Today, nearly fifty years after its release, Star Wars still feels fresh, exciting and entirely organic. It is a naturally progressing story. Everything in it matters, and every moment leads inexorably and inevitably to the next moment, as it should — building to a tremendous climax and satisfying denouement.

None of those things are true about its immediate sequel, The Empire Strikes Back.

For that reason above all others, I rate Star Wars by far the better film.

I am well aware that a number of fans of the franchise — possibly a majority and seemingly in greater numbers every year — feels Empire is superior, including Black Gate‘s own Neil Baker.

I believe they are wrong.

Let us start by looking at all the things Star Wars has going for it.

It opens with a bang — with perhaps the greatest opening in cinematic history — as a Star Destroyer relentlessly and seemingly endlessly emerges from the ceiling and captures the Rebel ship, along with the imaginations of everyone in the theater.

Having gotten our attention, the story then builds, one piece after another. Each of those pieces leads to the next, and all are critically important to the whole. From Luke’s farm to Mos Eisley to the Death Star to Yavin 4, there’s a direct path connecting the start to the finish.

Every moment counts; not a frame of film is wasted. Especially not in the original 1977 cut, unencumbered by a 1995-era CGI Jabba and wacky digital Jawa hijinks.
Star Wars is, simply put, the perfect movie.

As I have long maintained, it is also a movie followed by eight increasingly disappointing sequels, prequels and sequels. And that includes its immediate successor.

To prove it, let’s turn that same critical eye on The Empire Strikes Back.

Empire is a movie with no real beginning and no real ending. It is almost entirely middle section, and much of that middle is effectively filler.

Now, one can argue that much of that filler is fun and cool. Walking tanks, snow monsters, giant space slugs — sure, they’re fun, at least at the surface level. Beyond that, though, I’d argue they have only two main purposes: to stretch out a rather thin story into a full, two-hour movie, and to check off a series of agenda items made necessary when George Lucas completely changed the overall trilogy’s story, partway in.

What agenda items might those be?

Agenda Item One was to warp the characters and story in ways Lucas didn’t have in mind when he filmed the first movie, so that they could fit the new direction in which he decided to take the franchise.

An example is the reveal that Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker. This was never the plan. It occurred to Lucas only in the aftermath of the first movie’s success. It makes for a shocking “reveal” moment in the theater, and it has become the rock upon which Lucas built his church, going on to shape the plots of at least the next five movies. It wasn’t a terrible idea and it doesn’t completely ruin the film for me.

The problem is, it feels artificially manufactured. We know it was never the plan. It would’ve worked better if it had been set up that way from the start.

A better example is Leia: Lucas has her fall in love with Han, and in the following film it’s revealed she’s Luke’s sister.

Lucas had created a great love triangle among three likeable characters in the first movie. In Empire he abandons the idea and demolishes it before it has scarcely taken root. That done, however, we can’t have Luke be a loser, so (in the third film) he gets the consolation prize: She’s his sister, so she can’t be with him anyway!

“Yes,” Lucas must have thought. “Problem solved! Now everyone will be happy!”

Ugh. No. Not everyone was happy. The action of the first movie was driven in large part by Luke “falling in love” with the hologram of Leia and dropping everything to go and try to rescue her. For some of us, the destruction of this motivation for Luke — not just rendering it moot, but actually making it slightly creepy — was cause for massive disappointment.

Agenda Item Two: Empire needed to provide an in-story explanation for what had happened to Mark Hamill’s face between 1977 and 1980. (In real life it was a car accident that disfigured him). To accomplish this, we get an interminable sequence involving Luke captured by a snow beast and Han searching for him. (And just think — this was all originally supposed to go on even longer, with a whole army of the creatures attacking the Rebel Base! Why? Because it would’ve looked cool! Sigh.)

Nothing that happens on Hoth serves a purpose beyond “how Luke’s face became scarred” and “how this particular group of characters ended up together on the Falcon.” Everything involving Han, Leia, Chewie and the droids from that point until they arrive at Cloud City is only there to give them something to do while Luke and Yoda are running around the swamps of Dagobah.

Yes, there’s the Han-Leia kiss, but that could’ve just as easily happened after they parked the Falcon on a nice little planet and had a lovely picnic. It wouldn’t have been as cool to look at, but that’s the point: Lots of things in Star Wars were cool to look at, but every single one of them also contributed to the developing plot — to getting us where we had to go next.

That brings us to Agenda Item Three: Setting everything up for a third movie that will resolve the story, since The Empire Strikes Back has no ending, along with no real beginning.

This is the agenda item that really matters. The larger plot requires that Leia falls for Han, Luke meets Yoda and gets some (but, critically, not all) of the training he needs, and Vader lures Luke to the Cloud City to try to capture him, so they can fight.

That’s it. That’s all that matters in the movie.

Each of those things could have been handled in a way that was actually relevant and organic to the story being told, and so that the prime motivation was “tell a good and internally consistent story where the events actually matter” rather than just “look superficially cool, stretch for time, and check boxes on George’s list to set up the third movie.”

Finally, there’s the direction. The fact that Irvin Kershner is a far better actors’ director than the more ham-fisted Lucas gives Empire more polish and helps create the illusion — and illusion it is — that it is the better film.

Not only do I disagree — there are days I might go so far as to even argue it’s only third-best of the original three.

For all its well-documented missteps involving Muppets, Ewoks and a new Death Star, a very good case can be made that even Return of the Jedi is a better movie than The Empire Strikes Back. Jedi progresses through a series of plot points that all need addressing; few of them are simply for show, or to fill time. And Jedi at least has an ending — and quite a powerful one, with Luke redeeming Vader and the two of them defeating the emperor. Empire has nothing of this level of power or impact, save that one dubious “I am your father” revelation retcon, inserted at the veritable last minute.

What kills Jedi for me is its handling of Boba Fett, but that’s a controversy for another day.

In sum, I have no issue with anyone saying Empire is their favorite. We are all free to like whatever we want. That’s not my business or anyone else’s.

But don’t come at me with Empire being objectively “the best Star Wars movie.”

As I said, I feel the films mostly declined in quality after the first one. Star Wars truly was a happy accident; the catching of lightning in a bottle. As heretical as this opinion might seem to some, it does place The Empire Strikes Back second in quality, above all the others except the first one — a position I believe it rightfully deserves. It is at most the second-best movie in the Star Wars franchise.

But it is not number one.

That Falcon won’t fly, son.

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Van Allen Plexico is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), a Grand Master of Pulp Literature (2025 class) and a multiple-award-winning author of more than two dozen novels and anthologies, ranging from space opera to Kaiju to crime fiction to superheroes to military SF. Find his works on Amazon and at Plexico.net.