Why "The Empire Strikes Back" Hits Harder in Middle Age
On the 45th anniversary of the greatest science fiction epic of our lifetime, the movie still has lessons to give
“What are you doing this summer?” My brother Mark asked. “Never mind, I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You and I are going to London to watch freaking Star Wars.”
I listened patiently as Mark shared the details. This June, the British Film Institute will host a screening of the original Star Wars, the version that first played to audiences in 1977, before George Lucas decided to update it and add a bunch of unnecessary CGI. It’s one of the few original Technicolor prints still in existence, and the first time it’s had a proper theatrical showing in nearly 47 years.
For those of us of a certain age, who grew up with Star Wars and the first two sequels, this is exhilarating news. Finally, the defining movie of our youth as it was always meant to be seen, with clunky special effects created by hand, and Han shooting first.
“That sounds great,” I told Mark. “I’m just… I’m not sure I can afford that.”
My brother and I have always been close, but our lives as adults couldn’t be more different. He runs a hugely successful hedge fund with assets in the billions. I’m a journalist living paycheck to paycheck. He’s got two homes, a goat farm, and an office in Miami. I rent a small three-bedroom apartment in the suburbs, and my “office” is our local coffee shop.
But if there’s one thing we continue to have in common, forged in adolescence and still going strong well into middle age, it’s our obsession with Star Wars.
Yesterday was a pretty big anniversary for nerds like us. It marked the 45th anniversary of the theatrical release of one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time. I’m talking about, of course, The Empire Strikes Back Again, a “reimagining” of The Empire Strikes Back that my brother and I filmed on an 8-millimeter camera.
It’s possible that most of you (okay, all of you) only remember the official release, the one starring Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill. It was something of a cultural phenomenon, with movie theater lines snaking down city blocks and a generation of kids memorizing every line. The less famous version, starring a group of Michigan preteens filling in for the iconic roles, with props created from whatever we could find in our garage, opened just a few weeks later to considerably less fanfare.
The idea to recreate Empire was my brother’s idea, but I helped him storyboard every shot, and together we learned obscure filmmaking terminology. Our favorite phrase was “We’ll fix it in post” — a hopeful prediction, especially given that our editing facility consisted of a cement block and a razorblade.
Casting was easy. Our neighbor Scott, with his rugged good looks and innate talent for smug sarcasm, was a natural as Han Solo. Mike, another neighborhood kid who was just one color-coordinated sweater away from being entirely orange, was C3P0. My brother was Luke, because he had the shag haircut and, more importantly, he owned the camera. And I played Chewbacca, not for my hairiness but because I was the tallest. We had no Leia, because we were too shy to talk to girls.
My brother did most of the directing, and I tried to take over for his scenes, but the footage was ruined by my inability to wink. I could close both eyes, just not one. The dailies were useless — I had nothing but long, lingering shots of trees or patches of grass just to the left or right of the actors. Occasionally the cast would try to jump into frame, but I always pulled the lens away before catching any of the action. Needless to say, I was quickly fired, and returned to my job playing Chewbacca who for some reason was wearing jeans.
Our finished film, all twenty minutes of it (without sound, mind you), was a huge hit. We charged a quarter per head to watch the movie in our family’s basement, and the entire neighborhood lined up to watch it. To this day, it’s still one of the best memories of my childhood. And it continues to be the reason that my brother and I, despite living in different universes, always have something to talk about.
“We should bring our kids,” Mark suggested, still continuing to believe that going to London to see an old movie was something in my price range.
“I don’t think my son would care,” I said, and it wasn’t just because I didn’t want to spring for two international round-trip flights.
“Yeah,” Mark groaned. “I don’t think mine would come either.”
In the last five decades, Star Wars has spawned its own cottage industry, with countless sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. But I have yet to meet somebody under 40 who cares for George Lucas’s fictional universe like those of us who’ve been fans since the beginning.
