Fight Night: Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back

Conflict is the most basic building block of story, and a fight is the most simple conflict there is: Two people come to blows, and one must triumph over the other. Fight Night is a regular column in which Ken Lowe revisits some of cinema history’s most momentous, spectacular, and inventive fight scenes, from the brutally simple to the devilishly intricate. Check back here for more entries.

What is Star Wars? What, specifically, is a Star War? The latter day definition is being stretched a bit more as Disney has taken the reigns and cranked out a ton of spinoffs and tie-ins. Some of it called back to Star Wars’ most prominent influences, and others have finally acknowledged just a little bit of the cultural debt it owes to those inspirations. Mostly, though, Disney has chosen to reply to the question of “What is Star Wars?” with a pretty safe answer, at least in its mainline movies: It’s a story that culminates in a dark villain and a plucky young hero trading some dialogue before lightsabers crash together. If those lightsabers are smacking together in a throne room or over an abyss, all the better.

Star Wars has become an extremely baroque kind of opera, with the kinds of references and character tropes that, like a noh drama, are impenetrable to those who don’t understand the grammar. And the reason it’s like this, I’m convinced, comes down not just to one movie (The Empire Strikes Back), but to one specific fight scene. When Luke Skywalker faces Darth Vader at the end of the film and is rocked by cinema’s first spoiler, it didn’t just provide a twist ending to one movie. It dictated the course of everything Star Wars has become in the subsequent decades it has dominated popular culture.

In our last entry, I explained how a fight between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris is thrilling because it features two world-class athletes who were also expert Hollywood (and in Lee’s case, also Hong Kong) stuntmen. Crucially, the story for this fight is an afterthought. Nobody has ever praised The Way of the Dragon for its script. It’s good enough to justify a camera, a location, and two guys engaging in pinnacle-of-the-form kung fu fighting.

The bout between Luke and his father in The Empire Strikes Back is almost precisely the opposite situation. It’s no intended slight against Mark Hamill and Vader stuntman Bob Anderson to say they are no Lee and Norris. Yet their fight is a master class in how to use a set, special effects, dialogue, lighting, acting, and some carefully rehearsed stunt work to turn a scuffle between one young actor and one accomplished stuntman in a cumbersome costume into an epic drama that has captivated generations of fans.

The Film

The Rebel Alliance has been backed into a corner, and the Empire pursues them doggedly. The young hero Luke Skywalker must pursue the deeper mystical training he needs to develop the latent power he needs to defeat the evil Emperor and his enforcer, the sinister and violent Darth Vader. His friends lead the Empire on a daring chase as he feels guilt over sidelining their cause, and eventually this fear of losing his friends drives him to confront their enemies before his training is complete. You don’t need the whole thing broken down for you again. In the context of The Duel That Changed Everything, it’s actually more instructive to look at what The Empire Strikes Back isn’t, or rather, what it may have been instead.

As I pointed out in my ranking of alternate Star Wars timelines, the future of Star Wars, back in 1978-9, before The Empire Strikes Back came out, was uncertain. Harrison Ford was not necessarily a lock to portray Han Solo again. Stuff was up in the air. But, the studio heads knew they wanted a sequel to the biggest summer blockbuster ever. Author Alan Dean Foster worked together with George Lucas on the story of a potential sequel, and it survives in his novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, a book I recommend you check out if you are a Star Wars fan.

In that story, Luke and Leia, sans Han, go in search of more allies in the fight against the Empire, landing in a solar system where they must sneak around Imperial facilities and where they encounter Darth Vader and must beat him in a race for a mystical artifact. It is roughly 45% more Indiana Jones, and carries none of the baggage of Luke and Leia being siblings, nor of Vader being Luke’s father. It’s intriguing to think of where the series would have gone if that had been its sophomore act.

Ultimately though, Lucas wanted his hero’s journey, and we got it after The Empire Strikes Back got all of its star warring out of its system, with its elaborate snow planet battle scenes and asteroid chases. Finally, it all comes down to our hero and his antagonist. Luke, separated from his friends, comes face to face with Darth Vader in a dark and mist-shrouded room full of foreboding machinery—much like the machinery we now know animates this hulking phantom who used to be a man. After a movie where the good guys have been beaten down and chased across the stars, we’re filled with dread for Luke, who can’t possibly be ready to take this boogeyman down.

What happens next transcends a simple brawl, or even a simple twist ending. It’s the high that Star Wars has unsuccessfully chased for a dozen movies, scores of video games, hours of serialized television, and hasn’t ever quite found again.

The Fight

Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader finally come face to face in the belly of Cloud City as Luke tries and fails to rescue Leia, Han, and Chewbacca from the Empire. It’s all bait meant to draw Luke out of hiding, though, and Luke is eventually lured onto a grimly lit set, Vader awaiting him at the top of a set of stairs. There’s one barb from Vader: “You are not a Jedi yet,” James Earl Jones’ larger-than-life voice investing the line with menace.

