ST The Reception of The Last Jedi vs The Empire Strikes Back

Exactly, I watched ESB a day before TLJ came out. Trust me you could knit pick ESB too. I really believe a lot of people are just upset right now. Not saying that their opinion is not valid but no matter what any Star Wars movie release will be scrutinized by the internet. ESB would have been ripped if there was a internet. Max Landis’s Uncle would have been online talking trash.

 

I was 6 when Sepcial Editions were released, so I don’t have squat to talk about fan reaction. My reaction though was is I didn’t like it first. What a dark movie. I just wanted Luke to use the force to beat Vader, but it didn’t happen. I was also very intimidated by Vader, an intimidation that is nonexistent by the end of TLJ. Also we lose Han. How is this movie any good. Young kids may think losing Luke now is bad, but they didn’t grow up with him. This could be the second movie they saw. The stakes would be better if something happened to any of the new characters but nope nothing bad can happen to them.

What made me appreciate Empire is how every characters backs were against the wall. Luke had to confront Vader to save his friends, Han got
Taken to Jabba and can’t escape because he is frozen. Leia just lost
The love of his life, Lando, who just met, didn’t have a choice but to betray his friend, Yoda had one chance to train Skywalker and at the time seem like he failed, I can go on. Tlj has that darkness that Empire has but None of these new characters has high stakes or really anything on the line. The resistance as a whole does though.

 

I was alive then. There was definitely some criticism of what happens to the characters...after ANH, not everyone enjoyed seeing Luke lose, Han get frozen in carbonite, etc. I think it is fair to say that when ESB came out, it was not as loved as ANH was. ESB really earned its status over time as everyone evaluated the OT as a whole.

 

TLJ is certainly an interesting movie to say the least. who konws?

 

ANH wasnt gee whiz, Luke aunt and uncle were burned, they were burying Jawas, an arm got chopped off, Mos Eisley is a bad place, the cantina doesnt want robots, they blew up a planet, Obi dies, and they lost two squadrons.

What happens in ESB besides learning Vader is Anakin? Luke loses a hand and Han was captured? Some Echo background people died? Dak? ANH was mega dark.

 

The BIG difference is in the endings though. Which shapes the feeling you leave the cinema with. One was a celebration with smiles & medals. The other was coming to terms with losses & seemingly impossible odds going forward. With just a glimmer of hope.

 

I was 8 when I saw ESB in the theater. I remember being quite scared by the whole carbonite thing, as well as Luke having his hand cut off. Plus, I'd never seen a movie where the bad guys basically "win", so that was a bit traumatizing. All in all I remember not liking it as much as Star Wars, but for pretty much exclusively "8-year-old is scared by the movie" reasons.

By the time Jedi rolled around and I was 3 years older I loved it.

 

You are missing the scope of the darkness. Guy loses arm in Mos Eisley--who cares? He was a random thug. Jawas getting killed--who cares?--they are anonymous junk scavengers. Yeah, Luke's Aunt and Uncle are burned, but you don't see it happen, you just see the aftermath and a lot of people miss it if they aren't looking for it. Obi-Wan dies, but he just vanishes, he isn't "killed". Alderaan blows up, but no one is shown dying. I mean year, horrific if you think about it, but it isn't dwelled on except by Obi-Wan for like 20 seconds. Sure the pilots at the end all bite it, but most of them just go up in fireballs--it's WWII fighter ace stuff we've been use to seeing on screen forever.

In Empire, Vader is force choking people left and right, and major characters are getting maimed, tortured and frozen. The violence is much more personal and intimate. The major characters are clearly no longer invulnerable, and that changes everything.

 

Liea was tortured in ANH. I dont see being frozen as some tremendously bad thing that's super dark. You got the hand chopped but that was quickly answered by the end.

Vs, an arm on the floor with blood, burning Jawa corpses, burning human skeletons, those 3 alone are way more serious than most of what ESB lays down. ANH wasny some zippy happy thing. Yes, the ending of ESB has the heroes down but the overall film wasnt darker than ANH.

 

I saw ESB when I was a kid (not in theatres, but I was still a kid). And even as a kid, I didn't find there to be much "controversial" stuff in it (unlike TLJ):

First of all, ESB had the luxury of only being the second film in the series. So it only had ONE movie to build off of, and far less defined characters. TLJ, had six films over almost 40 years and well-established mythology and backstory.