Even if you loathed the movies, if you came of age in the 70s and 80s, they’re part of our shared history. The original Star Wars trilogy is to Gen Xers what Woodstock was to Baby Boomers; for better or worse, it’ll always be inextricably tied to our generational identity.
Is it just nostalgia? Probably a little. But it’s not just being wistful for youth. There was something magical about being in a world where Star Wars was still something you could discover on your own. There were no fathers or big brothers forcing you to watch it, insisting that it was the greatest film franchise in history. Our parents barely understood it, and the adult world was mostly flummoxed. (The New York Times dismissed Empire Strikes Back as “silly” and like “reading the middle of a comic book.”) Yes, it was part of the cultural zeitgeist, but when you stood in line to see it, with no clue what you were about to see, it felt like it belonged to us.
I will never forget the summer of 1980, when my friends and I debated what we’d seen and how much of it was true. Was Darth Vader really Luke’s father? What had Yoda meant by, “There is another?” And when the opening scroll announced that this was “Episode V,” did that mean there were three other movies that came before Star Wars? Where were they? Had we somehow missed them? Why were they being hidden from us?!
There was no internet to provide all the answers, no Wikipedia or YouTube or social media. The best we could do was host think tanks in the playground, sharing theories and trying to fill in the missing pieces. But we had no way of solving those riddles, and that somehow made them more exciting.
That’s what I’m trying to show my son every time I beg him to watch The Empire Strikes Back with me. There once existed a world where there were still pop culture mysteries.
But the real secret sauce of Empire is that it just gets better as you grow older. As I’ve watched it again in my 50s, I identify with different characters now. I feel for Yoda, not just because he’s 900 years old, but because he’s clearly annoyed by Luke’s impatience. Yoda’s entire plotline is basically: Please calm down, try to focus on your schoolwork, stop thinking only about your friends, and sit down with me for a nice dinner.
That is exactly what it’s like to live with a teenager.
Even Darth Vader is more sympathetic when you hit middle age. He’s a slave to his job, spending every waking hour at the office and dropping everything any time his boss calls. He’s got some health concerns, like respiratory issues—his helmet is basically a fancy CPAP machine. Darth just wants his kids to visit and maybe take an interest in his life, but every time they do, they’re like, “Noooo! Noooo!”
Again, that is exactly what it’s like to live with a teenager.
But my biggest revelation about Empire, which I’ve only realized as I’ve gotten older, is its moral ambiguity. The movie has no happily ever after. There’s no satisfying conclusion. The good guys don’t always win. Your mentors will sometimes lie to you. Your friends sometimes leave. Family is complicated. Love is messy and doesn’t always end up like we expected. As you get older, your “Millennium Falcon” won’t always go to “light speed” anymore, if you catch my drift. It’s basically a metaphor that life can be full of disappointment and uncertainty, and nothing is guaranteed.
I never appreciated any of this when I was 10. To me, it was just a cool movie about spaceships, lightsabers, and telekinetic Muppets. And it is that. But with the hindsight of age, the story gets so much richer.
My brother and I cancelled plans to fly to London for the Star Wars screening. Instead, Mark invited me over to watch a private screening of The Empire Strikes Back Again, our homemade homage to the original. It still holds up, and in a weird way, it had as many surprises as Lucas’s masterpiece.
There’s one scene with Darth Vader wandering the desert planet Tatooine (which we mistakenly renamed “Tantoonie”), searching for Luke, and he decides to stop and take a nap in the sand. That bit was improvised, as the kid wearing the Darth outfit was overheating — we shot it on the beach during a hot summer day in 1980 — and he collapsed from exhaustion.
As a kid, that scene always annoyed me. Darth would never do that! But today, well into our 50s, it’s not just hilarious but also feels strangely relatable. Life can be hard, especially when you’re an older adult and you can’t retire and your kids keep disappearing and your lungs aren’t cooperating like they used to and you can’t remember the last time you had a day just to yourself. Sometimes you just want to lie down and take a snooze.
The Force can wait a half hour!