Why is Empire considered the darkest in the OT?

[suarezguy]

Vader torture-interrogating Leia is definitely a dark implied scene (him killing Obi-Wan dark but not so much as Obi-Wan is so accepting of it and feeling it will make him stronger) but it's topped in TESB by his killing his own men and coming close to killing Luke and Han being seen to be tortured (because his friend betrayed him).

 

[Reverend]

We never actually see the interrogation, nor any meaningful after effects so I wouldn't exactly call it "dark" so much as sinister and really quite theatrical in terms of setup.

Seriously, all that was missing after the pull in on the needle was a "dun dun duuuunnn!!!!!".

 

[Solariabsg25]

I wouldn't say so. For one thing certification has always been wildly inconsistent and very subjective from one film to the next. I've seen things in 'PG's that are worse then some '15's and '12's that are more tame than some 'U's I've seen. Have you ever read the kind of guidelines the censors supposedly go by? The more they try to quantify and specifically define where "the line" is drawn the more ridiculous and futile the whole thing seems. It's like the Zeno's Paradox of blood splatter and nipple exposure.

For another, it's just a pair of smoking skeletons. You see more shocking imagery in cheap carnival haunted house rides and as Halloween decorations. Really speaking, the severed arm in the cantina is way more explicit since, you know it's a bleeding, severed appendage of a (presumably) still living person.

Jaws was a PG, as was A Bridge Too Far which involves far more on-screen death and violence than any Star Wars movie. Starship Troopers, which involves numerous decapitations, dismemberments, people being bitten in half, being melted by bio-acid, and having their brains sucked out through a straw, was only a 15.

Then again, 1954's Them! the classic Warner Brothers giant ant movie was an X (what would now be an 18).