between Luke and an apparition
of his nemesis, Darth Vader (who is voiced with grandiloquent imperiousness by
James Earl Jones). As lightsabers clash,
sparks fly and Vader falls. Yet when
Luke shatters the villain’s skull-like mask, he doesn’t behold some monstrous
visage—he sees his own face. In “Star
Wars,” as in life, goodness lurks, even under façades of evil (and vice versa).
Near the end of the movie, Luke battles the real Vader in
a ballet of violence that rips through a steam-soaked chamber and later to the precipice
of a wind-buffeted catwalk. Yet it is
not desperate leaps and sword swings that fuel this climax, but something that Vader
tells Luke, something that shatters our hero’s delusions of innocence forever,
wrenching apart the notions of good and evil upon which the entire “Star Wars”
saga was so sturdily built. The sheen of
shock may have rubbed off of Vader’s revelation (especially since the movie is
over thirty years old), but its raw power remains.
Despite such grim doings, “The Empire Strikes Back” is
grand entertainment, thanks especially to the manic (and even sexy) adventures
of Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), who are fleeing
the Empire aboard the famous disc-shaped spaceship Millennium Falcon. And in
the end, the movie’s friendships counterpoint its melancholy aura, especially
in the final scene, when Luke and Leia stare out at the galaxy from an airlock.
By the time that moment arrives, our heroes have lost much. Yet there is only one phrase etched on Luke’s calm, determined face as he looks toward the future and his inevitable final fight with Darth Vader and the Empire: bring it on.
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