In honor of the 30th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back I thought I’d post some thoughts on the movie. Since this is almost certainly my favorite movie of all time, I could go on for infinite pages about every single shot and how each one affected me personally. I won’t go quite as far as that, though nearly every frame of this movie has been hanging in the main gallery of the art museum of my mind since I was eight years old. The cold comfort of the Hoth base, learning the odds of dying in various ways, the thunderous reveal of Darth Vader and the massive Imperial Fleet, the epic scale of the Hoth battle, meeting Yoda, Han Solo and Princess Leia’s asteroid field inspired romance, Yoda schooling Luke in the ways of the force, the calm of Cloud City replaced by the excitement and terror of the heroes desperate escape, the final clash of the lightsabers in the hellish carbon freezing chamber, and, through it all, one of the most powerful and romantic music scores ever written—these are the things I will try my best to avoid gushing over.
There’s nothing new to write about this movie that hasn’t already been written. Everyone knows that this was the Star Wars movie that had the least Lucas involvement (though he deserves as much credit for the movie as anyone), everyone talks about how powerful the “I am your father” reveal was in 1980, everyone talks about how the more mature, “dark” tone made for a much more interesting movie, and how traumatic it was that the good guys lost. And look no further then Princess Leia's horrified reaction to the THUD frozen Han Solo makes when he clangs against floor to know that this movie cared about the little details in a way few have before or since. Empire was the first Star Wars that was really Star Wars—it took the simple story from the original movie and transformed it into an epic saga. Everything said about the movie is true, and when kids growing up in the 80s and 90s thought of Star Wars, it was this movie that laid the foundation for what Star Wars was. It’s a shame they show it on TV so much nowadays, and that the prequels and subsequent media inundation have made Star Wars less magical and almost banal. I know the movie so well that I’ll never be able to experience like I used to ever again, and new generations will never experience the way we did. Kids today turn on their Xboxes and have a lightsaber fight without understand the awed silence in which we sat when Luke turned on his saber in the carbon freezing chamber. So much of what was wonderful about Star Wars has been sucked away, for me and for millions, by unceasing overexposure.
Just for today, though, I will try to forget what Star Wars has become and just remember what it was. Oddly enough, Empire was the last of the original Star Wars movies I saw. Therefore it was always somewhat mysterious and epic, even before I watched it. I knew what happened in Star Wars, and I knew what happened in Jedi, so I therefore knew that the events that joined those two very different movies had to be explosive indeed. How did Luke Skywalker go from naïve farmboy to calm and collected Jedi knight? Why was Han Solo frozen? How did Luke meet Yoda? Where did the Emperor come from? Darth Vader was Luke’s father? And who was Lando?
So I never got to experience Empire the way older people experienced it, as a cliffhanger, as a struggle that the heroes largely lose, as the anticipated sequel to the original Star Wars. I knew that everything turned out okay in the end, so I never thought of Empire as “dark.” (And I’ll be honest, I still think the term “dark” in conjunction with any Star Wars movie is a bit much. I think I once heard Empire called the saga’s “dark opus of ever building despair” on a forum once. Whoever said that must have been thinking of the scene where Yoda beats R2-D2 with a stick. I still get chills.) But even with all that baggage, I was still struck by just how different Empire was from the much more tonally similar Star Wars and Jedi.
