Coming in hot with the hot takes! Controversy ahead!

The commonly accepted wisdom among “Star Wars” fans is that Irvin Kershner’s 1980 film “Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back” is the best film in the “Star Wars” canon. Many appreciate its relatively dour tone and po-faced sense of panic. “Empire” carried over the characters from “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” and took them more seriously. In George Lucas’ original 1977 film, the characters played out as broad archetypes. In “Empire,” they were depicted as depressed, struggling, injured, panicked, or standing on the cusp of wisdom. They became deeper and more human.

Also, “Empire” expanded the role of fan-favorite character Darth Vader (physically portrayed by David Prowse, voiced by James Earl Jones) from a threatening lieutenant into the right-hand man of the Emperor (who was played by Elaine Baker and voiced by Clive Revill in the original version of “Empire” before Ian McDiarmid replaced them both in later re-cuts). Vader now had command of a fleet of Star Destroyers and set out on a wild quest to find Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), the Rebel soldier responsible for blowing up the Death Star, effectively hamstringing the Empire’s evil war efforts. It wasn’t revealed until the end of the movie that Vader’s tenacity had a secret motivation; it turned out Luke had secretly been Vader’s son this whole time.

Luke didn’t just learn that Vader was his father, either; he also had his hand severed by Vader in a lightsaber fight.

On top of all that, “Empire” ends on a cliffhanger, which is also deeply appreciated by most fans. The ordinarily cocky Han Solo (Harrison Ford) meets his match in the bounty hunter Boba Fett (physically portrayed by Jeremy Bulloch and originally voiced by Jason Wingreen, with Temuera Morrison voicing him in subsequent re-cuts), and ends up frozen in a block of carbonite for transport. Meanwhile, Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) proclaims her love to Han just before the freezing process, introducing a new emotional dynamic.

Despite all these things, though, I maintain that “A New Hope” is the superior film. Read on to find out why.

The revelation that Vader is Luke’s father at the end of “Empire” is, of course, one of the most famous twists in screenwriting history. The twist went on to dictate the stories of most of the “Star Wars” films that followed. Many “Star Wars” stories thereafter were dedicated to Luke’s inherited Force powers, Vader’s origin, and a general sense of messianic and antichrist destiny.

Say what you will against me, but that twist in “Empire” robbed Luke of his uniqueness.

Luke, as he was presented in “A New Hope,” was merely a random kid. He lived on a dumpy, impoverished desert planet, and resented his aunt and uncle who raised him. When he stumbled upon a holographic recording of a beautiful princess, his world was shaken. Here, it seems, was a ticket away from Tatooine. He introduced himself to a local hermit named Ben (Alec Guinness), and Ben told Luke that he knew his real father. Vader, Ben claimed, killed Luke’s father. Ben himself is actually Obi-Wan Kenobi, a famed Jedi Knight.

Then the Empire invades and kills Luke’s aunt and uncle. With nothing to lose, he leaves Tatoonie to join the Rebel war effort, wanting to help in the final eradication of the evil Empire. He was a random kid who started from nothing and grew to become a fresh-faced soldier who used skill and mastery of the Force to deal the death blow to the Death Star. It’s a satisfying arc. He went from zero to hero.

“The Empire Strikes Back,” though, by making Luke the son of Vader, rescinded his “zero” status. He was now a part of the story by birthright. A little kid watching “A New Hope” might relate to Luke, seeing themself as a similarly ordinary person with the potential to become a hero. Thanks to the twist ending from “Empire,” though, Luke was now destined to be great, which removes his humanity a little. Now he is someone possessed of super-powered, royal blood.

“A New Hope,” as most fans know, was partly inspired by the 1930s sci-fi serials that Lucas watched as a kid, and most of its characters are broad archetypes taken from wild adventure stories. There is the fresh-faced hero, the aged teacher, the charming rogue, the pretty princess, the weird alien, the evil military lord, and a creepy dark wizard. Through its broad characterizations and simple storytelling, “A New Hope” extends those cinematic traditions into the modern day, feeling like a proper update of the material. The film aimed to make modern adults in 1977 feel the same kind of thrill watching a “traditional” sci-fi story that Lucas did as a boy.

“Star Wars,” then, serves as a connection of the modern to the ancient. It links to a larger facet of film history going back to Georges Méliès’ work on films like “A Trip to the Moon.” Heck, if you listen to Joseph Campbell, it extends even deeper into traditional mythic stories from just about every ancient Earth culture. There is something gloriously epic about the simplicity of “A New Hope.”

“The Empire Strikes Back,” however, responded to the overwhelming success of “A New Hope” by expanding the importance of certain characters (notably Darth Vader), and began to explore its own mythology. It separated itself from 40-year-old cinematic traditions and began to only double back itself. As such, the sequel has weaker ties to long-form cinematic traditions. Instead, it’s more focused on its own insular mythology.

