Today I will be doing a spoiler-free review of Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back. This is yet another classic early Star Wars movie that just keeps you interested from beginning to end. The start of this movie was fantastic as it just pulls you in on the action immediately and wastes no time. There are some other amazing action scenes in the movie as well and one of the best 1 on 1 fight scenes in the Star Wars franchise which takes place toward the end of the movie. Han Solo and Princess Leia are with each other a lot throughout the movie and they show a lot of character development together. Chewbacca is also with Han throughout the movie as he usually is. All of these characters shine in their own way and they all have a fantastic role. You’re also introduced to two Star Wars legends in this movie as well and Luke goes to see one of them for advice and how to survive the dark side. The plot of this movie is also very well written and fleshed out as it feels like everything makes sense. 

The villain of this movie is still Darth Vader. Once again, Darth Vader is just a menacing and amazing villain as he was before. He is probably the most iconic movie villain of all time. He also has one of the most iconic lines in movie history at the end of the film, which just adds more time to an already amazing movie. The acting was also great as there was a lot of emotion displayed by a lot of the characters. The pacing was very good as well as the movie is 2 hours but feels like less than 1 hour. The ending is one of the best movie endings ever. With two different cliffhangers going on at the same time, with Vader dropping that iconic line on Luke and the future of Princess Leia and Han Solo being up in the air as well. The score was also great as it is in basically every Star Wars movie made. 

I always rate the Star Wars movies and shows and I rate them based on 10 things in the movie. Those things are: action, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, protagonist, and antagonist. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this movie a 94/100, which is just slightly better than A New Hope. There was nothing bad about this movie and everything was at worst very good. There were just a few things I couldn’t quite give a 10 so that’s what slightly brought the score down.