My reasons for liking it back then were a bit more simplistic than they are today. Luke and Darth Vader finally had a proper fight (something I was expecting, but never got, throughout all of Star Wars), Yoda was a lot more fun to look at than old Obi-Wan, and Han Solo was the coolest man in the universe. Really. Empire Strikes Back Han Solo could walk into any room today, right at this moment, wearing that stupid 80s navy blue jacket, and get every woman there to go home with him. Young boys could only watch him in jealous awe. It might be hard to understand or even remember, but for young 80s kids raised on Spielberg and Lucas, Harrison Ford was the absolute last word on movie stars. What resonates with me now, and why, despite all that the Star Wars saga has endured in the last decade or so, people still love Empire, is the story. The simplistic values of the original film might work when you’re a kid, but when you get older you realize life doesn’t quite work like that. Empire takes the traditional hero’s journey story of the first film and asks “what now?” So you’ve proven yourself and saved the galaxy. So what? To quote Princess Leia, despite everything that happened in Star Wars “The Empire is still out there!” Nothing our heroes accomplished mattered much in the end. Empire is a story about those times when dreams don’t come true, when we fail to rescue the princess, when no matter how hard we try nothing seems to go right. Yoda taught Luke the old Hollywood standby “Believe in yourself and you can achieve anything!” and so Luke, full of confidence, goes to Vader and gets his ass handed to him. We didn’t realize it as kids of course, but The Empire Strikes Back essentially makes a mockery of the value system in the first film, the value system spat at us, cynically, by so many movies. “Believe in yourself” “Good wins out in the end” "That evil guy you're after isn't a corrupted cyborg version of your father" “Love conquers all” “The hero gets the girl” (Remember, pre-Return of the Jedi, Han Solo was stealing Luke’s girl right from under his nose) Empire says “nope” to all of these old Hollywood themes. (And despite my oft maligning it, Jedi, when it’s good, takes this thematic evolution a step further, but more on that another time)
This is the opposite of the hero’s journey. The story where all your training and preparation amount to nothing. The story that forces you to face up to the fact that no matter how good you are and how hard you try, there are going to be times when you’re left without a hand dangling from the bottom of Cloud City. Empire shows that when everything else has left you, faced with terrible options, you still have the chance to be brave and good. What makes a hero in Empire is not traditional heroics, but the simple choice to do good. Leia’s choice to go back for Luke, Lando’s choice to help save Leia and Chewie, and of course, Han Solo’s choice to face the certain death of carbon freezing with a brave face and an immortal line. Luke’s sacrifice in choosing to jump to his death at the end of Empire is far braver than anything he accomplished in Star Wars. Life is more complicated, so much more complicated, than staring out at the setting suns wishing for your dreams to come true until, one day, they do. A lot of times, dreams don’t come true, or when they do they prove to be nothing like we imagined. That’s why the ending to the movie is still so beautiful and powerful, because in suffering the characters have found a goodness that transcends fate: compassion and friendship and loyalty—these are the things that save our heroes in the end, not their skill, not their courage, not their hard work. As Luke and Leia stare out at the impossible vastness of space as the Millennium Falcon turns into a spec in the distance and the powerful Han and Leia love them builds to a crescendo, we’re left not sad but hopeful, knowing that these characters have stared the devil in the face, as it were, and they’re still standing arm in arm. The enduring theme of The Empire Strikes Back, then, is a very brave one for such a mainstream movie. Genuine goodness, far from being rewarded, is often punished with increased suffering and hardship; it is worth pursuing not because it’s beneficial, but because it’s right. Beyond all the nostalgia and special effects, it’s this idea that makes Empire Strikes Back legendary. I don’t expect there will be another movie quite like Empire in our lifetimes. Sure, “better” movies might come along, but with the amount of media out there today there will never be a movie that defines fantasy for an entire generation again. There will never be another sequel that lives up and surpasses its predecessor with quite the same energy. Empire wasn’t “Star Wars 2”, it was Star Wars times 1000. Perhaps, many years from now, when the Star Wars marketing blitz finally dies down, these movies will be discovered again and seen the way they were to our generation, the way the Wizard of Oz continues to speak to people generation after generation. Maybe, when I write my Psycho-Cosmo-Blog on the 60th anniversary of Empire, such a magical film will no longer be held prisoner by merchandising gluttony: Lightsabers will be a rarity, Darth Vader will be scary, the battle of Hoth will be epic, Yoda will be wise, and Han Solo will, once again, be the coolest man in the universe.
