The Empire Strikes Back is the middle chapter of the original Star Wars trilogy, and it rewards a patient viewer more than either of its bookends. There is no tidy victory here: Luke trains under a strange, diminutive mentor on a swamp planet while the Rebel fleet scatters and his friends are hunted across the galaxy.
It does not open with a rescue or close with a celebration. It spends its two hours on doubt, exile and a group of people who spend most of the film losing, which makes it a stranger and sadder watch than A New Hope or Return of the Jedi. That is exactly why it has aged into the one most people name as the best of the series.
Some of that comes down to who George Lucas handed the director's chair to. Rather than direct the sequel himself, he brought in Irvin Kershner, whose lectures he had attended as a film student at USC, because he wanted someone who knew how a Hollywood film was made but did not make Hollywood films. Kershner's fingerprints are all over the quieter, more character-driven scenes: the training sequences in the swamp, and the long stretch in a city suspended in the clouds where the heroes discover the trap they have walked into.
The other overlooked hand belongs to Leigh Brackett. The veteran screenwriter and science fiction novelist delivered a full first draft built from Lucas's outline, then died of cancer weeks later before the two could discuss revisions. Lucas wrote new drafts himself before handing them to Lawrence Kasdan to finish, yet Brackett still shares the screenplay credit on a film that bears little trace of her pages. Frank Oz brought Yoda to life through puppetry rather than effects work, and the film holds a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes decades later.
It is streaming now on Disney Plus in the US, the UK and Australia, and if you only ever revisit one Star Wars film, this is the one that gets better every time.
