SW:TESB darkside cave on Dagobah - what is going on?

That's because the one film the fans love the most, he likes the least.

I don't think he ever quite got over someone making a better star wars film than him.
 
Luke felt something wrong. He said he felt cold. Then he asked what was in the cave.

Luke may have brought his experience into the cave with him, but something about that cave was messing him up before he ever went into it.


Yeah I know, Yoda could have made Luke feel darkness there. But nothing about the scene leans that way. It plays like the cave just had some pre-existing bad hoodoo.
 
Oh wow, you just blew my mind. I never noticed the door frame before. The parallels between the cave and Bespin are shot for shot, cool!
 
I never noticed the Bespin similarity either! I just remember as a kid being very bored with this part of the movie for some reason. There's a lot of layers of things going on in those scenes!
 
So if this Bespin theory is true, then we must assume that the film crew were building the cave that way on purpose. I can't believe this has never been mentioned before. I've read pretty much everything on the making of this movie that there is, I've never heard anything about it.

I'm willing to bet that this Bespin theory is true--hard to believe it has never been talked about before....wow....
 
Good lord, ESB is a good film.

I think the only thing that would make make it a PERFECT film would be a line like this: "Bespin? Hmm. It's gonna be a long journey but I think we have enough fuel and food to get there"
 
Love the Bespin connection, that's a great observation and it makes perfect sense that it should foreshadow Luke's encounter with Vader later on. As the Dagobah scenes were filmed last I think, it's possible parts of the Bespin set were redressed and used in the cave scene.



The Bespin thing is pretty impressive, I never noticed that before, either.

As for the cave.. the old EU claimed that Yoda had killed a Dark Jedi there, but of course that was always non-canon. It's also questionable as to how much of the truth Yoda tells his students for their tests. It's definitely quite possible, probable even, that the cave was just a plain ol' cave.

On the one had, it's "strong with the dark side", on the other, it contains "only what you take with you"... the dark side he was referring to probably wasn't in the cave at all, it was in Luke. That was the whole lesson of the cave, after all.. to demonstrate the darkness within that the student must learn to accept and control. Tell a student that there's something scary in there, and their own fears and doubts will fill in the rest. It wasn't until RoTJ that Luke stopped being afraid of Vader. He overcame that fear quite well in ESB, but Luke was probably terrified during that entire encounter.

I'm not so sure the cave is just a plain old cave. Yoda tells us "that place is strong with the dark side of the Force.. a domain of evil it is.." It may well play on your own deepest fears and force you to confront them, so yes you take all that with you when you step inside but the places is bad news...
 
Good lord, ESB is a good film.

I think the only thing that would make make it a PERFECT film would be a line like this: "Bespin? Hmm. It's gonna be a long journey but I think we have enough fuel and food to get there"

And a dance number. It needs a dance number.
 
Luke felt something wrong. He said he felt cold. Then he asked what was in the cave.

Luke may have brought his experience into the cave with him, but something about that cave was messing him up before he ever went into it.


Yeah I know, Yoda could have made Luke feel darkness there. But nothing about the scene leans that way. It plays like the cave just had some pre-existing bad hoodoo.

Or it could have just been something natural in the cave that makes people more susceptible to your emotions and plays on them, whether good or bad. Maybe there's some sort of gas in the cave or there's mold that releases spores that play with your brain, or any number of possibilities that don't necessarily involved the Force or the supernatural.
 
So if this Bespin theory is true, then we must assume that the film crew were building the cave that way on purpose. I can't believe this has never been mentioned before. I've read pretty much everything on the making of this movie that there is, I've never heard anything about it.

I'm willing to bet that this Bespin theory is true--hard to believe it has never been talked about before....wow....

Unfortunately John Barry, the production designer, died two weeks into the filming of ESB. He had won the Academy Award for his work on ANH, he had worked with Stanley Kubrick on Clockwork Orange and on genre movies such as Phase IV and Saturn 3, Superman and Superman II. I am pretty sure that the foreshadowing that we see here, happening on the visual level of set design, was completely intentional.
With genre movies it´s pretty easy to dismiss design features as not deliberate, i.e. have things just look cool without real depth or meaning, but good production design usually is very thought through and planned, having a concept behind it that carries and enhances the audiences perception of the story, it is not just a backdrop for the actors.
 
You would think Rinzler would have uncovered some evidence of the two sets and framing being similar if there were some tangible proof.
 
Coincidence or intentional, that is one amazing find. I remember noticing those cave structures and just figuring they were part of the dream-like aspect of the whole sequence. But if they were meant to evoke the Bespin duel that really does add another level to the magical quality of the whole film.

Norman Reynolds is getting up there in years but is still with us. Maybe he could provide some insight if someone knew how to contact him. Although, as the story says, it was "a long time ago..."
 
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