Review of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) by Devilscroll — 26 May 2023

Disclaimer for those who don't know me personally and haven't heard about it until today - The Empire Strikes Back is my favorite movie to such an extreme degree that next to the poster for "Uterus", my first film in my room, there is an even bigger and even bigger poster of, you guessed it, "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back".

And when I heard that the Tel Aviv Cinematheque was doing this event, of screening the films of the original trilogy one after the other, I realized that I had to be at least at the screening of the Empire.

There's no way I'm going to miss an opportunity to see this movie for the first time on a big screen. Wow, what an experience that was. First of all, I didn't expect it, but the hall was full of fanatical fans who clapped and cried with excitement at every nonsense, and it warmed my heart, made me cry myself, and upgraded the viewing experience about 1000 times.

This film was and remains a temporary masterpiece in everything to do with building characters and the processes they go through, brilliant villain construction, set and scenery design, effects, cinematography, editing, use of colors, everything here is simply above any other film I've seen.

And you can still discover something new here every time you watch it again. The real narrative ark of this movie, with all due respect to Luke and his father, is the Millennium Falcon - the whole movie is building for us this moment of the transition to the lightspeed.

The whole movie they try - and fail. Something in the first movie in the series was obvious, and once it happens - it's so satisfying, because for two hours you watched a movie whose entire purpose was to struggle to do something they did easily in the first movie.

Princess Leia, for example, is always lit in a bright, washed-out white light, due to her being a princess. So many meanings, wisdom, precise and sophisticated cinematic expression. A film that was ahead of its time, that you are easily drawn into and cannot get back out of, and most importantly - show me another film that is able to fill a cinema theater like this today, more than 40 years after it was released.