FIVE GREAT MINUTES

That’ll Do Nicely

I. TONSILS & ROY ROGERS

When I was five, my sister had her tonsils out. Mom stayed overnight at the hospital with her, which left Dad to figure out what we were going to do with our evening together.

We found ourselves at dinner at the Roy Rogers on Reisterstown Road - a treat for me, an easy solve for Dad (no shade - as a father to a ten year old myself, I know that Job One is filling the hours) - when Dad glanced across the street to the twin cinema at the Plaza with a “… Huh,” and asked if, after dinner, I might want to go over to the mall to see The Empire Strikes Back, in its 1982 rerelease.

(Yep, drop what you’re doing, Internet, a white guy in his 40s is gonna talk at you about Star Wars)

Back at Roy Rogers some 41 years ago (fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck me), I froze, mid-fixins-bar-heavy-bite, for two reasons:

1. In my family, movie nights were plentiful, but usually rigorously slotted in around my parents’ work schedules, my sister’s & my sleep schedule, etc., so the very idea of just … deciding to go to a movie like that was like eight nights of Hanukkah compressed into one suggestion (to this day, impromptu movie nights are one of my top five favorite things), and

2. I was five years old and Empire Strikes Back was my most favorite movie of all time (since then, it’s dropped a whole one, maybe two slots, behind other movies with passages to be covered in future posts), so …

I’m sure I didn’t respond with “Fuck yeah!” bc being a kindergartener, it wasn’t in my vernacular yet, but in some primitive form, the sentiment was there.

We finished up our, I dunno, horsey burgers?, and crossed to the mall. This being decades before reserved seating, you could just go into the end of the previous screening and wait for your showtime to begin.

BTW, this is the exact moment we walked in on, and to this day, because of that day, it’s my favorite shot in all of Star Wars:

In more ways than one, that screening proved to be something of a radioactive spider for me, when, before our showing, they ran the first teaser trailer for Return (then still Revenge) of the Jedi, which I had no way of knowing till years later, put me on the path toward producing promos & trailers, which I do to this day.

(I “returned the favor” a few years ago on a Star Wars campaign I was working on with an homage that never made it to air)

Theirs.

Mom, Dad & Dogbear

Watch this …

I’m pleased to say that, for as great a high as that whole evening was that 40+ years later I’m still musing on it, I’ve hit similar highs with Star Warses since then (up to and including taking my own five year old to Last Jedi).

But for all the childlike glee that Empire inspires (and, indeed, was designed to inspire), I never got half so much enjoyment from it until its blu-ray release, which was the first time I can remember approaching the material as an adult, and finding that there’s just as much - if not more - to enjoy about it. This is probably why Empire tends to stand out of the pack not just for me, but in critical consensus - it’s a grown-up tragedy, thoughtfully executed by adults, wrapped comfortably in a kid’s Halloween costume.

Watching it with adult eyes, not to mention in hi-def, I was able to better appreciate DP Peter Suschitzky’s and production designer Norman Reynolds’s use of color and framing - both a vivid upgrade from the stark blacks, whites, and browns of A New Hope - and Irvin Kershner’s playful, layered staging.

Around the same time, I read JW Rinzler’s indispensible The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (a friend of mine once described Rinzler’s trilogy as the first thing he’d grab if his house were on fire; his kids, second), which for the first time in my life made it clear to me that every piece of art is built one decision at a time, never more than a choice or two away from failure.

This visual and philosophical reappraisal brought me back to my favorite sequence - the jewel in the crown of the jewel in the crown:

The Asteroid Field.

FAIR WARNING, since we’re all new here: I will be discussing this scene (and other key beats related to this scene) in great detail, offering interpretations, observations, and inferences along the way. If you haven’t seen The Empire Strikes Back, spoilers ahead.

(BTW, if this essay is your first exposure to Empire Strikes Back, please contact me bc I am deeply curious about your whole deal)

At the time of Empire’s release, it wasn’t hard to see this sequence as a standout (considering the grand total of Star Wars material was four hours and change, or if you count the Holiday Special, eighteen hours). Even now, nearly half a century later, you could take the total tonnage of the days’, maybe weeks’ worth of Star Wars (oh that word) content, and leave me the Asteroid Field and I’d be fine. (Ok, maybe a few other highlights, too, like I’m Navin Johnson cherry-picking a paddle-ball, ashtray and chair on the way out the door)

There’s an extent to which the Asteroid Field in particular, and Empire at large, is George Lucas’s self-clapback at the technological and financial limitations that, from his POV, compromised A New Hope (even while it pried the world’s third eye open; while it’s said that nobody hates Star Wars more than Star Wars fans, I’d argue Lucas has the edge).

Specifically, the Asteroid Field feels like a mulligan of the first movie’s escaping-the-Death-Star dogfight, which keeps the VFX compositions tight, possibly owing to technical constraints. Nobody would call that sequence sedentary (thanks in large part to Marcia Lucas’s editing and John Williams’s score), but it’s not hard to imagine George Lucas squirming like George C. Scott in Hardcore, seeing only the imperfections in the execution, and roadblocks to his vision.

