Huh?? Did I link the wrong article?And that site tries to say today's Star Wars fans are hating on The Last Jedi exactly the same way fans were hating on Empire back then. After reading that well unfortunately they couldn't be more wrong.
Seems to be a side-by-side comparison to me.
Going back to read it today, I skimmed through it and somehow ended up in the middle of the David Gerrold's quote. I was confused for a moment when he mentioned Han and Leia traveling to Bespin, because for a few paragraphs there it sounded exactly like he was talking about The Last Jedi.
Gerrold's full article here (page 24):
https://archive.org/details/starlog_magazine-038
The Empire Strikes Out
When I called to suggest to ye kindly editor that I had some thoughts about The Empire Strikes Back, he said, "David— wait! Before you write anything, give us a chance to install the new security system. We're putting in steel doors, 10-foot concrete walls, barbed wire, electrified fences, laser beams, sandbag reinforcements, guard dogs, alligators in the moat— we'll have special security clearances for all employees and airport-style weapons-checks at the doors, an X-ray scanner for incoming packages — "
"Howard, Howard—" I managed to interrupt him. "I liked it. I have hardly any quibbles at all."
"Whew!" He breathed a sigh of relief. "Maybe we can do without the machine guns in the guard towers after all."
"Pish tush," I said. (I've always wanted to say "Pish tush" to someone.) "A few angry letters because I asked what makes Kessel run and you get all excited." ♦
"A few angry letters?!!" he screamed. I got the feeling he was jumping up and down on his desk at the time. "We're still picking shrapnel out of the art department!!"
"Howard, Howard," I said as gently as possible. "Please stop scuffing the furniture and sit down. Now, listen to me — we have a responsibility to the readership. It's that simple. I have to tell the truth."
"Gevalt!"
"Even if it's unpleasant," I added.
There was a thud and then silence from the telephone. After a moment, another voice said, "What did you say to Howard?"
"Uh, nothing. I'll talk to him again when he gets out of the hospital."
I liked it. I really did.
I just didn't like it enough.
So I went back for a second look, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized—
— uh, listen, if you're one of those fanatics who started waiting in line sometime last December, who hasn't seen daylight since May 21, who worships the wart over Yoda's left eye, then maybe you'd better skip this part of the magazine and go on to something else. Okay? Because you're not going to like much of what I have to say here.
Howard will appreciate it.
Just about every other critic in the country has been telling you how good the picture is; they've been falling all over themselves to tell you. It's embarrassing. I feel guilty for not liking it as much as I'm supposed to.
I really hesitated before I wrote this column, because nobody likes the guy who stands up to say, "Aww, this party isn't as good as everybody says it is."
And it's no fun being that guy either. You don't get invited to a lot of parties.
You saw the picture. You have your own opinion. Nothing I say here is going to make you like the picture any more or any less. And that's not my job anyway.
My job is to make you think about what you saw. If you're happy, if you don't want to think, then turn the page.
The rest of us will get on with this. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it
Let's take the easy— and familiar— quibbles first.
• Han Solo maneuvers the Millennium Falcon into a hole in an asteroid to hide while he makes repairs. Princess Leia sees something outside the ship. They go out to investigate— wearing only oxygen masks. No spacesuits. They explore the inside of the tunnel they are in, walking around the ship — walking?!!
Wait a minute. That asteroid isn't big enough to have a significant gravity well. I'll bet you could reach escape velocity by firing a double-barrelled shotgun at the ground. And if the asteroid doesn't have gravity, then it can't hold an atmosphere. And even if our heroes are not breathing the atmosphere then they still need the pressure of an atmosphere on their bodies to keep from exploding.
Some spacesuits and weightlessness are clearly in order here.
And the fact that there are inside some kind of critter, a giant space snake, does not mitigate it one bit, but it does bring us to:
• A question of ecology. I won't argue the possibility of giant space-going worms living inside asteroids. I rather like the idea. I just want to know what those things eat. (Not to mention, how do they mate?) Most large critters have large appetites. An elephant will eat umpteen pounds of stuff every day just to maintain itself. What does this critter survive on and where does it get it in large enough quantities? Even if this critter is a lot of hollow, its existence still implies (there's that word again) that there is a larger ecology to support it.
What kind of creatures live in space and regularly hide in asteroid holes that a critter like this can survive playing trap-door spider? I don't believe it eats only spaceships. There aren't enough of them in the asteroid belt.