Finally, redemption for all the video gaming misfortunes I’d suffered over the years. I pretended that I wanted a new computer for the educational elements, because I could get online and interact with friends, or so my family could finally get ahead of the technological curve. Those were all valid concerns, but they weren’t even close to the real reason. The mid 90s was the absolute zenith of PC gaming, and I wanted to be able to play games so advanced they put even the upcoming Nintendo 64 to shame. More than anything in the world I longed to get rid of our archaic 286 computer and finally use a computer that could run games that were the envy of my friends.
I had been buying PC games for several years even though my computer had no hope of running them. They were so much more interesting and complex then Nintendo and Sega games (at that time), with big giant boxes and long instruction manuals that talked about the game world as much as how to play the game. Some even included maps and charts and other goodies that made things even more fun. But I had no way of playing them.
My family was never very tech savvy, and they refused to understand the need for a computer that could actually connect to the internet and interact with the modern world. It wasn’t until 1996 when I finally sensed my wisdom was getting though, and so by the time Christmas rolled around I was fully expecting a new computer. If I hadn’t gotten a new computer, I would have probably just taken up a sport or started dating or something—it’s incredibly difficult to be a successful nerd without a good computer. Fortunately we’ll never have know what my life would have been like had I gone down that road. For on Christmas of 1996 I became the proud owner of a new Packard Bell 200 MHZ Pentium computer. Pentium, people. That’s like a million times better than a 486. The first game I installed was Tie Fighter, part of a “Star Wars Collection” I got that included six Star Wars games of massively varying quality, from the ludicrously awesome Tie Fighter to the abysmal Rebel Assault. Star Wars was big again at that time—the Special Editions were about to come out, and the games and novels had been coming out in force for a few years. Tie Fighter gets my vote for being the best Star Wars related product ever, movies included. Nothing for me quite captures the spirit of what those movies were all about than Tie Fighter. Before the prequels Star Wars was a crazy gritty world of heroes and scoundrels, but the best thing about Tie Fighter was that you were just an average Joe imperial pilot trying to make his way in the Empire. In addition to being a great game Tie Fighter was the quintessential pre-prequel Star Wars experience.
I had also had King’s Quest VI laying around the house for a long time, an even older game that I nevertheless experienced for the first time on Christmas of 1996. Adventure games are long dead, despite occasional articles about a “renaissance” that never quite materializes, but back in the mid 90s they were still a viable genre, and some of the best ever, like Gabriel Knight II and Grim Fandango were just coming out. King’s Quest VI was from 1992, but it felt as fresh then as any new game, and indeed it remains one of the best Sierra adventure games ever made (good future topic: Sierra adventure games.) The backgrounds are beautiful, the characters are rich, and the game has so many memorable moments, from the very first moment you wake up on the beach to the climactic journey through the Land of the Dead. The production values and ambition were greater than anything I’d ever seen on Nintendo and Sega, and the game was from 1992!
Of course, the real highlight of that Christmas was a game I’d been fantasizing about for months. I rushed out with my Christmas money to buy it the second Wal-Mart opened up, and I don’t think a year has gone by where I didn’t play it at least once ever since: Daggerfall. Daggerfall is too huge a phenomenon for me to skim over here—it requires its own discussion. Suffice to say it was the most expansive, in depth, and atmospheric RPG I had ever played, and it really opened my eyes to what a computer game could be. I had infinitely more fun reading the Daggerfall instruction manual than I ever had with the Sega 32X. There were so many other great games, and I got to play them all in one big burst during the first few months of 1997—Warcraft, Warcraft II, Diablo, Phantasmagoria (not great so much as memorable), Under A Killing Moon, the Pandora Directive, Ultima Online, and about a dozen more. I could spend days talking about any of these games, but I’ll refrain from that for now, since this was supposed to be about my introduction to the computer age. In addition to games there was also the world of AOL. Those years were the golden age of AIM conversations and online shenanigans—programs that could force people offline, internet romances, and personal geocities websites. Just the existence of the internet was a novelty—when I discovered that the cover of one of my favorite novels was online, I printed it out just because I could.
