Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

A Wagnerian pop movie -- grandiose, thrilling, imperiously generous in scale, and also a bit ponderous... The throwaway wit and the recondite references to old movies have been replaced with solemn reverence.

The Empire Strikes Back will deserve whatever it earns. Despite the inevitable loss of exhilaration moviegoers will experience from a second installment, it is an extraordinarily broad audience entertainment.

After 10 minutes into The Empire Strikes Back, I realized that I was getting more than I bargained for. This film was not a sequel at all, but a freshly conceived movie marvel.

Surely far less entertaining than the first at almost every level... It is as if the huge popular success of that brainchild of George Lucas, now cloudily olympian as executive producer, had brought with it delusions of significance.

Compared to the recent competition, "Empire" is in a class by itself as space opera entertainment for kids of all ages. It's a handsome, slick, humorous, imaginative adventure epic.

The sequel is more calculated. The spontaneous energy of the original, which grew out of the arcane riskiness of the project, is missing. "Empire" is the work of people who know they're going to make money.

A New Hope was first but there wouldn’t be a Star Wars as it stands today without The Empire Strikes Back.

An audio-visual super-duper-spectacle, worth every penny of the $22 million it took to make. The continuation of the Star Wars saga is a cornucopia of treats that move along so briskly you're afraid you'll miss something if you blink.

Uncharacteristically for a Star Wars saga, [Luke and Vader's confrontation] is chilling psychologically as well as physically. For the rest, though, The Empire Strikes Back is good-natured hokum.

"The Empire" really doesn't end, but instead suspends itself in time... While this may be commercially shrewd from the standpoint of future chapters, it is personally frustrating to be left dangling. In fact, it also seems like a cheap trick.