• There's no sense of astronomical scale. The Falcon goes from Hoth system to Bespin "system. How? The hyperdrive is busted.
I thought hyperdrive was the way they traveled faster than light
Even if you're at the core of the galaxy (unlikely— too much hard radiation— probably fatal), most star systems are still going to be a significant distance away from their nearest neighbors. Even half a light-year is a forbidding distance at sub-light speeds.
• The usual quibble about the movements of the spaceships. Very pretty. Very impressive. Very inaccurate. Spacecraft tend to travel at several hundred miles per second. Even the slow ones, like the ones that went to the Moon. (Does anyone remember that?) The fast ones— say, like the Falcon— eat up distance at several thousand miles per second. Or more. At those speeds, dogfights are…unlikely. At least, the kind demonstrated by the special-effects wizards here. A terrific-looking job, but wrong. What we are seeing may look like spaceships, but they move like supersonic fighters and flying aircraft carriers. Impressive, yes. But reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica. And symptomatic —
Listen, this isn't science fiction. It's science fantasy. It's fairy tale, using science-fiction devices. And it's great fun, all this flash and dazzle, zipping and zapping across the silver screen and into your heart. Enjoy it. That's what it's for. Despite the above quibbles, most of the rest of it works very well.
That a project as ambitious as this one succeeds as well as it does is credit to the not-so-small army of talented men and women who've spent the past two years of their lives trying to make it the very best film they could. They deserve our applause.
John Williams' music was great (of course), Leigh Brackett and Larry Kasdan's dialogue was clever, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford's performances were crisp, Mark Hamill's stunts were impressive, Ralph McQuarrie's designs were beautiful (again), and most of the effects were stunning — particularly the gigantic stop-motion elephant walkers. Wow!
No question, it's the best Saturday matinee I've seen since May 25, 1977.
But even fantasy, science or otherwise, gotta follow some rules —
You can break the rules, of course. Lots of storytellers do — but the good ones always have a good reason for doing so. But you must never forget your audience, because that's the fatal mistake.
I think George Lucas knows this, but I also think there may be some serious miscalculations here…
An audience comes to a story with a "willing suspension of disbelief."
That is, they know it's only a story — but they want to cooperate with the storyteller in the process of convincing themselves, even if only for a short while, that the story is actually happening.
If, even for a single moment, the storyteller says or shows something that the audience knows to be false, then the magic of the story is broken. If it's a very good story, the audience will quickly reestablish their belief in it. But the more such moments occur, the more the disbelief mounts up.
Eventually, a threshold of disbelief is reached, and the audience will no longer cooperate in the process of fooling themselves. The storyteller has lost them. He has failed.
The job of the storyteller — or the filmmaker — is to make his lies as convincing as possible.
The Empire Strikes Back looks very convincing. Most people will be convinced. The technical questions won't bother them a bit. Nor will much of anything else, I suspect.
But — those who do start asking questions are going to ask all the questions. They will dig all the way down, as far as they can go, until they get to the big one: The Cracker Jack test.
Remember? Is there a prize in the story? Does it demonstrate a piece of truth? It's hard to say here, because not all the evidence is in. This isn't a complete story. It's only part of a story. That incompleteness is terribly unsatisfying. It hurts the film.
Star Wars had an epic quality. It felt like a classic myth. Part of that is because it had what Alfred Hitchcock used to call a "McGuffin" — a reason for everybody to be chasing everybody else: "Where are the plans to the Death Star?!!"
The Empire Strikes Back may be told against an epic background but it doesn't quite have that same epic quality. Nor does it have a McGuffin. And that may be the reason why it doesn't have the same mythic feeling. All the chasing and racing is very exciting, but it doesn't seem to have a larger purpose. Where before we were made aware that these events were one small part of a larger rebellion, now it seems as if everything revolves around Darth Vader versus Luke Skywalker. The focus has been narrowed. The rest of the battles are therefore trivialized by comparison, and the sense of epic is weakened.
Structurally, the film is flawed by its need to imitate its predecessor's "formula" of fast-paced cross-cutting. We cut back and forth between Luke and Yoda on Dagobah and Leia and Han in the asteroids, and the time sense of both sets of events is distorted. How long were Han and Leia fleeing? How long is Luke studying?
