Five years in the doghouse is long enough

Five Octobers ago I watched The Empire Strikes Back for the first time in eight years, as the fifth in a six-movie preparation prior to the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That viewing shockingly upended my previous comparative rankings of Star Wars movies. For some unknown number of years, I had claimed that the sequel to the original Star Wars was my favorite Star Wars movie. In one two-hour viewing of an albeit "scruffy looking" copy of the original Empire, I lost all that. (You can read the full post here.)

Not only had it been my favorite of the Star Wars movies, but it had been my fifth favorite movie of all time. Its #5 ranking on Flickchart put it only three spots ahead of Star Wars, so the difference there was negligible. But that also meant it was ahead of some 4,000 and change other movies.

In the time since then, there has been a corrective on Flickchart. It started with Do the Right Thing beating it (as discussed here), and then went on from there. The movie that was once #5 on my Flickchart is now ... #46. Still very high in terms of its overall 99th percentile, but quite a fall from grace for a no-doubt top ten movie up until five years ago. 

Every time a movie would beat The Empire Strikes Back, sending it a notch further downward, or beat a movie that was ahead of Empire, which had the same result, I greeted it with some concern. Too much more of this, and it might threaten to fall below Return of the Jedi, which is at #58. For five years now, I've known that another reckoning with Empire was necessary. I just didn't know when.

It should have come before now. It was Christmastime in 2017 when we watched, as a family, the original Star Wars. That meant me, my wife, a relatively sentient seven-year-old and a likely clueless young boy who was a week away from turning four. The goal was to watch one Star Wars movie each Christmas until, I don't know, we got to the prequels at least. 

But we didn't watch The Empire Strikes Back in 2018, nor in 2019, nor so far in 2020. And that had everything to do with the relatively sentient seven-year-old, who is now ten. 

Although he liked Star Wars fine, he has told me on a number of occasions that he doesn't like "Star Wars," as a concept rather than a single movie. This despite an interest in Star Wars-related paraphernalia, like our Where's the Wookiee? books.

So we didn't push that next viewing. It likely wouldn't have happened Sunday either, except my wife wanted to do a family movie, but we were all Marvel'd out. Since getting Disney+ at the end of August we have watched Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange and Ant-Man -- each of which successively became my ten-year-old's favorite movie he'd ever seen. Ant-Man and the Wasp seemed like a logical next step, and I'm sure the kids would have gone for it, but my wife put on the kibosh -- wanting to save it for later, so it felt fresh again.

We were throwing around other movies -- the merits of Frozen II were half-heartedly considered -- but the time our pizza was arriving was fast approaching, so I just made a command decision. Tonight would be the night that I, that we all, would reckon with The Empire Strikes Back. (It being the 40th anniversary of the movie also appealed to my internal editor's sense of a good news peg.)

After only a few moments of the pristine version of the movie available on Disney+, my "scruffy looking" takeaway from the previous viewing was as thing of the past. I suspected, without outright knowing, that the rest of my complaints would fall by the wayside, too. I immediately felt as though I were back in the company of an old favorite.

One of the things that helped me recognize that was how much investment I felt in whether the kids were enjoying it. If I no longer vouched for Empire, I probably wouldn't care much. But it was clear that I did, and that I do.

They were both incredibly restless, for different reasons. The younger one (now six) was running back and forth on the side of the room, shooting lasers. That's a positive outcome.

The older one was wriggling from one position to another in a beanbag chair, apparently bored.

We used different strategies to quiet them down, with varying success. Though as we have both obviously seen the movie many times, my wife and I didn't try too hard.

Despite all this evidence of my ten-year-old's fitfulness, I was still surprised to hear his assessment when it was all over.

"Did you like it?" I asked.

"No," he responded, definitively. "It was really bad."

I had girded myself for the likely response from a soon-to-be-teenager, which I imagined would be "It was okay." But this really surprised me. I didn't ask any follow-up questions.

It was time for them to go to bed, so I didn't want to impede that part of the process. But I remained sitting on the couch during the credits, befuddled.

Before I had a chance to get up, my son returned to the couch and apologized for not liking the movie.

"That's okay," I said. "You don't have to like it. But what do you think it is about it that doesn't connect with you?"

It was here I was reminded of what an essentially weird movie The Empire Strikes Back is. Especially when you only sort of remember the events of the first movie, which you saw three years ago -- which might as well be 20 when you are a kid.

