CT BBC Article arguing that TESB is overrated.

While I am not sure I agree, its the author's opion.

Editing title of thread.

 

My thoughts appear below. I have decided to quote portions of the article and then give my response. Parts in quotes and italics are taken from the article itself.

"This might come across as a contrarian hot take, but it seems obvious to me that the best film in the Star Wars series is, in fact, Star Wars. (I know we’re supposed to call it ‘A New Hope’ these days, but it was called Star Wars when it came out in 1977, so that’s good enough for me.)"

What seems obvious is that it's all a matter of opinion which movie in the Star Wars saga is the best. There are a fair number of people who think of ANH as the best Star Wars movie, so I'm not even sure why Nicholas Barber is assuming this martyred air here like he's going to be crucified for telling us ANH is in his opinion the best Star Wars film. The film is often called ANH to distinguish it from the saga as a whole, but you can call it Star Wars if you like. Also, what does these days even mean? It's been called ANH for as long as I can remember, and I'll turn thirty this year. Dude could stand to get off his high horse here.

"What’s more, it seems obvious that The Empire Strikes Back is the source of all the franchise’s problems. Whatever issues we geeks grumble about when we’re discussing the numerous prequels and sequels, they can all be traced back to 1980."

That's a bold claim because we'd have to compile every complaint that fans make about the prequels and the sequels (and there's probably over a million different complaints made by a million different people) and then prove that each of those complaints have their genesis in ESB. That would take a very long and substantive article. Frankly, longer and more substantive than this article turns out to be. Nicholas Barber bit off more than he could chew here and using extremes like "all" instead of "many" just makes his point harder to prove and easier to ignore as exaggeration. This is a good example of why I advise against using extremes like "all" and "always" in any sort of debate or persuasive writing since there is almost always that exception that can destroy the argument entirely. "Many" and "most" are foundations for much stronger and less easily dismantled arguments in my humble opinion.

"Then came The Empire Strikes Back – a gloomier film, admittedly, but also a slower, stodgier, more contrived, convoluted and repetitive one."

I disagree that ESB is a slower movie than ANH. Both ANH and ESB have action-packed openings, but then ANH slows down considerably on Tatooine (necessary for some wonderful world-building, but still the pace slows) while in ESB the pace slows for Luke's training with Yoda but still that slowness is interspersed with the action of Han and Leia's efforts to escape the Empire, so to me, ANH is arguably the slower movie. I do think it is fair to criticize ESB as more convoluted and contrived than ANH especially in terms of the revelation that Vader is Luke's father and Obi-Wan was lying to Luke about his father's identity and death. Still, what some people regard as convoluted and contrived others will regard as complex so this is ultimately a matter of individual interpretation and preference. As far as repetitive goes, I think ESB can't help but be more repetitive than ANH since ANH is the movie that established and created the Star Wars universe while ESB is the one that continued to build on it. Still, I think we were introduced to many new ideas, places, and characters in ESB. ESB, therefore, to me, succeeded at building on the world of ANH and expanding the Star Wars universe as a sequel is supposed to do.

"The Rebel base on the ice planet looks roughly what you’d expect a Rebel base on an ice planet to look like; the plain white plastic corridors of Cloud City could have been salvaged from the studio bins after a Star Trek film had wrapped."

We'd never seen a Rebel base on an ice planet before Hoth and ESB. Before that, we'd only seen a Rebel base on a jungle planet (Yavin IV) and we could just as easily say that the Rebel base on Yavin IV looks like we'd expect a Rebel base on a jungle world to look whatever that means. The plastic white corridors of Cloud City look very clean and polished to me, and I think it is the clouds of this city on a gas planet and the exterior construction of the city itself that was meant to be the most eye-catching. The dude is just trying to find the bland details instead of focusing on the actual impressive stuff. I could make Tatooine boring if I just focused on the sand and nothing else too.

"Key events in Star Wars include Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) being knocked unconscious by a wilderness alien; Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) being captured by Darth Vader (Dave Prowse’s body paired with James Earl Jones’s voice); Luke learning about the Force from a Jedi master in a remote cave; a lightsaber duel that ends badly for the good guys; a ‘scoundrel’ abandoning the Rebels before having a change of heart; and a protracted battle between the ranks of the Rebel Alliance and the heavily armed Empire. Switch around the order of those events, and you’ve got The Empire Strikes Back."

