Its funny how Empire gets All the love.. from me too.
I dont know if its because it upped the anti introduced pretty dark scary images to us kids
It made a pretty big impression on
me at five years old, I can say that. It took the setting and characters established in the first film and basically said, "I told you that story to tell you this one..." Star Wars was set-up -- the Hero coming into his own, his support structure being introduced and given some dimension... And then, once we had that, they got thrown into some Serious ****™. Absolutely it raised the ante -- but well. The characters that we'd met acquired more depth and nuance. Even the
Falcon became more of a character. The presentation was pitch-perfect, with the score and the visuals and color saturation and costumes and
everything. It was the best possible payoff for those of us who had seen the first one and become intrigued by the setting and characters and possibilities. And we got left with a multipartite cliffhanger (Vader is Luke's dad? Does Luke finish his training? What happens to Han? Who does Leia end up with?).
Expectations had to be carefully managed to provide a satisfying payoff to all that and, for a lot of us, Jedi wasn't it. I'm one of those who found it good and all, but there was something...
off... about it that niggled at me and took me years to start parsing out. An off-ness that I did
not feel with the other two, even with practical questions that came up in subsequent viewings (How did the
Falcon get to another star system without hyperdrive? Just how long
was Luke on Dagobah? How long was the trip from Tatooine to Alderaan, anyway? Etc.).
Moral ambiguity works for certain characters, not all of them. A character can be flawed without being morally compromised but the lack of subtlety in a lot of modern stories, or mostly "reimagined" existing characters is to take them and imbue them with qualities they never had, or to magnify their worst qualities and redefine these as virtues. This tendency seems to be the reflex of the modern era of films where the prevailing culture tries to comfort itself by creating works of fiction that celebrate subversion and lack conviction to any sense of moral duty or allegience to anything other than self. It may sound a bit extreme but how often do characters in recent years act in ways that are self serving rather than hold to a cause or belief that rejects such things?
Generally speaking, art is a reflection of the attitudes and beliefs of the time in which they are made. We live in a world where young people are taught that "their truth" is more important than truth itself. Where their desires are always acceptable and no one should question it. Where institutions are all corrupt and should be dismantled. They are taught that their enemy is out in the ether rather than consider the possibility that perhaps their enemy is the consequences of the poor choices they make. Taking personal responsibility for your actions is more important than posting your feelings on social media and considering it activism.
So what's the end result of the art that these attitudes create? You get heroes whose trials are not actually trials but mirrors with which to reflect the perceived strengths of their own awesomeness. Their antagonists are easily defeated because the protagonist already has the tools and knowledge to overcome them without true opposition and the saddest part is that there is no growth for these types of heroes because they've sacrificed nothing to achieve everything. Without death of some kind, whether it's literal or psychological there is no meaning behind it. The stories become as vapid as the culture and the cycle feeds the culture by marketing these things as aspirational when they are anything but. True heroism requires sacrifice of one kind or another.
It is stupidly ironic that the grim cynicism of the '70s in film was exactly what Lucas was fighting back against by wanting to do an escapist adventure fantasy. He wanted to inject a little hope into the societal bleakness he saw all around him. And here we are again. "Die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
