Difficult to see all the fuss and love nowadays as much as those present for its inauguration did.

Rating: 6/10 (7 January 2009)

Good lord, what spell does George Lucas have everyone under? This is one of the highest ranked films on the website; it's regarded as one of the greatest sequels of all time; it's on most lists entitled the 'greatest motions pictures' of the respective genre; it's a film nearly everyone likes - and yet it failed, for me, to do any of these things justice upon recently seeing it for the first time. Perhaps you had to be there; to see it on opening night at a time when there was no such thing as the Internet on which you could download and/or watch special teasers or trailers; at a time when the studio were not able to give you the first five minutes as an appetiser to get you to see it; at a time when the only manner in which you could discuss the up and coming franchise episodes were face-to-face and not on message boards. Although it's too bad it isn't more like that nowadays.
Maybe it's futile criticising it now, but at the end of the day, it's still just a film. Perhaps you really did have to be there on opening night with no knowledge of what awaited you, preparing yourself to be propelled into a world of monsters, space travel and aliens as you left your brain at the door. But I do think most people rate the film based on childhood experiences more than the film itself  they don't ask themselves the question 'How good was the film?', they ask themselves 'How happy was I as a kid when I first saw this?'.
For the record, I liked the previous episode. I thought it was good fun and relatively light-hearted with a sense of vision going for it throughout. You really believed Lucas had an idea and desperately wanted to follow through on his vision. This twinned with the scope of ideas to do with space travel and the structuring of space stations, look of attire and general mise-en-scene enforces the evidence Lucas loved an idea to the point it was an obsession, an obsession he let everyone else into and love in equal measure.
Alas, Episode V entitled 'The Empire Strikes Back' from 1980 is actually quite silly and removes any feeling or excitement the prior episode may have instilled into one. Its overall idea is that the young and upcoming hero in Luke Skywalker (Hamill) is to go off and train to take his skills to the next level and become a Jedi whilst friends Han Solo (Ford) and co. are chased down by the evil forces led by Darth Vader (Prowse/Jones).
'Fine' you think, this may well be more interesting now that the introductions and general establishment of good versus evil has been dealt with; there also seems to be a self discovery journey going on. But if anything, the film is less interesting than the first one, particularly after about an hour after which it transcends into a bunch of slightly interesting scenes set on space ships and odd jungle infested planets. Once all that has happened, Vader gets some hired guns to find the rebels and more stuff happens that just has you passively sit there and watch it all unfold.
Maybe it's that I cannot just let myself go, but I had no problem with the 1st and 4th episodes in terms of narrative, which were actually quite interesting as this broad and quite epic setting was used to transfer good and evil across a galaxy. In this one, there doesn't feel like anything at stake. The film's protagonist Luke is safe and sound on a jungle planet with Yoda, being taught what he needs to know, so he's fine, whereas Solo and co. are hopping around trying to dodge the forces of evil and the problem is you never feel any connection to them. Why should you feel any towards an annoying, big, hairy creature; daft comic relief robots and an underdeveloped, expressionless and somewhat empty headed woman who goes by the name Leia (Fisher).
But these things are the bigger picture. The film has all number of frustrations going on at spaced intervals. Of course, Solo and co. never get hit by any of the laser beams and they can hide in that meteor storm nice and easily but again, criticising it seems futile. One thing I noticed on several occasions was that everyone in the Millennium Falcon kept talking over each other, which also annoyed me and the heavy handed catalyst which pushes Luke off into his training with Yoda is a near death experience on ice planet Hoth, during which he nearly freezes to death amongst being eaten.
Towards the end of the film, Luke will be having a showdown with Vader after which a famous line is uttered. All well and good but Luke doesn't go down into the bowels to fight Vader because it's the realistic choice, he goes down there because we want him to  we want him to fight and the story demands he put his new Jedi skills into practice so that all can see how much he's really learnt. This is after the film goes needlessly 'dark' for one scene involving the freezing/supposed death of a main character and no, the film is 'dark' for that one scene; not from the start and throughout, it's still that laser dodging, fast talking, monster eliminating 'fun' the prior film was. All in all, The Empire Strikes Back is underwhelming and viewing it now makes it seems quite silly more than anything. Perhaps proof 'event cinema' can and never will withstand the true test of time.