50 Greatest Action Sequences: #2

2. The Empire Strikes Back – Battle in the Snow

“Echo Station 3TA. We have spotted Imperial Walkers.”

Clearly what makes this battle sequence from Irvin Kershner’s seminal sequel stand out is the inimitable performance of Cheers icon John Ratzenberger as the guy who says, “Okay, everybody to your stations! Let’s go!”

The AT-ATs are cool, too.

This sequence excels by giving the audience something they have never seen before. The temptation with a sequel is to give the audience more of the same, just bigger and more expensive. Empire was certainly more expensive, but it took the story in directions the audience never anticipated and gave them action they hadn’t seen in Star Wars or, for that matter, any other action film.

And by hadn’t seen, I mean even in the trailers or the promotional material. I remember as a kid getting a picture book version of the movie a few days before it came out. I didn’t read it, but I looked at the pictures. I also looked at every photo from every magazine article (I still remember it on the cover of Time). No mention of Imperial Walkers. No photos. No one knew they were coming, much less what they looked like. They were as well kept a secret as the identity of Luke’s dad.

As a result, the first part of this sequence dazzles the viewer with the sheer novelty of the machines as much as the pyrotechnics of the actual fight. The element of mystery and surprise is just as important to an action sequence as it is to any narrative, though it rarely gets employed.

This is also a perfect marriage of technique and effect. Using stop motion animation, a very old technology at that point, to render the walkers works well because the practice depicts stilted motion more readily than fluid. That’s why, even by today’s standards, the walkers still look bad-ass.

Which is not to say that these adversaries are entirely original. Lucas based them, in part, on one of the oldest of sci-fi texts, War of the Worlds. The tripods in that tome are the inspiration (along with gantry cranes) for the beasts of this sequence. One of the many reasons this is a good choice is that the very size of the walkers adds to the dimensionality of the fight. If they were just tanks, you’d have the snowspeeders dive bombing them and nothing else. Here the fact that they are tall and have legs means you can have the fighters flying under them, over them, around them, etc. In an action sequence, it helps to have options.

A production design element that works well in the Star Wars universe and especially well here is specialization. Whenever Lucas thinks up a new spaceship or vehicle, a new outfit for its driver from the costume department isn’t far behind. This, of course, means they can sell more action figures, but it also helps give each fraction of that universe it’s own identity. The AT-AT drivers are, for some reason, my favorite stormtrooper variation, perhaps because their action figures always looked like they could kick all the other action figures’ asses.

The scene doesn’t settle, however, for new toys. It would suffice, perhaps, for this to be a shoot-em’-up between the snowspeeders and the AT-ATs, but Lucas throws in the wrinkle that shooting them isn’t enough. It’s always a nice moment in sci-fi when the good guys realize that point-and-shoot won’t stop whatever they’re battling, because it forces the characters and, by extension, the action sequence, to be more creative. It encourages the audience to problem solve along with the characters instead of just waiting for them to pull the trigger. Here, our heroes come up with two inventive ways of bringing down the behemoths. The key to some of the best action sequences is to present an interesting physical problem and provide a creative physical solution.

Kershner talks a lot about familiarity in his commentary on this sequence. For all the novelty of the walkers, he ties in to some common action tropes to keep the viewer grounded. There’s the scene of the pilots running to their snowspeeders, reminiscent of old WWII films (a convention evoked by the original Star Wars as well) or the periscope-style device the AT-AT commander uses to target the generators toward the end of the sequence. Even the shtick of Han Solo trying to punch-start the Millenium Falcon is one of the oldest jokes in the book, effective here because we’re not expecting it tied to such “advanced” technology.

See also: Final battle in Star Wars, Spielberg’s take on tripods in War of the Worlds, Something else we’ve never seen before – The door chase in Monsters, Inc.

Next: What a coincidence! The greatest action film of all time has the greatest action sequence of all time!