The Empire Strikes Back is not as much fun as the original Star Wars: A New Hope. Let’s just admit it and face the facts. The original Star Wars—back before it was called A New Hope and was simply Star Wars—was one of the most rollicking good times that had been experienced in movie theaters for a long time. Released in 1977, the original entry in the saga was notably a breath of fresh air from the pervasively dark, cynical, paranoid and less than rollicking good time offered by the epic tale of Luke, Leia, Han and the gang. By contrast, its immediate sequel and the first of many to come, is something of a downer. Not to suggest it belongs alongside such definitive 1970’s films as Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or The Deer Hunter in terms of having a really downbeat ending, but the ending of The Empire Strikes Back has a lot to do with why it never equaled its precursor in popularity despite being almost universally regarded as a superior example of filmmaking.
Good luck finding a critic who knows what they are talking about who will go on record as saying A New Hope is a superior example of cinematic craftsmanship. It just can’t be done. In every single way imaginable, The Empire Strikes Back is an improvement over the original in terms of filmmaking. The screenplay is more structurally solid, the direction is impeccable, the special effects obviously represent a leap forward and even the acting—never regarded as the highest achievement in the Star Wars films—is overall superior, though one does miss the presence of Alec Guinness.
So why, then, didn’t The Empire Strikes Back improve upon the box office receipts of its lesser predecessor? For exactly the same reason that The Godfather, Part II—which is also generally regarded as a better example of filmmaking than the original—did not come anywhere close to breaking the box office records set by its predecessor. Both The Godfather, Part II and The Empire Strikes Back suffer from the same problem: quality counts for among mainstream filmgoers than entertainment. And there is simply no getting around it: The Godfather and A New Hope are unquestionably and irrefutably more satisfying as pure moviegoing experiences. Take away the critical thought and the engagement of the film as a film and plant one-hundred percent of your focus on the story taking place before your eyes and just as it almost impossible to suggest that the first movies in both these series is better filmmaking overall than the second, so it is almost impossible to suggest the second film is a more entertaining ride.
And the reason that both sequels fail in that regard is also what draws them together. The Godfather is the glorious story of Michael Corleone’s rise to power. The sequel is his downfall. Everything in the original Star Wars goes right for the rebels and climaxes with the victorious explosion of the dread Death Star, while almost everything goes wrong for the rebels in The Empire Strikes Back. That’s why it’s titled that. The empire does strike back and with a vengeance. By the time the film ends, Luke has literally lost a hand and gained a psychopath as a father. The most exciting character in the film, meanwhile, has literally been frozen into a lifeless statue. The empire wins even if Luke and Leia managed to get away. The ragtag insurrections have been hit and hit hard.
There is no celebratory awarding of medals. In fact—and here is where the story diverges between The Godfather and Star Wars—there is no ending at all in The Empire Strikes Back. Instead of a real ending what the audience gets is the story stopping. It just stops. And it stops with major questions unanswered and incredibly unexpected new questions posed.
Ultimately, the fact of The Empire Strikes Back is that it has become an iconic and definitive lesson in how to make a sequel that is more satisfying in every imaginable way cinematically speaking that somehow manages to be unsatisfying as pure entertainment. Looking back, it really is quite a remarkable achievement.