These days a computer is really just for the internet. There are still a few great games, but most of them have moved on to the Xbox 360 or the PS3. There are no more giant boxes filled with 120 page manuals and great junk—today computer games are just console games with inferior controls and difficult installations. But back in 1996 a good computer game was the height of interactive entertainment. That was the last Christmas where I really had that old childlike sense of excitement. How could I not? After fantasizing about playing all those computer games for years, I got them all literally overnight. A Christmas where you get to play King’s Quest VI and Tie Fighter for the first time on the same day is a Christmas indeed.
Sega, Sega, Sega. What happened, Sega? You could have had it all.
In 1992, Sega was poised to rule the video game industry for all time. According to their commercials, they were way cooler than Nintendo, and games like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 backed up the ads. Little did we Sega acolytes know that at the height of her power Sega was already falling victim to that fatal flaw that would lead to her destruction. But it soon became obvious to all but the most die-hard of Sega supporters: Everything Sega made that wasn’t the Genesis sucked, and sucked badly. How naïve I was! I was overjoyed when I received the Sega Game Gear for Christmas in 1992. Some of my friends already had one, and there was no doubt it blew the Game Boy away in every conceivable area—it was bigger, it was black (which meant it was cool), it had more buttons, you could turn it into a portable TV by purchasing a simple add-on, and it was in color. Color, people. That was huge. While my Nintendo-loving friends were forced to huddle around their green-hued Game Boy, I was able to play 8-bit Game Gear games in full and glorious color.
Yet it was somehow wrong. There were some fun games for Game Gear (the Sonic games chief among them) and it initially seemed like a sound investment, but I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that for all its superiority the Game Gear was missing something. As each new game ended up being worse than the last, it slowly dawned on me that technical superiority doesn’t mean a damn if you can produce the games to back it up. While Nintendo was releasing gems like Link’s Awakening for Game Boy, Game Gear owners had to deal with gaming miscarriages like Quest for the Shaven Yak starring Ren and Stimpy and Chakan: The Forever Man, along with a host of mediocre ports of much better Sega Genesis games. I bought a new game here and there, but my enjoyment of Game Gear didn’t last much beyond that Christmas.
But I still loved my Genesis, and my faith in Sega was not shaken. That would take an even more disastrous financial blunder, a decision so insulting, so terrible, and so misguided that it remains hated and despised by even those who once called themselves loyal Sega aficionados: The dreaded Sega CD/32X double whammy that sent the company into a (deserved) free-fall from which it never really recovered.
In an effort to prolong the Genesis' life against the technically superior (yes, I can admit that now) Super Nintendo, Sega released two add-ons designed to make the Genesis more powerful. The first, the Sega CD, hooked up to the bottom of the Genesis and let Sega fans play "CD quality" games, which meant crappy interactive movies with grainy, terrible video and non-existent gameplay. Naturally, I desperately wanted one.
The $300 Sega CD was too expensive for me, but so pure was my loyalty to Sega that when the 32X was announced at the relatively cheap price of 150 dollars, I begged my parents for a chance to “upgrade” my Sega Genesis to a 32-bit powerhouse. Let’s see those Nintendo kids talk bad about Sega now, right? It even had the first ever Star Wars game for a Sega console: Star Wars Arcade, which promised to accurately recreate the space battles from the movies in 32-bit detail. How could I lose? By getting a 32X, that’s how. Unlike the CD, which hooked up to the bottom of the Genesis in a somewhat aesthetically pleasing manner, the 32X plugged into the cartridge slot and sat atop the Genesis like some mushroom shaped tumor. It even came with a set of metal clamps to surgically hold open the Sega Genesis slot so it could be forced inside--that's incredibly disturbing, and I wish I was making it up.
