The Empire Strikes Back – Donald F. Glut, 1980 ★½

The Force is Weak with this One

You just broke box-office records, redefined special effects, and kindled sci-fi mania in an entire generation. What to do for an encore?

In the case of George Lucas and the people behind Star Wars, you take a sledgehammer to expectations and give the audience what no one thought they ever wanted. Less thrills, less humor, no happy ending.

That’s the conventional take on The Empire Strikes Back, joined to the fact this risky gamble worked, galvanizing its fan base and transforming a blockbuster into a franchise. So why is it so unimpressive as a novel?

It comes down to an unengaged writer, a pokey story structure, and situations and characters better watched than read.

The story begins three years after the climactic destruction of the Death Star in Star Wars. Luke Skywalker is now a ranking officer in the Rebel Army, hiding out from the evil Galactic Empire on the ice planet Hoth. While he ponders becoming a Jedi Knight, Luke faces the possible defection of old friend Han Solo, also serving the Rebellion but eager to remove the bounty put on his head.

Before any of this is worked out, the Empire launches their titular attack.

Imperial AT-ATs (an acronym for All-Terrain Armored Transports) begin their assault on the Rebels at Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. AT-ATs are described in the book as "mechanized pachyderms." Image from https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/0419/Does-America-need-a-full-size-fully-functioning-AT-AT-Do-we-even-need-to-ask.

Donald F. Glut was tapped to write the book tie-in for the movie, which hit theaters and bookstores at the same time. A seasoned writer of comic books with science fiction and fantasy subjects, he takes a clipped approach to fleshing out someone else’s script:

Troopers hurried to carry out their commands, running through the snow with heavy bazookalike weapons on their shoulders, and lodging those death rays along the icy rims of the trenches.

Later:

In one of the city’s central corridors, Lando, Leia, and Chewbacca held off a squad of stormtroopers by blasting heavy rounds of laser bolts at the Imperial warriors.

When it comes to dialogue or character descriptions, Glut’s writing becomes even more mechanical:

“It’s like part of a dream,” Luke said. He shook his head, feeling cold and frightened. “Or maybe I’m going crazy.”

At least, he knew for certain, he couldn’t have gotten himself into a crazier situation.

Being forced to follow a script can be a challenge for any movie tie-in. But it wasn’t such a problem with the Star Wars novel Alan Dean Foster wrote (credited to Lucas). That book has its flaws, yet captures the pacing and charm of the movie while simultaneously offering color and detail regarding the Star Wars universe that is uniquely its own.

Glut was writing to a younger audience already plugged into the Star Wars universe, and it shows. He’s not toiling in the fields to cultivate a sense of place or occasion. His style is perfunctory, disengaged, and focused on moving the reader to the next set piece.

In addition to comic book writing, Donald F. Glut has been a prolific writer of television-series scripts and books about dinosaurs both fictional and fact-based. According to his Wikipedia bio, he was a classmate of George Lucas at the University of Southern California. Image from https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Donald_F._Glut.

Fortunately, being that this is The Empire Strikes Back, there are several engaging set pieces to energize readers, or at least spark memories of favorite moments from the film.

Or does it? Not so much for me. I never took to Empire the way I did to Star Wars, or as it now must be called, A New Hope. Empire’s challenging story does not compensate, in my view, for its lack of verve or enjoyability.

The only big battle takes place at the beginning of the film, and results in a win for the bad guys. The middle of the film breaks off into two sections, one involving a protracted escape and the other a long spiritual discussion interspersed with magic tricks. The ending is a series of misfortunes designed to leave you hanging.

The advantages to this deliberate and rather grim approach show up on screen better than they do on the page. Most important of these is character development.

Cloud City, on the planet Bespin, is one of the new locations featured in The Empire Strikes Back, along with Hoth and Dagobah. Image from https://www.imdb.com/list/ls066461154/mediaviewer/rm2282371584/.

In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke must deal with the repercussions of his life choices well before that moment of truth in the final act that even people who never saw the movie know all about. Han Solo must work through his commitment issues, both with the Rebellion and with Princess Leia, who is finally coming around to his romantic overtures.

And most importantly, we have the emergence of Darth Vader as a major character, perhaps the major character, after he spent much of the prior film in Governor Tarkin’s shadow.

In the book, all this is touched on, but nothing is developed, at least not for long. Han Solo’s enormous charisma on screen is short-changed in the book, perhaps because the actor playing Solo, Harrison Ford, rewrote much of his character’s dialogue.

Indeed, the novel misses some of his best lines: “Never tell me the odds!” … “I’m nice men” … and those two coolest words a man ever said to a woman: “I know” – all these are AWOL in the novel.