But then, with the success of Star Wars so overflowing the bank that they had to open new banks, Lucas and team got a shot at a do-over, this time with the throttle open and nothing but green lights. What they came back with was, to me, unmatched perfection.

II. You’re Not Actually Going Into An Asteroid Field

The start of the second act of a story can be a tough gear to shift. Fortunately for its creative team, propulsion is the name of the game in Empire, a movie that rarely if ever sits still. Here, the story shifts from the first act’s focus on the heroes’ interpersonal dynamics to a chase movie which, for one cohort of the separated protagonists, it remains until all but the final moments.

Having escaped the brutal assault on the new rebel base - not to mention a run-in with the local fauna that’s left him near-death and seeing ghosts - Luke Skywalker surprises his droid companion R2-D2 with his intentions not to rejoin the squad, but to go off on a splinter mission to chase his destiny.

Like R2, and Luke himself, we’re not positive this is a great idea, and our sentiments are echoed by John Williams’s wavering, three-layer, minor-key woodwinds that manage not to sacrifice the intrepidity of the moment as Luke temporarily exits the story, while sounding a warning for what’s to come …

We’re shown in no uncertain terms that the ground is shifting under us. Where Luke’s exit is a single, receding X-Wing against a vast starfield, we immediately wipe to the Empire’s pursuit of the Falcon in medias res, the Star Destroyer filling the frame, dwarfing the fleeing rust-bucket (shades of the opening shot of ANH, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it).

This contrast is invoked more directly in the reverse angle —

You don’t need 3D to feel 3D.

— as the approaching Star Destroyer visually swallows the fleeing Falcon. (This shot also more clearly establishes the four TIE Fighters that dog the Falcon through the sequence).

Two things to keep in mind about the opening salvo of these shots:

1. Each of these elements - four TIE fighters, the Falcon, the Star Destroyer - would have been shot separately and then composited, a Sisyphean but invisible miracle that recurs approximately every two and a half minutes throughout the trilogy.

2. Since the motif was only introduced in this movie some twenty minutes earlier, this is only the fourth or fifth time in their lives a first-time viewer would have heard the Imperial March. Wild to think about a moment when that was true.

From here, we move inside the Falcon’s cockpit, where we begin to settle into the heroes’ dynamic that drives the rest of the act - it’s like a family road trip already in the advanced stages of are-we-there-yet, painted in Suschitzky’s chiaroscuro comic book palette; when a laser blast fleetingly lights up the cockpit, it’s not blinding white, but a lush gold. (Empire has, for my money, the best cinematography of the series, and it bums me out a little when each new one doesn’t try to recreate it, but your mileage may vary, of course.)

The deft framing of these shots establishes the characters’ evolving dynamic - Han and Chewie aren’t exactly on-the-outs, but the situation is changing. Here, Chewie is alone, stoic in his no-fuss co-piloting, while “Mom and Dad” are isolated and bickering in their shared frame.

The Backseat Shot

We seal in the family dynamic with the arrival of kid brother 3PO - a necessary and helpful bit of resetting the table, in case we hadn’t tracked who wound up where while escaping Hoth, ratcheting the already tense cockpit into stop-touching-me bumper cars, ending on a quick note of Han taking the situation in hand, showing determination for the first time in the sequence, and with good reason:

To the best of my recollection, this is one of the series’ first - if not the first - use of the z-axis, reminding us that for all its car-chase linearity, this scene is set in SPACE. There’s no up or down, so why not use it all? The Falcon’s barrel roll dive - intrinsically joyous, contextually panicked - feels like Richard Edlund’s team showing off, and why the hell shouldn’t they?

Of all my crystal clear recollections of this movie and my experiences with it, I wish I could remember what seeing this for the first time felt like. It had to have been wild.

I don’t know who the “Take evasive action!” performer is, but be sure to zoom in for his amazing flail-fall.

For the first and only time in the sequence, we put a face to the heroes’ pursuers, in this case a comic beat clowning on the Empire’s clumsy Goliaths, and letting us know that the agile Davids aboard the Falcon have the upper hand for the moment.

(It occurred to me on my most recent rewatch that we don’t get the TIE fighter interior pilot shots typical to the visual vocabulary of similar Star Wars beats, which again keeps the personality squarely planted aboard the Falcon, its pursuers quite literally anonymous.)

Critically, too, we’re reminded that this is a regular-degular Star Destroyer, and not Darth Vader’s flagship, level-setting the stakes to reassure us that while it’s bad for our heroes, it could certainly be worse.

WHEEEWWW, this shot.

More z-axis fun follows as the undersides of the Star Destroyers form a snaggletoothed jaw from which our heroes have escaped (for now - everything in this movie is “for now,” more on that in a minute), foreshadowing the space slug beat a few scenes downstream, and adding a style of visual we haven’t yet seen in the series.

Here, too, the action reorients, with the Falcon repositioning to move from camera-right to camera-left, the direction of the action for the remainder of the sequence (tentatively established by Luke’s exit at the top of the sequence).

The Falcon rights itself, the more nimble TIE Fighters still on its back. Like I said, every victory in this movie is just “for now.”

The larger obstacle evaded, we get a repeat of the same sequence of shots from our first time in the Falcon’s cockpit, ready for the jump to lightspeed —

— and the Backseat Shot again —

Watch what?