In honor of Star Wars: The Force Awakens' release, we're rerunning our series from 2012 when I watched the Star Wars movies for the first time. Read my intro/explanation here, and here's my Star Wars: A New Hope review.

The Empire Strikes Back is probably one of the densest genre movies I have ever seen.  Because it embraces its role as sequel fully, the story dives right in and doesn't need to spend more time on character development.  Even when it adds new characters (like Yoda, more on him in a minute) there's not a ton of backstory, and yet, they seem to fit perfectly well into the world for their own purpose.  Besides, Empire seems to know now with gusto that there will be a follow-up, and the layers don't all have to fit into a single feature.

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Image via Lucasfilm