We should have known from the start there were disconnects here. Not four minutes into the movie my son had asked to pause it, to clarify what was going on. He only sort of remembered the characters from the first movie, and says he does not even remember the Death Star blowing up. We had just read the crawl aloud, but it had not helped. And now suddenly they were on this planet covered with snow, which had nothing to do with any of the settings he may have vaguely remembered from the first movie. 

He didn't ask us to pause it any more times during the movie, perhaps because he allowed the momentum of some of the action scenes to propel him along, perhaps just because he sensed we were annoyed by the interruption. But it was clear he had never fully gotten on the wavelength of this movie.

As he tried to explain what was wrong with the movie, he said "A lot of things happened that seemed like they were important, and then they didn't end up seeming as important as they should have."

I think what he's describing here is the lack of resolution at the end of the movie. As a middle movie in a trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back could end without a happy ending. But my son has seen very few movies that have cliffhanger endings. In fact, he might have seen none. (Avengers: Infinity War is still far off in our Marvel future.) 

I think his comment could be describing that Luke Skywalker loses the lightsaber battle to Darth Vader (and his hand), or that Han Solo is taken away frozen in carbonite, his face a kind of horrifying death scream. I wouldn't be surprised if he were also disturbed by Luke's face appearing in Darth Vader's decapitated helmet after their confrontation on Dagobah, which certainly got me, back in the day. I had to explain that it was a vision, and they didn't ask any follow-up questions.

I think they were also confused by characters like Lando Calrissian. They are not accustomed to processing ideas like betrayal, or how a compromised character can redeem himself as the movie goes along. 

But the real mind-fuck the movie put on him was also the most surprising thing, to me, about his whole viewing experience:

"Why was Darth Vader Luke's father?"

"Didn't you know that?" I asked.

"No," he said.

Now it's me that's mind-fucked.

In this post I wrote about my worries of Star Wars being spoiled for my kids through supplemental material, like the storybook Darth Vader and Son, which includes a bunch of cute drawings of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker engaged in banal father and son activities. I had wanted the reveal in Empire Strikes Back to still have an impact on my kids when they eventually saw it, but assumed that it was not possible.

When I asked what he thought that book was talking about, apparently, my son thought it had been a joke, like if you made a book where Frankenstein's monster was Superman's father. (That's my example, not his.) He didn't think it was like, you know, real.

That's because in a child's world, it's really hard to comprehend that the epitome of evil and the epitome of good could be related to one another. It's a really adult concept to try to grapple with.

In the ten minutes after the movie ended, he had already done some of the grappling. In just talking about it on the couch for a few minutes, he had upgraded his assessment to "pretty good." In the coming days, he will likely continue to process it, and maybe he will unlock more of the experience he had.

As for me, Empire is back in my good graces. I don't think it's going to be back in my top ten on Flickchart anytime soon, but I can easily see it working its way back up to the 20s. I still like Star Wars better, but most of my previous affection for Empire has officially been restored.

The period of reckoning for my son may determine where we go from here. If he can come around on Empire, maybe a viewing of Return of the Jedi will be in the offing, and we'll go from there. Maybe a love will be born. My wife has already suggested something only tangentially related to this storyline, like Rogue One, as a next possible viewing, to see if that helps steer the ship.

Or maybe Star Wars just won't ever be his thing.

As for the younger one ... well, we already know he loves the lasers. 

I did the right thing

There's been a big upheaval in my Flickchart top 20.

Not even my top 20, but my top ten.

Not even my top ten, but my top five.

Just to give you a little perspective, not a single title in my top ten has changed, or even changed relative positions, since I finalized my re-rankings of my movies on Flickchart some four years ago. That's how solid I considered it and that's how inflexible I became in terms of how I viewed these movies and assessed their value to me.

But then, as you recall, I had a somewhat underwhelming viewing of The Empire Strikes Back, heretofore my #5 movie on Flickchart, a couple weeks ago. Now, everything has changed.

Get ready for chaos.

What happened was I was catching up on some long overdue Flickchart ranking on Friday night. I haven't been ranking much on the site lately, in part because the site is blocked at my work, and I have too much else to occupy me when I'm at home. But I did have a little window of available ranking time on Friday night, so I decided to make up for lost time.

After I'd been at it for about 20 minutes, I got the following match-up: Do the Right Thing vs. The Empire Strikes Back. My #41 vs. my #5.

Even knowing the massive implications of the decision I was about to make, I didn't think about it very long before clicking the poster on the left. I did the right thing and selected Do the Right Thing.

