First off, I must say it’s amusing and interesting how much mileage we’ve gotten out of the words “orbital bombardment” from a single line! But I think we’ve come to a mutual understanding of sorts, we more or less agree:
- Certainly Leigh Brackett, at the least, wrote murderous intent into Darth Vader in the first half of her draft.
- Subsequent drafts show an evolution playing this aspect down.
- By the final script they’ve got it to a point where for many viewers (like me!) they’ve successfully rid the script of any overt murderous motivation…
- But Lucas and Kasdan have perhaps underestimated that many other viewers (like you!) may still take the term “orbital bombardment” to specifically reference a plan of guaranteed eradication of the rebels, including Luke.
- I think we agree that even if we go with the most uncharitable read of this scene, it’s at worst a very minor flaw in a masterpiece of genre cinema.
Works for me!
Yeah, that’s a good summary. I agree with everything you say here.
Regarding the “orbital bombardment” line - maybe I read too much into it, but I always took General Veers’ line to strongly imply that Vader must have previously ordered Veers to bomb the base from orbit. In my reading of the scene, it makes more sense that Veers brings up the infeasibility of bombardment because Vader had earlier ordered Veers to carry it out. And more significantly, Vader orders Veers to prepare for a surface assault only after Veers explains that bombardment from space is infeasible. (I admit this is muddled somewhat because earlier on the bridge Vader had already ordered Veers to prepare his troops. But I always interpreted that line as more of a generic order to have troops standing by ready for deployment just in case.)
Also - you brought up earlier how a lot of the plot mechanics surrounding Hoth are designed to setup an excuse to have a visually awesome ground battle. I agree with this. But then why do we even need the scene where Ozzel messes up Vader’s plans? The excuse for a cool ground battle should be trivially easy to write if you know about the ending twist. Vader should demand a ground invasion as Plan A because he wants to capture Luke alive. The whole business with Ozzel coming out of hyperspace early, forcing Vader to adjust plans, simply muddles this whole issue. But it makes sense once we realize that Vader’s motivation was originally just to kill Luke, but Lucas/Kasdan needed some excuse to have a cool ground battle with impractically awesome AT-AT walkers. (To be fair, even without the ending twist, the Hoth ground battle could be justified simply by the Rebels’ discovery of the probe droid prompting them to raise the shield.)
Ironically, in Brackett’s draft (page 40), no reason for the ground invasion is provided. (Also there is no Imperial probe droid - Vader finds the location of the Rebel base on page 21 by interrogating some alien smuggler.) It’s implied that the “ice castle” that the Rebels use as a base is somehow immune to orbital weapons. Maybe at some point, Kasdan/Lucas/whoever decided they needed to explicitly justify the ground invasion, (Kasdan’s writing for ESB is more military sci-fi than Brackett’s more fantasy-heavy style) so they developed the “Ozzel excuse”. This ironically became unnecessary once the ending twist was decided. (But Ozzel’s death is such a cool scene, establishing Vader’s infamous habit of casually murdering underlings when they mess up, so I’m glad the scene exists.)
Anyway, I think the earlier drafts strongly support the interpretation that Vader ordered the bombardment and intended to kill Luke, which is why I always felt something was a bit off about Vader’s motivations.
Basically what I’m saying is that there’s no reason at all this story wasn’t still heading toward Vader’s redemption regardless. Certainly it majorly effects the backstory, but the general sequence of events in ROTJ’s plot don’t have to be overwritten from what we know. You’d only have to make adjustments in motivations, something like Luke’s existence profoundly triggering the remorse Vader still feels for betraying Anakin Skywalker (or whatever Skywalker Sr’s name would’ve ended up being).
You’re probably correct. Even in Brackett’s draft, there are some hints of nuance in Vader’s portrayal. Brackett’s draft also depicts tension between Vader and the Emperor (page 71 and 90), which is an obvious setup for Vader to later betray his master. And of course, there’s precedent in earlier drafts of a black knight that makes a last minute turn to good. But the thing that really started me on this whole tangent was that in Brackett’s draft, Vader definitely, indisputably, unambiguously tries to murder Luke by force choking him from a distance (page 45) - an event that Luke barely survives due to a fortunately timed jump to hyperspace. And my primary point is that Vader’s desire to kill Luke seems to have made its way into Act I of Empire Strikes Back as a vestigial remnant, in the form of Vader’s attempt to destroy the entire Rebel base from orbit.
