You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned

Number five in my reverse-order rewatch of all the Star Wars movies!

I'm not sure I actually have all that much to share about this one. For a very long time, Empire was my favorite movie and the asteroid field scene my favorite scene in all of cinema. It would sometimes switch places with A New Hope at the top of my SW rankings depending mostly on mood or whim, but as one of six films, it stood out pretty powerfully as the most successful combination of substance and entertainment in the saga.

The Disney era has undermined that to a certain extent -- not by presenting any singular film that achieves a greater degree of success, but by evolving Star Wars into hundreds of hours of richly varied storytelling with dozens of triumphant arcs that make it harder and harder for me to justify calling one particular chapter the best.

I will say that watching ESB right after ROTJ showcases Episode V's strengths a lot better than watching it as the follow-on to the chronological threesome of Solo, Rogue One, and ANH. Filmically, it's head-and-shoulders above ROTJ for me, whereas ANH has always been strong competition, and both Solo and Rogue One are so visually gorgeous that the more dated aspects of ESB's production values suffer in proximity.

Thematically, the biggest realization I had this time around is the need for Yoda to listen to his own messaging. He and Ben repeatedly tell Luke that there's no coming back from the Dark Side, both in this film and in ROTJ, and their insistence on that point is the perfect example of two of Yoda's best ESB quotes. One of them is the title for this post. The other is, "That is why you fail." As with his Episode II complaints about the Jedi becoming overconfident, these are powerful examples of Yoda being so close to the truth that the moment desperately needs, but not quite grasping it.

The contrast with his wonderful scene in TLJ, in which he pushes Luke to solve things not as the Jedi would have solved them, but by treading a path informed by their mistakes and his own, creates a terrific through-line stretching between all three middle-of-the-trilogy films.