Which means that Do the Right Thing is now my #5 movie of all time.

But it likely won't stay there for very long. Since it was only #41 before this, that means there are 40 other movies I (think I) like better than Do the Right Thing, only four of which are currently ahead of it in my rankings. And when it comes up against any of those other 36 in a duel, any of them could jump ahead of it and become my new #5.

In order to prevent his kind of all-out anarchy, what you're supposed to do when reassessing the value of a favorite movie is re-rank just that movie. What many people would have done is just sent The Empire Strikes Back through a gauntlet of ten films in order to arrive it at its new spot in the rankings. That prevents the need to move an undeserving movie way too high, which can have a domino effect and throw a lot of other rankings out of whack for weeks, months or even years to come.

But for some reason, I don't re-rank movies after rewatching them, even though I believe philosophically that it's an approach that makes sense. I guess I'm too worried about being reminded how much I love a movie and having my fresh sense of affection for it artificially inflate its position. It's a variation on my rationale for waiting a month before ranking a new movie, to give me time to reflect on it and not let the freshness of my feelings toward it give it an unnaturally high or low position.

And so I didn't re-rank The Empire Strikes Back, in part because I wasn't sure I even trusted my new sense of doubt about its quality. But that did leave it vulnerable in the open arena of Flickchart dueling, when you never know what decision you're going to be forced to make next, and that vulnerability was exploited on Friday night.

Now if I were really concerned about this, I'd have an option open to me. I could re-rank Do the Right Thing, allowing it to fight those ten or so movies and arrive again at approximately the same spot it held before. I could do that same thing for Empire as well, which is what many people would have done in the first place, as soon as they recognized it had lost some of its value to them, and that this would have implications on all its future duels. I have a unique window of opportunity in which Do the Right Thing's jump in the ranking has not yet had any additional repercussions.

But I kind of like the idea of throwing a wrench into the works for a bit, to shake up some of the bedrock convictions that have become unhealthily fixed for me. The underlying theory about Flickchart is that over time, any kinks will work themselves out through the natural dueling process. Maybe it'll be interesting to see some new blood in my top 20 for a while, to force me to really consider the movies I love and how much I love them, rather than just making robotic choices in duels as a result of knowing by heart which movie has the higher ranking and therefore, which one I like better.

Chaos? Bring it on.

Scruffy looking

Be careful what you wish for ... you just might get it.

The laments of Star Wars fans about the prequel trilogy are well documented, but of course they've also got vocal laments about what George Lucas has done to their beloved original trilogy. You know, "Greedo shoots first" and all that. Part of "all that" is that it's virtually impossible to watch those three films in their unmolested form, without digital additions of Jabba the Hutt and the like.

Virtually impossible.

Imagine my surprise when I ended up watching the original theatrical version of The Empire Strikes Back this past weekend, as my fifth movie in a year of rewatching the original six movies prior to the release of The Force Awakens.

Here's how it happened. I tried to borrow Empire from the library, as I've done with all four of the previous movies I watched. However, Force Awakens fever must be kicking into high gear, because I was third on the wait list for both available copies of the movie. I was trying to watch Episode V by the end of October, following on with the pattern that dictated I watched the first four by the end of February, the end of April, the end of June and the end of August, respectively. So I knew I'd have to resort to other methods to get my hands on it.

I knew that our friends owned DVD copies of the original trilogy, and my wife was heading over to their house on Saturday to visit (we have sons that are within a year of each other), as well as to return something we borrowed from them. She did indeed come back with Empire -- one of the two discs, anyway. At first we were worried that disc 2 had only bonus features, and that we'd be out of luck, but then we noticed that no, it also houses the original theatrical version (!!!) of the movie.

I had thought numerous times over the years, "Oh, if only I could watch these movies as they were originally released, without all the enhancements and corrections and remasterings that have messed them up." I had heard stories about fan cuts of these movies being available on the internet, but I didn't think they were available in any sanctioned format. I idealized these as some pure and unadulterated version of the movies I loved, thinking that I could unilaterally dismiss the changes that were made to them ... but as it turns out, I cannot dismiss those changes.

Simply put, this Empire Strikes Back looked like junk. Who's scruffy looking? This movie.

For one, the widescreen did not properly fit our TV. It was too scrunched down, filling only about half of the available space with the image. I later learned that this is because it was transferred from laser discs, meaning for some reason that the aspect ratio did not conform properly to a modern TV. (This DVD was released at least a decade ago, which explains the availability of these original theatrical versions in the first place.) I don't entirely understand that, but I'm glad it wasn't my TV at fault -- I spent some time fiddling with the settings, knowing my kids had been mucking around with the remote control.