These sentences as a whole are pretty ridiculously reductive to me, but let me tackle some individual points anyway. In ANH, Luke is knocked out by a Tusken Raider but it's clear that the Tusken Raiders have enough culture to use technology, clothing, and weapons, whereas the wampa he's knocked out by in ESB is more of an abominable Snowman type monster. In terms of the Star Wars universe, Tusken Raiders are sentient beings while wampas are more like straight-up monsters, so this is like saying, "In ANH, Luke was knocked out by a person, and in ESB, he was knocked out by a monster." I also don't really see either of these events as key events. I mean, they happened but really not even in the same points in their respective movies and neither one seemed to be crucial for their respective movies. We could also say that the wampa fight shows how Luke is growing and beginning to try to manipulate the Force in comparison to ANH Luke who at that point has no knowledge of the Force.

I'd agree that Princess Leia is taken captive by Vader in both ESB and ANH, but I'd argue that in ESB the bigger focus is on Han being taken captive and frozen into carbonite.

Luke learns about being a Jedi Obi-Wan's remote hut on Tatooine and on the Millennium Falcon in ANH. I don't remember him learning about being a Jedi in a remote cave on Tatooine. Dagobah is also a very different world from Tatooine, so to act like these are similar settings is I think very unfair to ESB.

"A lightsaber duel that ends badly for the good guys" is a very broad statement but if we look at the details of the ANH and ESB duels, we see many differences such as Obi-Wan dying in the ANH duel while Luke is merely maimed. We could also say that Obi-Wan ends his duel with Vader in a place of spiritual certainty (that he will become more powerful than Vader can possibly imagine) while Luke ends his duel with Vader in the spiritual turmoil of coming to terms with the fact that his father is Darth Vader.

I would agree there is some redundancy between Han leaving the Rebel base in ANH and then coming back to rescue Luke and Lando's betrayal and subsequent effort at atonement but we do see that Lando's betrayal is more about cutting a deal with the Empire for the safety of Cloud City and his business interests there while Han is pretty much entirely looking out for himself. The scoundrel having a change of heart plot line is also a very common one. It was never unique and original to Star Wars in the first place. It's a very common character trope so that it is used again in the Star Wars universe isn't a huge surprise. What matters is that it is used a bit differently and that the characters themselves (Han and Land) feel fresh and original in some way to have their own appeal to audiences.

The protracted battle between the Empire and the Rebels is the entire point of the OT, so it's kind of like complaining that all the Harry Potter books are about Harry fighting Voldemort or all the Lord of the Rings books are about Frodo bringing the Ring to Mordor to be destroyed. It's like, "Yes, that's the essential and unifying plot of the overarching story that connects the different volumes of the story." I don't really know what to take from that point except that the critic is only interested in standalone stories, which is fine, but the structure he is critiquing isn't unique to Star Wars and is really a defining trait of most stories told across multiple volumes.

The order that events occur in a story is also very important for the overall story building, so I'm not sure I agree with the author talking flippantly about just switching the order of events around when if you have to switch the order of events around it's kind of proof the stories aren't that redundant in my opinion. Especially if the redundancies are expressed in very broad statements.

"Haaaaang on a minute. 'Although the Death Star has been destroyed'? 'Although'? The sole aim of the heroes and heroines in Star Wars was to destroy the Death Star, a humungous planet-pulverising spaceship of crucial strategic importance to the Empire. One of their big cheeses announced that 'fear of this battle station' would keep every dissenter in line. Another hailed it as 'the ultimate power in the universe'. But now the Rebels’ demolishing of the ultimate power in the universe is waved aside with an 'although'? That, frankly, is not on."

The destruction of the Death Star in ANH was never associated with the complete annihilation or defeat of the Empire, so it always made sense to me (and many others) that there would still be a war to fight between the Empire and the Rebels. The Rebel victory at the end of ANH was a temporary rather than a permanent one but that made it no less significant. It's possible for an individual battle or victory to be important but there still needing to be a war to finish. We could say, for example, that although D-Day was an Allied victory, there was still a lot of fighting left to do before Nazi Germany was defeated. Does that make D-Day unimportant or any less of a pivotal battle? Not really. But the war didn't end with D-Day. That's also true.