Second, the complaints about ESB seemed to be more about tone, pacing, filmmaking style, and the "twist" was controversial. But the characters still felt like the same characters, it didn't have nearly as many controversial elements as TLJ did.

And finally it was just a better-made film overall imo. Better paced, better structured, not as reliant on convenience, etc.

 

By this logic, every single blockbuster that’s part of a popular series should cause faux internet “backlash.” That doesn’t happen because it isn’t the internet’s fault that a bunch of SW fans don’t like this movie. Some blockbuster series movies go over relatively well. Some don’t. Just like no one needs an excuse as to why people love the movie, no one should be searching for excuses to write off criticisms people have as somehow illegitimate. It won’t change anyone’s mind. People that don’t like it will keep on not liking it.

 

I think its a bit of a false comparison personally, the somewhat mixed reception to ESB was I would say based on expectations of what a Starwars film could potentially be and indeed that the whole medium of the action blockbuster was fairly new.

I don't think the same is true here, I can't imagine many viewers went into TLJ unaware that it had the potential to try and confound expectations, if anything there was a feeling this was quite likely to be the case due its place as the middle film in a new trilogy and TFA's similarities to ANH.

 

I was 11, 14, and 17 when the OT films were released. One mustached fat guy got up at the end and said it wasn’t as good as ANH. My friends and I loved it. It obviously didn’t do as well critically or financially as ANH. Part of the reason for not doing as well financially was ANH was loved by everyone and partly not everyone loved TESB. And I think the aforementioned guy like many people didn’t think a sequel could equal its predecessor.

And you didn’t have the internet then nor click bait.

 

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here, but wasn't it pretty common back then for sequels to not do as well as the originals? It's kind of the opposite now most of the time.

 

AOTC didn't do as well as TPM. Age of Ultron didn't do as well as the Avengers. Sequels only do better that the originals in very special cases. Winter Soldier out-earned Captain America because people who didn't bother with such a hokey character saw the Avengers and liked him in it, discovered the first movie after the fact, then showed up in droves for WS. That's an unusual set of circumstances.

 

I did say "most of the time" not "always."

 

This is a hopeless comparison. I've seen people using TESB to justify Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen's abysmal reception, saying that it will improve over time and be vindicated. I've seen it used for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. And really any movie with a low reception score.

Let us remember that TLJ's situation is quite different. It's not the first sequel to an original work. It's part of a new trilogy that is supposed to be a followup to the classic six-part saga that is George Lucas' Skywalker Saga. As such, expectations are much higher and much more precise. TESB was still defining the universe and the overall story. TLJ is taking place in a universe that has already been heavily defined after 40 years of stories.

And after two years, I still think that the Starkiller Base doesn't belong in Star Wars and was an awful fan fiction idea.

 

Most of the time sequels to not make more than originals. They lose all the people that saw the first one and didn't like it.

 

The exceptions tend to be films that find an audience on home release.

 

Saw Empire at the cinema when it was released (I was 7) and loved it. It’s still my favourite SW movie.

The good thing back then was your only outlet to talk about the film was friends and family who had seen the film. There seemed to be less pressure than the immediacy of today’s world where you have to proclaim on everything straight away and make a decision that seems to be set in stone in the now. There wasn’t as much attention seeking either that social media brings or the pressure that brings to bear no matter what side of the fence you fall on.

 

Yeah, back then you didn't have faceless idiots telling you there was something wrong with you if you liked a movie. Fandom gets more and more toxic as time goes by.

 

Me too. IIRC, people were just starting to get home VCRs.

In retrospect I think they were smart (and brave) to go for something different from ANH 2. It would've been very difficult to recapture the specific magic of the first, so they took a left turn and forged something new and special in its own way.

 

You also didn't have people telling you that if you didn't like the movie, that you "just didn't get it" or "just didn't adjust your expectations" or some other such nonsense.

 

I knew, as I was typing the OP, that some myopic diehard would come along and take issue with my wording.

And Han gets run through by his own son in TFA, don't forget that. And yet still I consider ANH and TFA as "gee whiz" in tone and execution. Fun, fast, romps that have a lot lighter tones than their immediate successors, despite content.