Kris Ashton

I was part of the generation that grew up with the original Star Wars trilogy and one of the first movies I ever saw at the cinema was The Empire Strikes Back. For many years it was my favourite film and I must have watched it more than 30 times.

Forty years after its original release – to the day, as it turned out, although that was pure coincidence – I sat down to watch it with my six-year-old daughter, the latest ploy to fill in time during the corona virus lockdown. We had watched A New Hope earlier in the week and she was eager to see the second movie.

She sat glued to the screen for the first 100 minutes and all was going well until Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader faced off in their light sabre battle. When poor old Luke got the chop, my daughter turned to me in horrified disbelief and wailed, “He cut his hand off!” Then she burst into tears and refused to watch anymore. She still doesn’t know Vader is Luke’s father.

“Huh,” I said to myself as she stormed off, “I guess Empire is a bit too scary for a six-year-old.”

But on the flipside of that parental guilt trip I thought, “Hang on, she didn’t bat an eyelid when Obi-Wan Kenobi wielded his light sabre to dismembering effect in the Mos Cantina and she made only a passing remark when Luke slashed his way out of the ice cave on Hoth. Both of those scenes also showed blood, whereas when Luke lost his hand it was a clean cut. So why such a different response?”

The answer was obvious: my daughter had spent the best part of three hours getting to know Luke Skywalker. She had discovered R2-D2’s secret message, lost Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, joined the Rebellion, and destroyed the Death Star right along with him. She had joined him in his Jedi training on Dagobah, watched him grow and become more confident with the Force, and set out to rescue his friends. So when Vader hurt Luke, he also hurt her.

That’s the power of good characterisation and, as so many critics and fans have pointed out, it’s also why there is such a vast gulf in popularity between the original trilogy and the prequels and sequels. Plot, dialogue, special effects, music – each one alone is dispensable if the others are strong enough, but good characterisation is non-negotiable. It’s what connects a movie (or novel) to the audience and if that connection is strong enough, a viewer will tolerate any number of deficiencies in other areas.

The original Star Wars trilogy is the perfect example of this. No one cares about the cornball dialogue and occasionally dubious plot developments, and when George Lucas ‘improved’ the original trilogy with digital effects, everyone just sort of shrugged their shoulders. But when he decided to make Greedo shoot first in the classic scene from A New Hope, fans were outraged. Why? Because it betrayed the roguish anti-hero quality of Han Solo’s character. That’s not how he would behave!