"Remember that scene in Star Wars when an Imperial admiral mocked Darth Vader for his 'sad devotion to that ancient [Jedi] religion'? Forget it – because in The Empire Strikes Back we’re told that the Emperor himself is devoted to the same religion."

The Emperor is not devoted to the Jedi religion. He's devoted to the Sith religion, which is like the polar opposite of the Jedi religion and everything the Jedi religion professes. This is a pretty core tenant of the Star Wars mythos and not really a confusing one at all so this point just strikes me as intellectually disingenuous.

"And what about Obi-Wan Kenobi? Remember how he started training Luke to be a Jedi knight partly because his previous pupil, Darth Vader, turned to the Dark Side of the Force? Narrative logic demands that the ghostly Obi-Wan should keep on training Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, and send his new apprentice into combat against his old one. Forget it. The poor chap is cold-shouldered so that Yoda can train Luke instead."

Just because Obi-Wan started training Luke doesn't mean he has to be the one to finish training Luke, and much of Yoda's training with Luke requires a physical element that a ghostly Obi-Wan wouldn't be able to pull off. Obi-Wan also gets to be present a key moments in the plot and interacts with both Yoda and Luke so I disagree that Obi-Wan was cold-shouldered. I actually think that in ESB we begin to see a more complex treatment of Obi-Wan so he can transcend the archetype of the wise old mentor and become more of a unique character with both strengths and weaknesses. In ESB, we begin to really be shown that Obi-Wan is a human capable of mistakes and misjudgments as well as great gentleness and courage. I'd believe Obi-Wan got cold-shouldered if Lucas decided to never explore his character again, but that was far from the case. Obi-Wan gets more attention and screen time across the saga than Yoda does, so I don't think it's fair to say he got cold-shouldered for Yoda.

"Despite its title, The Empire Strikes Back is rarely about the Alliance v the Empire, it’s about who is related to whom and who is in love with whom (the two sometimes overlap). It twists the saga from the political to the personal, from space opera to soap opera."

I would say that ANH and ESB devote roughly equal focus to the conflict between the Alliance and the Empire. I would say who is related to whom was important in ANH as well. Luke wonders about who his father is a good deal in ANH, learns about his father's past through Obi-Wan, and inherits his father's lightsaber when Obi-Wan passes it on to him. Luke's connection and interest in his father is a strand that connects ANH and ESB. It's not something that ESB invented whole cloth. There's plenty of romantic banter and hints in ANH and the introduction of something of a love triangle between Han, Luke, and Leia in ANH, so again that is also something that is only continued by ESB rather than invented by it. The saga was always as much or more personal as it was political. I think that's part of why it has such a broad appeal, honestly.

"I was annoyed when Qui-Gon Jinn was shoehorned into Obi Wan’s past in The Phantom Menace..."

Qui-Gon was only shoehorned into Obi-Wan's past if you believe that he could only have one Jedi mentor, which is silly when we know that Luke had more than one Jedi mentor. Why can't Obi-Wan have more than one Jedi mentor as well? This critic seems to have a hangup about accepting that a person can have more than one mentor without the other mentor being "shoehorned" in or "cold-shouldering" the original mentor figure. I don't really understand that hangup at all to be honest.

"It’s not just Star Wars films that have made the exasperating mistake of prioritising franchise-building over simply making a good film, either.. Think of all those films and TV shows that assume we’ll jump for joy when the villain is revealed to be Sherlock Holmes’ sister or James Bond’s childhood pal. Think of all those superhero blockbusters that waste time teeing up the next instalment in the series. I’m sorry, but The Empire Strikes Back has to take the blame for all of them. Search your feelings, you know it to be true."

This paragraph just goes off the deep-end so much that it's hard for me to take anything about it seriously. Instead of providing a strong conclusion, it is illogically arguing that ESB is to blame for the sins of other franchises. That's like blaming Lord of the Rings for all the knockoff fantasy novels that tried and failed to live up to the trilogy's greatness.

If this was all the random rambling to be found on a fan's blog, I wouldn't bother responding in such detail, but since it appeared in a legitimate, respected media source (the BBC), I thought a more in-depth answer was warranted. I get that it's an opinion piece but to me it is a pretty poorly constructed and supported one. Overall, I found it fairly sloppy in its writing and unconvincing in its arguments. Perhaps a piece focusing on the greatness of ANH would've been a better undertaking for this writer.

 

Well I agree with this part:

 

That was probably the most accurate part of the article.