Production: Lucasfilm / 20th Century Fox

Director: Irvin Kershner

Starring: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Frank Oz

Screenwriter: Leigh Brackett, Lawrence Kasdan

Based on a story by George Lucas. Novelization (1980) by Donald F. Glut

124 minutes; Color

A first viewing of this blockbuster sequel to Star Wars (1977) sweeps the viewer along with the color and spectacle of its various space-opera venues: frozen and swampy planets, hide-and-seek among asteroids, and a climax in the sky station of Cloud City. A repeated screening reveals its weakly episodic nature, where heroic freedom fighters struggle repetitively against the Galactic Empire. Luke Skywalker (Hamill) is coached in spiritual control by a green puppet, Yoda, operated by Frank Oz of tv's Muppets, in a sequence more banal than metaphysical. After too much pointless action and not enough character exploration, a genuine mythic (and Freudian) charge is belatedly evoked when evil Darth Vader reveals himself during a duel with good Luke to be his father, and in one or two scenes we are allowed to recognize in Luke a potential for harm, lending the film a much needed moral complexity. Brackett was dying of cancer as she drafted the script (she received a posthumous Hugo for it), which was heavily revised by Kasdan, but nevertheless and despite its faults The Empire Strikes Back retains distant echoes of the florid and witty grandeur of her own space operas. The Star Wars trilogy was completed with Return of the Jedi (1983).

The second of the trilogy that began with Star Wars (1977) and concludes with Return of the Jedi (1983), The Empire Strikes Back is the least interesting of the films. Its $32 million budget and Oscar-winning special effects testify to its technical polish but the characters are never developed beyond the cardboard cut-outs of Star Wars. In the manner of the James Bond films, it falls into the trap of committing itself to the spectacular at the expense of the personal. Even though Kasdan's and Brackett's screenplay spends more of its time on the individual adventures of Hamill, Ford and Fisher, they remain stereotypes.

The film's one success, and pointer to the future, is Prowse's Darth Vader whose dark presence dominates the picture, giving it the weighty center it so desperately needs. Moreover, with the revelation thai Vader is Luke's father, the film edges closer to the mythic, giving the Star Wars legend the beginnings of a sense of complexity beyond the simple- minded serial verities of Good versus Evil, that Richard Marquand would further develop in the masterful Return of the Jedi. It is this aspect, reflecied in the narrative's classic cliff-hanging ending (Ford preserved alive awaiting rescue in the next instalment), that gives what is otherwise merely an efficient sequel a certain resonance.