Then the images themselves just looked so ... 1980. It was then that I realized how I've been spoiled by the digital remastering of Empire that I first saw in 1997 when the special editions were released, and then again in 2007 when I revisited the movie for the first time since then. And as most people know, Empire was the original movie that Lucas messed around with the least, so what we basically got in the Empire special addition was a crisper, nicer-looking image with almost none of the additional bullshit content we didn't want. So Empire was the movie that would least benefit by watching the original version.

These visual factors certainly complicate a conclusion I think I may have reached after this particular viewing:

I actually like Star Wars more than I like The Empire Strikes Back.

I suppose that's not quite as shocking as making it a single-sentence paragraph would indicate, but for someone who has long happily subscribed to the conventional wisdom that Empire was the best Star Wars movie, it felt like a shock indeed.

Why didn't I care so much for Empire this time? It's hard to say exactly. But I'll try.

The first obvious conclusion is that it suffered in comparison to my last Star Wars viewing, which enthralled me so much back in August. The images looked so great on that BluRay version that I almost didn't care about the aforementioned Jabba insertion and the aforementioned display of inept marksmanship by Greedo. Looking as good as it did, it wrapped me up in the story and made me realize how intensely satisfying it is.

During this viewing of Empire, I tended to focus on the ways the story did not leave me satisfied. The story actually felt very rushed to me this time watching it, which is in direct contrast to the very deliberately paced opening of Star Wars. Even though the opening crawl is supposed to do the work of reminding me where we are in the story -- and I had quibbles even with that, as it describes Luke Skywalker as the leader of the rebellion, when he's really more of an instrumental figure than the leader -- it nonetheless felt like the movie was not properly set up. How much time has passed? How did they get to Hoth? If they had time to set up a whole base on Hoth, why is Han Solo still with them? Didn't he have one foot out the door at the end of Star Wars? I feel like I must have known the answers to these questions before, or if I didn't, not knowing didn't bother me.

Then I felt myself getting stuck on the details. If R2D2 calculated the odds of surviving the night out in the Hoth cold as 725 to 1, why did Han basically have no trouble with that, once he found Luke? I mean, his Tauntaun didn't even survive, yet once he set up camp, you get the idea he just passed the night drinking hot chocolate and singing folks songs. He's no worse for the wear in the morning when the search mission finds them, and doesn't need to spend any time in a cauldron of bubbling medical liquid. I was thinking that I'd like to see a movie devoted to the harrowing night passed by Han and Luke on Hoth, when they nearly froze to death and at a million different moments you didn't know if they'd survive. But Han and Luke didn't have that kind of night, so what was all that 725 to 1 talk?

I felt a certain hastiness on Dagobah, as well. How long is Luke there? How much training has he done? If he and the others left Hoth at the same time, and the others only had a couple days at most of fleeing the empire, that means that Luke should only have a couple days at most of training. I mean, yeah, the point is supposed to be that he goes off to face Vader when he isn't yet prepared. But how could Luke think he was even almost prepared? He trained for a day or two with Ben back on the Millennium Falcon, and he trained for a day or two with Yoda here. And only when blowing up the Death Star or getting his lightsaber back in time to slay a Wampa did he really demonstrate any fitness with the Force at all. I remember when I was younger thinking, "Okay, Luke's still a rookie, but he's almost ready to face Darth Vader." For reals? That would be like me going through an intensive week of learning how to play baseball and then thinking I could cut it in the major leagues.

Before I go shuffling my Flickchart rankings, though -- Empire is currently at #5, and Star Wars at #8 -- I think I need to get my hands on the special edition, and see if I still have these problems with the plot. On the one hand, that's kind of an idiotic thing to think, because how a plot functions should have little to do with how the picture looks. On the other hand, could I have really been wrong about The Empire Strikes Back all the other times I watched it? I have to think that unpleasantness of watching this version of Empire -- even as it brought back a certain nostalgia for the quaint version I saw for the first time 35 years ago -- had something to do with my loss of certainty about its narrative.

As I got through the prequels and on to Episode IV, I assumed that the rest of my Star Wars viewing schedule would assume a very pro forma quality, and that few surprises would await me. Now that this Empire shocker has just happened, I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that I think Return of the Jedi is the best Star Wars movie when I watch it sometime before the December 17th release of The Force Awakens.