This is, of course, an esoteric complaint, but I feel it’s a valid one. “Empire Strikes Back” was a bold new step for geek culture, more deeply exploring the myth of a single film and encouraging speculation (which, in turn, aided in the creation of modern “Star Wars” fandom). It also, however, leaned away from the classical. “A New Hope” was ancient. “Empire” was modern. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the ancient.

In “A New Hope,” Darth Vader isn’t the central villain. The main baddie of the film is Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing), the general in charge of the Death Star. He’s seemingly the highest-ranked Empire officer that appears onscreen and Vader answers to him. Vader, while working for the Empire, doesn’t really appear to care about politics or even who he serves. He’s a creepy, masked warlock with mysterious psychic powers and an open adherence to an ancient religion the other officers don’t respect. He seems to be working for the Empire as a means to hurt others; Vader apparently enjoys killing, and has no issues with blowing up an entire planet just to prove a point.

We also know Vader was once a good friend of Ben, a.k.a. Obi-Wan Kenobi, but was seduced by the dark side of the Force. We don’t know why he now requires a mask and a respirator to survive, so we could only guess what he looked like under his helmet.

“The Empire Strikes Back,” in effect, promoted Vader after he proved to be a popular character among filmgoers. He became something of a fleet admiral, and all the generals answered directly to him now.

Personally, I liked Vader better when he was a lieutenant, aloof, and kind of above the bureaucracy of the Empire. His concerns, early on, weren’t linked to the Empire at all (so far as we knew). He had his own inner life, I sensed. “Empire” turned him into an admiral … and the right-hand man of the Emperor himself. (To be fair, “A New Hope” does allude to this idea.) He was now a key figure in the “Star Wars” saga, which also made him less interesting. In the first film, Luke came from nothing to lead a war effort. In the sequel, a “royal” good guy was now having a personal battle with the king. The story seemed so much smaller that way.

It’s pretty easy to see that the Empire, as depicted in “A New Hope,” represent the Nazis. The flared helmets, fascist architecture, and prim uniforms all are meant to evoke Nazi uniforms from World War II. In an ironic twist, most of the Empire characters are played by British actors; Allied forces became stand-ins for the fascists they fought.

But the aesthetics of the Empire — and the use of the word “Stormtrooper” to describe the Empire’s soldiers — imply that the Rebels are, in fact, fighting space Nazis. Indeed, the final Death Star run was inspired by the 1955 film “The Dam Busters,” a biographical film about the British pilots that enacted a daring and difficult bomb-dropping run on a German dam in 1942. What’s more, the fast-moving X-Wing fighters were modeled after World War I dogfights as they were dramatized in Howard Hughes’ action films of the 1930s. “Star Wars,” as its name implies, contains a lot of war imagery, and audiences can immediately key into the Rebels’ efforts to overturn the space Nazis.

“Empire,” because it’s more focused on its own mythology, as opposed to any cinematic or real-world influences, doesn’t feel like a war story anymore. Kershner’s film is about the Empire “striking back,” but everything takes a turn for the intimate. There is little talk about how Luke needs to be apprehended as a means of restoring morale to the Empire troops or about the kind of territory the Empire lost when the Death Star blew up. The story is no longer about the war, the logistics of battle, or specific military missions. Now it’s a personal story of revenge. The broader context of the war feels absent, distant, as if it’s being fought elsewhere.

This final quibble isn’t so much the direct fault of “The Empire Strikes Back.” Nevertheless, Kershner’s film, in taking the franchise in an insular direction, changed the face of “Star Wars” for the worse. Because its final twist was so shocking, the makers of the follow-up film, “Return of the Jedi,” felt obligated to repeat it. As such, Leia was revealed to also be the child of Darth Vader and Luke’s twin sister. This was a transparent effort by the “Jedi” screenwriters to offer a twist of similar magnitude. Of course, now that three of the main characters are relatives, there’s even less of a sense that Luke is a brave warrior who came from nothing. Now, everything in “Star Wars” is a “chosen one” narrative.

We saw this play out in Lucas’ “Star Wars” prequel films from 1999, 2002, and 2005. The entire “Star Wars” property now hinged on the idea that Darth Vader was Space Jesus, and that his children would eventually be born, grow up as his enemies, and slay him. “Star Wars” went from being an exhilarating fantastical war story with bold, cinematic archetypes into a tale of dry royal lineage. Most of the films released up to this point have been grouped together as “The Skywalker Saga,” transforming the franchise’s central narrative into something formal, regal, even bourgeois. What started as a tale about the efforts of scrappy outsiders attempting to bring down the formality of uniformed fascists became all about the formality.

Again, this isn’t expressly the fault of “Empire,” but the film’s success sent the Skywalker Saga into what ultimately proved to be a less interesting direction. Of course, this is just one man’s opinion. What do you think?