Not only was it ugly and difficult to get attached to the Genesis, but the new Star Wars game was awful. Sure, I had a lot of fun playing it for a few days around Christmas—the sound was way better than what the Genesis could normally do (though still nowhere near as good as the SNES, which, incidentally, cost less than the 32X!) and the graphics were impressive (from time to time), but that was about it. That was my big “Star Wars” Christmas, and I got plenty of enjoyable Star Wars stuff, including the movies on VHS, but the 32X will always cast a dark shadow over the whole day. 200 dollars of my parents’ money was lost forever on a crappy Star Wars game that got old after about a week. They were so mad at me that they refused to buy me another video game system from that day on. I never got another game for the 32X, and it was quickly tossed aside in favor of the only good Sega add-on—The Sega Channel, which let you play 30 full games a month for less than the price of a Netflix subscription. It was brilliant, ahead of its time, and probably saved me hundreds of dollars on game purchases. But it was too little, too late, and Sega could never recover from the disaster that was the 32X. Better minds than mine have already filled the internet with diatribe after diatribe on the system’s failings, so I don’t need to go into detail about what an unforgivable hunk of junk it was. Suffice to say that it was an unforgivable hunk of junk.
So why is such a miserable piece of electronic afterbirth on my list of my favorite Christmas presents? As a warning, a cautionary tale to all those youngsters out there who, whether from brand loyalty or easy susceptibility to in your face advertising, might be thinking of buying a suspicious product. Even companies you trust, even companies who have provided you with hours of quality entertainment, can sell you down the river without a second’s hesitation. It’s also a lesson on the capriciousness of fate. One minute your company can be on top of the world with Sonic the Hedgehog, the next minute you’ve got a warehouse full of unsold Star Wars games; Star Wars games where a full half of the game’s expansive eight levels consist of flying around in empty space trying to shoot a certain number of TIE Fighters. It would have been boring if it wasn’t so infuriating. I learned a valuable lesson that Christmas: Sometimes things you believe in suck. It’s a lesson that only grows more relevant as time goes by.
This article, by the former Moriarty of aintitcool.com fame, is a nice companion to what I wrote yesterday on Episode I. Much less emotional, but with a lot of the same basic points. It's a good look at what prequels and reboots have done to Hollywood. Check it out.
Ten years ago today Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace was released after sixteen years of pent up expectations. That’s right. For ten years now we’ve known about Jar-Jar Binks, Jake Lloyd’s acting, and midichlorians. It boggles the mind.
Believe it or not, nerds were once generally happy, optimistic people who enjoyed nothing more than getting together with friends and talking about video games or Star Wars. Ten years after TPM, geekdom is still reeling from the shock. Nowadays, nerds are bitter, resentful individuals, angry at the world and its broken promises.
For the record, I was never one of those radicals who detested the prequels. I still think Episode III is quite good (parts of it, anyway), and when each of the new movies came out, I was one of those strange people who sat there defending the obvious problems and missteps. It’s probably taken about ten years to get a little perspective. When I look back now, and see the effect the prequels have had on my perception of Star Wars as a whole, it’s hard not to be a little upset.
There’s a whole generation growing up now that doesn’t understand how cool Star Wars was before the prequels, and that’s a shame. Words will never do justice to the feeling of painting a painstakingly glued model of the Millennium Falcon or playing the Imperial March on a badly recorded cassette tape. Everyone has their own memories of Star Wars, and it’s impossible to say how much of the prequel bashing is built on nostalgia. But overexposure is never a good thing, and what used to be three fantastic movies is now a bloated franchise. How can a lightsaber duel be exciting when you can flip on Cartoon Network and watch fifty Jedi fighting ten times a week?
To borrow an old phrase, “The Jedi are extinct. Their fire has gone out in the universe.” (By the way, in, say, 1996 to quote Star Wars was kinda cool even among non-nerds. Try quoting it today and you’re bound to get some eye rolls.)
If nothing else, though, Phantom Menace gave us those wonderful first few months of 1999, when everything Star Wars was cool again. I don’t plan on being alive for the Second Coming (though, Odin willing, I might yet live to see Ragnarok) so the weeks and months leading up May 19, 1999 might just be the biggest moment of nationwide excitement I’ll ever encounter. Star Wars was everywhere. On the news, on the radio, and especially at my late 90s hang out of choice, Taco Bell.
