The Last Honorable Officer

I love movies. I love going to the theater. I love talking about them over coffee, tea, or cocktails. I love dissecting them. Learning how and even why they were made.

I love the romance of them. The idea that hundreds of people can come together to make something that not one of them knows how it will turn out. The notion that even the worst movie you ever saw, somebody put their creative heart into bringing it int the world.

I love that they have the power to make you angry. Make you cry. Make you laugh. All at the same time.

I love that no matter how dumb, at their best they are entirely human.

The human part is the thing executives always miss when hunting for that next success. In their pursuit of the next hit. The next money maker. The next Star Wars full of franchising opportunities.

They miss the point.

The Empire Strikes Back has long been argued to be the best of the Star Wars movies. A lot of reasons have been put forward over the years. Some technical. Some emotional. All of them are wrong.

The answer is Captain Needa.

A leader, responsible for others, is given an impossible task to complete. He does everything he can to accomplish it, only to fail. He knows what the price of that failure will be, but chooses to face it on his own terms, taking a shuttle to face Darth Vader.

It’s a small part meant to illustrate the ruthlessness of Vader. It elevates his menace in all the right ways. It’s a perfect mechanical device that sets the path for our shocker at the end of the movie when we learn his relationship with Skywalker.

And yet, that isn’t what makes it so great.

Michael Culver’s wonderful acting makes it great. He takes what would be throw away scenes in our MCU era of movie making, and transforms them. He lets us connect to his character in the most human of ways.

The acting is subtle. He uses slight shifts in speech and facial expressions to convey a whole hell of a lot of emotion. He is both a whole developed person we can empathize with and a cypher we can paint ourselves over.

Who hasn’t been given an impossible task from a boss? What leader hasn’t had to try and keep it together in front of their team? Who doesn’t want to be able to choose how they go out?

In a single character, a whole range of the human experiences is captured. He isn’t the only character to do this. The movie is filled with very human moments. From major moments with the main cast, to the smallest of arcs that barely cover any time at all.

I got to call out General Veers for an honorable mention. Julian Glover snidely delivering “He felt surprise was wiser…” is every one of us talking about that one guy at work.

But that is the goods. That is the stuff. That is what makes Empire the best of the bunch. The oh so familiar human-ness of the characters. It creates fertile ground for the hundreds of people bringing it to life.

It’s the difference between the movie you carry with you and the one you forget a week after seeing it.