A stunning success!

Rating: 10/10 (12 March 2009)

For some reason, the beginning of this "Star Wars" movie is "messed up" again. In the original Star Wars, the first 25 minutes is boring. The same argument does not (indeed, can not) apply to The Empire Strikes Back. It starts on an exciting note, and the excitement never slows down. What's wrong then? The beginning is just too confusing! A while passed between the two films, and Luke's voice sounds somewhat different. So for about the first 10 minutes of the movie, (where no faces are shown, and only Han Solo's name was mentioned) I was wondering: "Is it really him? Or was it someone else?" Omitting that confusing first 10 minutes, this movie was, to be perfectly honest, amazing. The acting really improved, I think, from the original. I positively loved Billy Dee Williams (who should've played Two-Face in Batman III) in this movie. James Earl Jones, who delivered a fantastic performance in the original, was even better here. (Darth Vader's sardonic line "Apology accepted" was just amazingly delivered!) He was even scarier, I'd say. Harrison Ford's character was a little more developed, as was Carrie Fisher's. Mark Hamill did a great job, too.
Of course, now we get to the list of annoying characters. C3PO really began to bug me in this movie, which he didn't do as much in the original Star Wars. I still found Chewbacca to be really irritating most of the time. R2D2's inability to communicate in anything other than beeps and whirs (that had to be interpreted by C3PO) got on my nerves really often. And, of course, before Yoda revealed who he was (although everyone knows by now how he looks like), he was the most annoying of the lot.
What I loved about this movie was John Williams' music. He certainly went against my expectations. Instead of composing a sci-fi sounding score, with futuristic sounding instruments, he composed one "traditionally". And it was far more effective than any sci-fi music could've been! The plot is a lot more exciting, dangerous, and, I'd say, refined, than the original. It never slows down it's a wild ride. It certainly is a huge improvement over the original Star Wars.