New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Every once in a while, I wonder what it would have been like. I had the summer of 1999, when The Phantom Menace was released. But what would it have been like to have the summer of 1980, when people everywhere lined up at the cinemas to watch the follow-up to Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back. These days, when it comes to event movies that are sequels, there are only a few standards. This is one of them, the original. The movie was unique for many reasons, not just because it did something the original Star Wars did not: leave you hanging. The first movie could have been the only movie: the Death Star is destroyed, the bad guys are either dead or spiraling out of control. But Empire ends on a much more unsure note: Han Solo is given over to an evil and obese gangster, the bad guys are triumphing, and did I mention that Darth Vader is Luke’s father?

Nowadays, the idea that Darth Vader is Luke’s father is about as shocking as knowing that the lead character of Psycho is killed in a shower within the first hour. But in 1980, how could an audience have reacted with anything less than gasping in unison? Audiences wouldn’t have expected anything more than snappy dialogue from Han Solo and Princess Leia, goofy goings-on with C-3PO and R2D2, and some crazy science-fiction action. Certainly, The Empire Strikes Back has all of those things, but the stakes are raised, and the movie feels like something darker, something deeper. I’ll only make a quick note that the film wasn’t directed or written by George Lucas (yes, he helped on the story, but the lines aren’t his), but this much is true: being compared to The Empire Strikes Back can only be a good thing.

Inglourious Basterds

If I was most people, the final film on this list might well be Quentin Tarantino’s 2003 Kung Fu action film Kill Bill Vol. 1. Big shock: I’m not most people. As has been covered in the past, I’m no fan of the two-film series Tarantino chose to make in the early part of the new century. So when the hype for Inglourious Basterds, a World War II movie starring Brad Pitt and his silly Southern accent, ramped up, I was cautious at best. So it was to my genuine and pleased surprise to find that Inglourious Basterds was not only one of the best films of the past year, but was Tarantino’s best film in 15 years. Though the marketing on the film was deceptive at the least (I definitely did not expect Pitt and the title group to be so unimportant), the film was a blast.

Alongside The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds ranked as one of the most suspenseful films I’ve seen in years. Even with all of Tarantino’s colorful dialogue and strange humor, it was hard not to be tense throughout the opening scene set in a French farmhouse, or the protracted tavern sequence. It’s to Tarantino’s credit and to all the actors in those scenes that no famous actors named Brad Pitt are in them. Pitt’s fine in the film, and I enjoyed his comic take on the gung-ho, gruff military leader, but I was as taken as anyone else was by Christoph Waltz’s characterization of Hans Landa, a particularly nasty SS officer. Inglourious Basterds, like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, stands as a testament to why so many people of my generation and of Generation X go wild for Quentin Tarantino and anything he touches.

Continued:       1       2       3