Han (Harrison Ford) and Leia (Carrie Fisher) share a tense moment of frustrated romance in a scene early in The Empire Strikes Back. In the book, the passion doesn't emerge even after they start kissing. Image from https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/conventions-events/han-solo-the-empire-strikes-back-jacket-could-reach-1-million/.

Instead, Glut describes what is happening between Han and Leia like he was writing a police procedural:

Han was getting used to the princess’s left-handed compliments, and he couldn’t say that he really minded them. More and more he was enjoying the fact that she shared his own sarcastic sense of humor. And he was fairly sure that she was enjoying it, too.

The best thing about The Empire Strikes Back is the Empire itself, which offers a lot more personality and intrigue than the goodie-goodie Rebellion. Tarkin may be gone, but Vader dominates what’s left in formidable fashion. In Star Wars we saw him briefly force-choke one uppity Imperial officer; in The Empire Strikes Back he outright murders two underlings while putting the rest of his command on notice.

Vader’s hard approach defines those who serve under him:

Supreme confidence reigned in the heart of every crew member in this Imperial death squadron, especially among the personnel on the monstrous central Star Destroyer. But something also blazed within their souls. Fear – fear of merely the sound of the familiar heavy footsteps as they echoed through the enormous ship. Crew members dreaded these footfalls and shuddered whenever they were heard approaching, bringing their much feared, but much respected leader.

Admiral Piett (Kenneth Colley, at right) gets the news he's been promoted, something predecessor Admiral Ozzel (Michael Sheard) finds tough to swallow in a scene from Empire. Image from https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/12/the-ballad-of-admiral-piett/420570/.

People looking for differences between the book and movie will find them, though they have to look hard.

·      An Imperial commander named Veers leads an armored assault on the Rebel base at Hoth; in the book it is revealed he is killed by a kamikaze attack, while the film leaves it unclear (a point of debate to this day).

·      Luke’s Jedi training takes him to the planet Dagobah, where he meets Yoda, just like the movie. Only this time Yoda is blue-skinned and uses attacking hover-balls to test Luke’s readiness.

·      Lando Calrissian, Han’s old buddy, finds himself catching a taste of Vader’s fabled force-choke when he discovers the folly of trying to haggle with the dark master.

Much is made of the Force in this novel; this time the word is capitalized and more is revealed about it having a unique metaphysical quality, particularly in the discussions between Luke and Yoda. I’m not big on their exchanges in the film, but I want to give Mark Hamill and Frank Oz big props about how much feeling they lend to lines that read like fortune-cookie clichés on the page.

Luke (Mark Hamill) is trained by Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz) as Luke's droid companion Artoo-Detoo looks on. In the book, Yoda pranks Artoo with the old accidental-levitation ploy. Image from https://screenfish.net/star-wars-episode-v-luke-strikes-out-on-his-own-as-the-empire-strikes-back/.

About the one thing in the book that comes off well is the comic-relief droid See-Threepio; he’s the one thing I notice being a strength in all three original “Star Wars” book adaptations. In Empire Strikes Back he has an awkward but uncontrollable habit of saying the wrong thing while trying to be helpful. This – like nearly everything else – is a carry-over from the script, but an element Glut handles well:

“They’re encasing him in carbonite,” the droid reported. “It’s high-quality alloy. Much better than my own. He should be quite well protected… That is, if he survived the freezing process.”

Chewbacca quickly glanced over his shoulder at Threepio, silencing his technical description with an angry bark.

One thing I don’t like about the movie is the way it ends. It’s not so much that it is a downbeat ending – that is needed to set up a bigger payoff in the next film. It’s more the lack of story development, focusing so much on Luke’s epic – yet anticlimactic – confrontation with Darth that it shorts the rest of the characters’ adventure in Cloud City as an afterthought.

Despite my coolness to The Empire Strikes Back, the film somehow managed to find an audience. Above, a crowd forms for a morning showing in Madison, Wisconsin, shortly after the film's May 1980 opening. Image from https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM109027.

I don’t find myself that engaged by their struggles or emotional tumult in the film, but there is a glimmer of something missing in the novel, where everything is handled in even more rushed a fashion. Despite an opportunity to plumb Luke’s feelings after all that has been revealed to him, he is described as a total blank, staring off into space with his friends in a final scene that is straight from the movie, yet oddly flatter:

Slowly he put his arm around Leia and together with Threepio and Artoo, they faced the heavens bravely, each of them gazing at the same crimson star.

Some people seem to think fantasy can be a license for lazy writing; The Empire Strikes Back shows why this is not true. Especially when delivering a challenging story, you need to do more than cover the bases. You need a touch of magic missing from this novelization.