Why not stay with Han and Leia until they leave the asteroid and head for the Bespin system, then cut to Luke arriving at Dagobah and stay with him until he leaves?
Changes the pace? Yes, it slows it down. It also suggests some scale of distance between these places. (Crosscutting also implies simultaneity — a concept which most modern physicists say is impossible, especially on an astronomical scale. Sorry.)
Because the film now runs at such a fast pace throughout its entire length, it can't build to an additional peak of excitement at the end when Luke finally confronts Darth Vader. It's an exciting fight, yes — but we're already at out peaks, we can't get any more excited — and darn it, we should.
The fight should be a climax, and it isn't, and that's one of the reasons why we're left feeling just a bit unsatisfied.
The other one: Yoda. I like him. It. Whatever. Cute. Zen can be cuddly. But if he's a Jedi master, then the galaxy is in worse trouble than we thought.
Sure, Yoda says all the right things. He has the best line in the picture: "There is no try. Either do or do not." That piece of truth is worth the price of admission alone. But it doesn't look like Yoda believes in it himself.
There's a scene where Luke tries to use the Force to raise his X-wing fighter from the swamp and can't do it. He gives up in despair, stalks off into the woods, muttering, "It's impossible," and sits down to sulk. Obviously, Luke hasn't finished growing up. He hasn't learned patience.
Yoda screws up his face, raises one hand, begins to tremble a little — and raises the fighter from the water and deposits it on dry land.
Luke is astonished. "I don't believe it," he says.
Yoda looks at him. ‘’That's why you fail. "
And that's where the scene ends.
We have to ask — what is the point that this scene is trying to make? Excuse me — there is no try. What is the point this scene is supposed to make? Is Yoda demonstrating the power of the Force to Luke? Yes. Is Yoda trying to teach Luke to use it himself? I would hope so. But there is no try, Yoda. Either do or do not.
So why does Yoda give Luke his ship? He's denying him a valuable lesson by denying him a reason to learn. Having the fighter handed back to him so easily is definitely not going to teach Luke patience.
And in fact, when we next cut back to Luke and Yoda, Luke is ready to drop everything to fly straight into Darth Vader's trap. And it has yet to be established that Luke has learned how to use the Force for anything more than lifting rocks while standing on his head — a skill of somewhat limited usefulness.
There's a piece missing here. If Yoda is truly a Jedi master, then after he has raised the X-wing fighter out of the swamp to show it can be done, he should drop it right back in and say to Luke, "When you believe you can do it, then you win."
And then the next time we cut back to Luke and Yoda, it would be enough to see the fighter out of the swamp again, cleaned off and Luke grinning like a man who's just discovered he can run the four-minute mile in three and a half.
It would get applause from the audience. It would visibly demonstrate how much Luke had learned about the Force. It would make his later impatience even more of a failure.
As I understand it, it is not the power itself that's hard to master, it's the self-discipline that's needed for controlling one's use of the power.
What is demonstrated now, in The Empire Strikes Back, is that Luke cannot learn how to be a Jedi knight. He doesn't listen. Yoda tells him he won't need his weapons, he puts his weapons on. Yoda tells him not to go to Bespin, he goes to Bespin. Luke promised to stay and finish his training — he doesn't.
Yoda was right. He can't teach Luke.
If that's the point of this subplot on Dagobah, then Luke is doomed to failure; he isn't much of a hero because he hasn't demonstrated his ability to grow — and that's what heroism really is: discovering that you can master what looks like an impossible challenge.
In fact, Luke does fail on Bespin — but we don't see much evidence that he learns anything from his failure. Did you notice he doesn't rescue anybody? They have to rescue him.
A story is about pain and hope and what we learn in the transition from one to the other. It's about growth, or the failure to grow. If Luke doesn't learn anything, then he can't grow. And if this isn't about growth, then it isn't a story. In fact, it isn't even a very good chapter.
The next episode, Revenge of the Jedi, should bring Luke and Vader together again for a rematch. Based on the evidence so far, I expect Luke to die in the attempt. If he's lucky, he may take Vader with him
Funny. The missing scene in Star Wars was about Luke learning how to use the Force. That's the same thing that's missing here.
An author or filmmaker chooses the specific incidents that he believes best tell his story. That the authors of The Empire Strikes Back chose to portray these incidents suggests that they may not fully believe in the power of the Force themselves.
Hey, guys — next time around, use the Force. Please.