It went from the best movie to the worst movie.

I just got done watching Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and I wanted to express my displeasure with it.

It’s like Irvin Kershner just doesn’t understand what makes a Star Wars movie a Star Wars movie.

First off, there’s so many questions left unanswered from A New Hope. What were the Clone Wars? Why didn’t we get to see the Kessel Run? Who’s this Jabba character, and why didn’t we meet him?

Whole characters are completely abandoned. Where was General Dodonna? Shouldn’t he be leading the rebellion?

To compensate, Empire fills time with completely useless plots and tons of new characters just to sell toys.

The entire mynock scene could have been completely edited out. All it does is force a weird love-triangle angle into the universe, when it’s clear after A New Hope that Luke and Leia are meant to be together.

Then they add in a bunch of bounty hunters. Boba Fett? 4LOM? IG-88? What is this junk? They only let one of them talk, because now the story needs to move to the SJW portion of adding some space diversity in Lando Calrissian. I’m so tired of these movies adding that crap in instead of just telling us a nostalgia-filled story. That’s what I expect in sequels.

Think of everything that made A New Hope good — world-destroying weapons, romance, daring escapes, epic space battles, and the good guys triumphing in the end.

And Empire Strikes Back throws ALL of that away.

Why wouldn’t the Empire just build another Death Star? Or maybe an even more powerful weapon, to raise the stakes higher?

On the romance, what the heck was that? They split up Luke and Leia. What, are we supposed to ship Luke and Yoda now? What would we call that? Yoke?

They can’t even get the daring escapes right, even with the movie just being one extended chase scene. The heroes are reduced to pretending to be garbage, then ultimately failing.

I haven’t even gotten to the worst part. They ruined Vader. They took the greatest villain ever, and they turned him into a second-in-command. Why did we ever need to see him bowing to this Emperor? It’s a wasted moment, and it makes me think that Vader is having to punch a clock to work every day. All to set up some lame, contrived plot twist of “I am your father.” Spoilers LOL. Because everyone has to be related now.

I only hope that they fix everything with Return of the Jedi, especially the Luke-Leia relationship.

Darren J. Gendron is a known scallywag, comedian and webcomic creator.