Vader was portrayed by David Prowse in the dramatic scenes, but for fight scenes, swordmaster Bob Anderson (who put in stunt and choreography work on basically any movie with a sword in it for a good stretch of time) crossed swords with Mark Hamill, who was responsible for no small amount of stunt work in the scene. Colin Skeaping stands in for Hamill during some of the most intense sequences, including one where Luke Skywalker is launched through a damn window.

Everything about the moments before the two fighters tangle communicates how daunting the prospect of fighting Vader is: Anderson (6’ 1”) was filmed from low angles and often wearing platform shoes or even stilts to ensure he could stand in for Prowse (6’ 7”). Hamill, who stands a respectable American everyman height of 5’ 9”, looks tiny next to his foe. In the first exchange, Vader is fighting Luke one-handed, overwhelming him with brute strength. When Luke falls into the carbonite chamber, it seems like the fight is over.

But it has just begun—Luke uses the Force in a moment of desperation to leap out of danger, and even Vader is impressed. What follows is a brutal, multi-scene, multi-set fight that lasts several minutes and sets of squibs, smoke, and other special effects. Luke and Vader clash and separate, then hunt for one another through the shadowy underbelly of Cloud City. Star Wars’ not-so-secret weapon has always been its sound design, and the clashing of the lightsabers, the sparking set as blades strike it, Vader’s sudden intake of breath from off-screen in the moment before he surges out of the shadows to terrorize Luke, all turn the experience into a tense spectacle.

Hamill said the Empire Strikes Back duel shoot was absolutely draining, lasting days and leaving the actors winded and Hamill bathing in sweat. It was so vigorous that he said he lost weight during filming. The result is a nearly 50-year-old fight that still looks incredible. Hamill looks like he’s been beaten to within an inch of his life, and the choreography leading up to it makes you believe he would be, and that somebody in a restrictive black plastic suit is actually a hulking robot rage sorcerer.

But as amazing as the scene is, it’s still overshadowed in the memory of viewers by the climax. Luke refuses to submit, and Vader cuts his hand off. He scrambles away desperately, hanging on to some cluster of instruments suspended over a yawning void. And then Vader delivers the most consequential lines in Star Wars.

At the beginning of that fight, Star Wars was a space fantasy phenomenon, a kind of fusion of Flash Gordon and Kurosawa and The Dam Busters. After the fight, Star Wars became an epic saga of destinies, fathers and sons, good vs. evil. Luke isn’t a plucky hero striking out for glory anymore, but an epic hero fighting against a force of evil that has corrupted his own father. Which is to say: Star Wars became Star Wars.

This is a column about fight scenes, though, so I’ll stop being effusive for one moment: Star Wars has long had the problem where its final acts feature cuts between multiple storylines. The only thing dragging this fight down is that it keeps cutting away to the other characters, which admittedly can’t be helped due to the story structure and the logistics of saving Luke once he makes his noble sacrifice. It’s too bad it couldn’t be finessed just a bit more.

The Fallout

Vader being Luke’s father is the original theatrical spoiler, the detail that had people leaving the theater with their faces rocked, impatient for the end of the epic saga, ready to write a million fan fiction novels and buy a ton of plastic toys. Star Wars might have been a flash in the pan if the movie had failed, and the movie might not have done nearly so well if it wasn’t anchored by such an explosive and melodramatic finale.

The effect on the zeitgeist was immediate. The effect on Star Wars, though, is almost more interesting. Every single mainline Star Wars movie since has concluded with a lightsaber fight. The story of Star Wars is, on balance, more about the ineffable destinies of space wizards than it is about plucky rebels or military conflicts or dashing rogues—those things have their place in the sprawling media ecosystem Disney has demanded since it acquired the property, but whenever something with “Episode” in the title comes out, those things always take a back seat to this specific flavor of operatic drama.

Despite making 12 parsecs at the box office, Star Wars has taken a pause—not enough return on the most recent investments. When (not if) it comes back, it is virtually assured that its story will culminate in a hero and a villain, their paths fated to cross in some dark and heartless place that is massive and foreboding and hostile in ways out of proportion to the fragile combatants. They will stand silently for a moment before the light from their swords casts each in a stark glow against the blackness. Blades will clash, emotions flare, some truth will be revealed.

It’s not every fight that becomes its own ritual, for good or ill.

Join us again next month as Fight Night goes back to the beginning of Hong Kong girls-with-guns action. It’s Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock’s two-on-two brawl in Yes, Madam.

Kenneth Lowe will complete your training, and with our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy! You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social. To support his fiction, join his Patreon.