I also suspect a related vestigial plot remnant is to be found in the general weirdness surrounding Vader’s conversation with the Emperor. This brings up the question of what exactly Vader knows about Luke and when, what the Emperor knows, and at what point Vader decides to use Luke to overthrow the Emperor. To me, Act I of ESB seems to imply that Vader is just straightforwardly carrying out orders to kill Luke and the other rebels. Vader openly throws around the name “Skywalker” in front of his crew. But when speaking to the Emperor, Vader is very cagey and downplays Luke as a threat, suggesting either subterfuge on Vader’s part, or perhaps merely an attempt to downplay his failure to kill Luke.
In Brackett’s draft, the Emperor scene is the turning point in Vader’s motivation, where he now wants to capture/convert instead of kill Luke, to overthrow the Emperor. In Kasdan’s drafts and the actual film, the Emperor suggests converting Luke at the prompting of Vader, whereas in Brackett’s draft, the Emperor firmly wants Luke dead (page 71) but Vader secretly decides to use Luke to overthrow the Emperor (page 91) after sensing that Luke is becoming powerful. Either way, the Emperor scene functions as a pivotal turning point in the script for Vader’s motivation, and explains why Vader was originally trying to kill Luke in Act I, but then changed to trying to convert Luke. But the ending twist nullifies this scene’s function as a turning point, since the twist implies Vader always wanted to secretly capture Luke, even before speaking with the Emperor. The Emperor doesn’t really tell Vader anything he doesn’t already know. It seems to be public knowledge that Luke is a Skywalker, and the Emperor mentions “the son of Skywalker” as if Vader already knows Luke is his son. So the scene loses much of its original purpose when viewed post-twist, functioning mostly as a way to simply introduce the Emperor as a character for later movies, and to setup/mislead the audience about Vader’s intentions on Bespin. (The altered 2004 Blu-ray dialogue tries to better clarify the situation, albeit in a very clumsy way. Vader asks “how is this possible?” after the Emperor claims Luke is Anakin’s son. This implies either that Vader is very transparently playing dumb or is actually clueless/unsure about Luke at this point. The latter possibility would restore the scene’s function as a turning point for Vader, since Vader is now discovering/confirming for the first time that Luke is his offspring. I wonder if Lucas changed the dialogue here because he realized it makes no sense that Vader was trying to kill Luke in Act I if Vader had always known Luke was his offspring.)
Finally, the lightsaber battle on Bespin also may have some traces of earlier plot mechanics. The lightsaber battle plays out like Vader really IS trying to freeze Luke in carbonite so Luke can be transported to the Emperor. (Vader uses the Force to flip the “on switch” to the carbon freezing device after knocking Luke into the chamber.) But after the twist, it’s kind of unclear what exactly Vader was trying to achieve by freezing Luke in carbonite. It can be interpreted in many ways: (A) Vader initially intended to obey the Emperor and bring Luke to him, but changed his mind after seeing that Luke was powerful and/or after unexpectedly feeling affection towards Luke; (B) Vader was trying to freeze Luke in order to transport him somewhere away from the Emperor where Vader could privately train/convert Luke; or (C ) Vader didn’t intend to reveal his identity to Luke at all on Bespin - because it’s a lot easier to convert someone to the Dark Side when they’re mad at you for killing their father - but after Vader failed to make any progress and Luke was cornered, Vader gambled (unsuccessfully) that revealing his identity as Luke’s father would at least buy him some form of tentative loyalty from Luke. In any case, I get the sense the writers didn’t actually have a solid idea in their minds to explain Vader’s attempts to freeze Luke, apart from the dramatic story-telling requirement to mislead the audience before the big reveal. This ambiguity may be traceable to Brackett’s draft (page 116), where there is no carbon freezing chamber at all on Bespin, and Vader is just straightforwardly trying to convert Luke to the Dark Side in order to overthrow the Emperor.
My point is just that the final script contains vestigial traces of changing motivations and relationships from earlier drafts throughout the writing process, revealing a more muddled story, rather than the straightforward story we all have in our heads, where Vader wants Luke for his own secret purpose and is not aligned with the Emperor on this issue from the very beginning of the movie. If the ending twist had existed since the very first drafts, the whole Hoth sequence would probably be written differently such that Vader explicitly orders a ground invasion as Plan A, specifically instructs his generals to capture Luke alive, and perhaps treats Luke’s last name as privileged information so that efforts to capture Luke alive fly under the Emperor’s radar.
The film is still a masterpiece. The criticism I have here is something only us overly analytical fans would notice or care about - but I find the topic interesting because it’s a window into the evolving story behind the scenes.