I was a junior in high school then, and practically every day after school my friends and I would drive off to Taco Bell to sample the delicacies on their menu. Nothing was off limits. The radio blared Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, and Britney Spears without distinction, and during commercials the announcers would even mention how excited they were for Episode I. I always made sure to purchase some of the fine Star Wars collectibles available at Taco Bell. Even outside the sacred walls of the Bell, you couldn't take a step without running into something Star Wars related. If the marketing blitz was any indication of quality, then we were in for a treat indeed.
We bought our tickets for the midnight show a week in advance, and then bought tickets for a few shows after that, just to make sure we got to see it as many times as possible. I don’t think I could sleep for at least two days leading up to the big event—every free moment was spent watching the original movies, talking about the original movies, or watching the trailers for the new movie. After waiting my whole life, the long awaited prequels were finally here, and I was almost choking on my own excitement by the time we got to go to the theater.
Even in my small town, the line was already wrapped around the building two hours before midnight, with people dressed in a number of Star Wars costumes. The quality ran the gamut from movie replica to barely recognizable. My friends and I didn’t go that far, but we brought piles of snack food to enjoy while in line.
At one point a panicked girl came up to me asking if I’d seen her boyfriend. “He’s dressed like Boba Fett!” she said. It took some searching, but I managed to comb the crowd and find a man in a high quality Boba Fett costume. When I brought him back to the fretting woman, she looked at him, then back at me. Then she frowned. “That’s not my boyfriend!” she yelled. I’m not sure if she ever found her boyfriend. Perhaps she just went home with the other Boba Fett guy. I’ve got to believe that one crazy Star Wars fan dressed as Boba Fett would have a lot in common with any other.
Finally, at around 11:30, they let us into the theater. The lights went down and the trailers began (I think they were for Disney’s Tarzan and Titan A.E.). At long last, at around 12:15, the familiar Star Wars logo appeared onscreen, the fanfare began, and the audience burst into applause.
Then we watched the movie. We all know what that was like. After that much hype, anything would have been disappointing, but the movie we ended up getting, looking back on it ten years later, was more disappointing than most.
But it’s the build up I’ll remember. We all really believed a movie could be that good. That Episode I would be every bit as good as the original movies, that it would make all of us feel the way those did, that it would be just as big a part of our lives. With the other prequels, we already knew that the prospects were grim. For those few great months in 1999, on the other hand, Star Wars was really on its way back. Lightsabers were going to crackle onscreen again! We were going to see Obi-Wan Kenobi and space battles and maybe even the Clone Wars!
It’s hard to say what the future will hold, but I’d place a safe bet that never again will so many people be so genuinely excited for something. It was the last time that many people loved Star Wars that much, and God did we love it.
So the movie didn’t live up to the hype. In a weird way, the hype lived up to the hype. Whenever I happen to catch Phantom Menace on Spike TV these days (or, in incredibly rare instances, put on the DVD) I don’t always see the bad acting, empty characters, overblown use of CGI and overall un-Star Wars like tone.
Sometimes I see the 2am trips to Taco Bell to get tacos and a stack of Star Wars pogs, Star Wars Pepsi cans, and the line of excited fans wrapped around the theater. I hear the long ago arguments with great friends over whether Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back is the better movie and remember how we all crowded around the N64 to play Shadows of the Empire or Rouge Squadron. I see the faces of friends I haven’t seen in ten years, lit up with the excitement of the moment, ready to kick off our last summer of high school and loving every second of it.
Sometimes, that’s good enough.
Doesn’t make up for Jake Lloyd’s acting though. Or Jar-Jar.
In honor of the 30th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back I thought I’d post some thoughts on the movie. Since this is almost certainly my favorite movie of all time, I could go on for infinite pages about every single shot and how each one affected me personally. I won’t go quite as far as that, though nearly every frame of this movie has been hanging in the main gallery of the art museum of my mind since I was eight years old. The cold comfort of the Hoth base, learning the odds of dying in various ways, the thunderous reveal of Darth Vader and the massive Imperial Fleet, the epic scale of the Hoth battle, meeting Yoda, Han Solo and Princess Leia’s asteroid field inspired romance, Yoda schooling Luke in the ways of the force, the calm of Cloud City replaced by the excitement and terror of the heroes desperate escape, the final clash of the lightsabers in the hellish carbon freezing chamber, and, through it all, one of the most powerful and romantic music scores ever written—these are the things I will try my best to avoid gushing over.
