(Note: Please read my previous review of Star Wars: A New
Hope)
Three years
after the release of Star Wars: Episode
4, A New Hope,
the second movie in the trilogy, Episode
5, The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980. It is easily the best movie in
the trilogy (although my favorite is episode 4, but Empire runs a close second)
with the same awesomely retro but really sort of cool special effects as the
first movie, only just a bit better. This was the same year that the popular
video game, Pac-man was released, which made for an awesome year, because I
love Pac-man. If you liked episode 4 at all, this is definitely worth seeing.
The movie was directed by Irvin
Kershner, with George Lucas as the executive producer. After the scroll, you
see one of the Empire’s remote probes land on the ice planet of Hoth where the
rebels have set up a new secret base. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Princess
Leia (Carrie Fisher), and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) are all at the rebel base. A
snow monster attacks Luke and hangs him by his feet. After he escapes, he sees
the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi who tells him that he must go to the Dagobah system
and learn from Yoda. At the moment, Luke can barely move, let alone go to some
strange place and learn from a Jedi master, but Han once again rescues him in
time for Luke to fight in a stunning battle with the Empire’s gigantic
four-legged metal walkers. Because of their size, they are very slow and
clunky. The rebels can use harpoons to wrap around their legs and bring them
down. Just like in the run on the Death Star in the previous movie, we once
again see that the small can defeat the large.
When the battle is over, Luke goes
off to Dagobah to learn from Yoda with R2-D2, while Han, Leia, Chewbacca and
C-3P0 get onto the Millennium Falcon and
discover that the hyperdrive is broken, and they can no longer go into light
speed. They have to fly into an asteroid field and back out, and they decide
that they need to find a safe place to land and fix the hyperdrive.
Meanwhile, Luke is learning from
Yoda, a 900 year old small and strange looking creature with large ears who has
been training the Jedi for centuries. Now Yoda is the only Jedi left, except
for Luke who is not a fully trained Jedi.
Han and Leia go to Cloud City,
a mining colony in the clouds where they meet Han’s old friend Lando Calrissian
(Billy Dee Williams) who has betrayed them to the Empire. In the end, however,
Lando ends up helping Leia and Chewbacca when Han is frozen in carbonate and
captured by bounty hunter, Boba Fett.
When Luke is in training, he sees a
vision of Han and Leia in Cloud
City and decides to go
rescue them even though Yoda tells him to stay and complete the training. After
promising Yoda that he will come back, Luke sets out for Cloud City,
and gets trapped by Darth Vader, who wants to turn him to the Dark Side of the
Force. In a lightsaber duel, Luke loses his hand, and almost falls off Cloud City.
Leia and Lando rescue him, and the movie ends with a cliffhanger, because Han
is still frozen.
Once again, I should mention the
“shiny version”. Aside from the digital remasterization, (my own word) there
are very few changes made to The Empire
Strikes Back. In the snow monster scene, you see the monster eat Luke’s
Ton-ton, and at the end, you see Darth Vader’s shuttle to show how he gets from
Cloud City to his spaceship.
In the John Williams soundtrack,
there are several new themes, the Imperial March, Yoda’s theme, and a new love
theme for Han and Leia. It is a brilliant soundtrack and a brilliant movie. You
must see it. It is your destiny.
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