Back in 1977, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill had signed for a three-movie deal, but Ford had refused. "Empire" showed that not everything in life always ends well or the way we would hope.įreezing Han in carbonite was, at least in part, a result of the uncertainty that Harrison Ford would return for a third movie. (Image credit: Lucasfilm)Īnd of course, it deals with betrayal and the potential loss of someone that we deeply care for. Luke's "test" on Dagobah was a clever and creative message to the trainee Jedi that he still had a lot to learn. We learned about how tempting it could be to the young and inexperienced and we learnt about how it thrived on fear, anger and suffering. We learnt much more about the dark side of the Force and its seductive attraction. The darkness of "Empire" was much deeper than a few frames of a dismembered alien arm, or the charred corpses of Luke's adoptive mother and father. But 'Empire' had a weight and a heft that grew with me as I grew." I mean, 'Star Wars' couldn't be more jolly, it would tip over into parody. "But later in my early teens I did become aware at what a gamble the sequel had been. "I wasn't really aware of the dark nature the first time I saw 'Empire.' I was so young that the cinema was a kind of spooky, dark experience for me anyway," Jamie Benning, producer of the documentaries " Star Wars Begins (opens in new tab)" and " Building Empire (opens in new tab)" told. We'd heard of Emperor Palpatine in "Star Wars," but this was the very first time we had actually seen him. Despite the flowery finale in "Star Wars," it actually had a number of pretty damn dark moments of its own: Darth Vader crushes the neck of a Rebel Alliance officer on the Tantive IV, Owen and Beru Lars are murdered and Ponda Baba loses an arm in the Mos Eisley cantina, to name just a few. "Empire" is considered the darkest of all the "Star Wars" movies and of that, there is no doubt, but this isn't the only reason it had such an effect on sci-fi and pop-culture. In 1979, Ridley Scott's " Alien" was unleashed and it successfully showed that sci-fi could go in many different directions, including somewhere dark. Consequently, he began to consider new directions in which to take the story, including the plot twist of Darth Vader being Luke's father.Īt about the same time that the script for "Empire" was being developed, another sci-fi movie was making waves, but this one was not for all the family. Lucas wrote the next draft himself but was unhappy with the result. Sadly, however, she died of cancer shortly after submitting it to Lucas, and they never had a chance to develop it together. (Image credit: Lucasfilm)Īll sorts of new ideas were considered for the second movie, and a first draft was written by Leigh Brackett. The scene where Han Solo is frozen is incredibly emotional, not just for Leia, but for poor Chewbacca too. Middle Eastern-style settings, warriors and princesses, laser swords and fairytale happy endings were easy plot elements to reproduce for low-budget B-movies. It was soon apparent that the box office numbers and licensing opportunities meant that a sequel was inevitable.įor a few years, following the runaway success of "Star Wars," there were numerous attempts to jump on the bandwagon. Lucas always had more of a story to tell, but he wasn't sure if "Star Wars" would be successful. Even fewer folk probably knew that George Lucas had imagined a six-movie saga while he was writing the script, which eventually grew to a nine-movie saga. However, unless you were reading trade press titles, like The Hollywood Reporter or Variety, you probably wouldn't have heard that principal photography of "Empire" started early in 1979. in Marvel's Star Wars Weekly (opens in new tab) comic - combined with an active imagination and maybe even a few of the early Kenner toys (opens in new tab) - it was easy to assume that the struggle against the Empire was going to continue for some time to come. That said, if you were following the further adventures of Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie et al.
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