It’s a shame they show it on TV so much nowadays, and that the prequels and subsequent media inundation have made Star Wars less magical and almost banal. I know the movie so well that I’ll never be able to experience like I used to ever again, and new generations will never experience the way we did. Kids today turn on their Xboxes and have a lightsaber fight without understand the awed silence in which we sat when Luke turned on his saber in the carbon freezing chamber. So much of what was wonderful about Star Wars has been sucked away, for me and for millions, by unceasing overexposure. 
What resonates with me now, and why, despite all that the Star Wars saga has endured in the last decade or so, people still love Empire, is the story. The simplistic values of the original film might work when you’re a kid, but when you get older you realize life doesn’t quite work like that. Empire takes the traditional hero’s journey story of the first film and asks “what now?” So you’ve proven yourself and saved the galaxy. So what? To quote Princess Leia, despite everything that happened in Star Wars “The Empire is still out there!” Nothing our heroes accomplished mattered much in the end. Empire is a story about those times when dreams don’t come true, when we fail to rescue the princess, when no matter how hard we try nothing seems to go right. Yoda taught Luke the old Hollywood standby “Believe in yourself and you can achieve anything!” and so Luke, full of confidence, goes to Vader and gets his ass handed to him. 
We didn’t realize it as kids of course, but The Empire Strikes Back essentially makes a mockery of the value system in the first film, the value system spat at us, cynically, by so many movies. “Believe in yourself” “Good wins out in the end” "That evil guy you're after isn't a corrupted cyborg version of your father" “Love conquers all” “The hero gets the girl” (Remember, pre-Return of the Jedi, Han Solo was stealing Luke’s girl right from under his nose) Empire says “nope” to all of these old Hollywood themes. (And despite my oft maligning it, Jedi, when it’s good, takes this thematic evolution a step further, but more on that another time)
Life is more complicated, so much more complicated, than staring out at the setting suns wishing for your dreams to come true until, one day, they do. A lot of times, dreams don’t come true, or when they do they prove to be nothing like we imagined. That’s why the ending to the movie is still so beautiful and powerful, because in suffering the characters have found a goodness that transcends fate: compassion and friendship and loyalty—these are the things that save our heroes in the end, not their skill, not their courage, not their hard work. As Luke and Leia stare out at the impossible vastness of space as the Millennium Falcon turns into a spec in the distance and the powerful Han and Leia love them builds to a crescendo, we’re left not sad but hopeful, knowing that these characters have stared the devil in the face, as it were, and they’re still standing arm in arm. 
The enduring theme of The Empire Strikes Back, then, is a very brave one for such a mainstream movie. Genuine goodness, far from being rewarded, is often punished with increased suffering and hardship; it is worth pursuing not because it’s beneficial, but because it’s right. Beyond all the nostalgia and special effects, it’s this idea that makes Empire Strikes Back legendary. 
I don’t expect there will be another movie quite like Empire in our lifetimes. Sure, “better” movies might come along, but with the amount of media out there today there will never be a movie that defines fantasy for an entire generation again. There will never be another sequel that lives up and surpasses its predecessor with quite the same energy. Empire wasn’t “Star Wars 2”, it was Star Wars times 1000. Perhaps, many years from now, when the Star Wars marketing blitz finally dies down, these movies will be discovered again and seen the way they were to our generation, the way the Wizard of Oz continues to speak to people generation after generation. Maybe, when I write my Psycho-Cosmo-Blog on the 60th anniversary of Empire, such a magical film will no longer be held prisoner by merchandising gluttony: Lightsabers will be a rarity, Darth Vader will be scary, the battle of Hoth will be epic, Yoda will be wise, and Han Solo will, once again, be the coolest man in the universe. 
