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.

| Apr 24, 2025

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.

| Apr 24, 2025

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.

| Apr 24, 2025

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.

| Apr 24, 2025

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.

| Apr 24, 2025

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.

| Apr 24, 2025

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.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 24, 2025

"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.

| Apr 24, 2025

The key question about The Empire Strikes Back has been whether it is "as good as Star Wars." The answer: Technically, yes. Artistically, not quite.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 24, 2025

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.

| Apr 24, 2025

It seems to end only because its creator, George Lucas, has run out of film stock. But it has the compensating virtues of more complex relationships between its characters and even more dazzling special effects than the original.

| Apr 24, 2025

"Empire" quickly suggests that Lucas has a vision that will make him the storyteller of the decade, an absolute and astounding inventor of circumstances and surroundings.

| Apr 23, 2025

It merely fades into a three-year intermission, to be continued in a movie tentatively entitled Revenge of the Jedi. But "Empire" is good enough. We already look forward to the next.

| Apr 23, 2025

This is pure adventure, and you only need allow the force to run with you (through you) and you'll find yourself swept up in the story in a way that is positively pre-adolescent.

| Apr 23, 2025

Let's have no more TIME talk of Lucas/Homer and Lucas/Bunyan. "Empire" is simply a minor entertainment, but I admire the moxie of betting $20 million on one-ninth of a matinee serial to be continued into the next century.

| Apr 23, 2025

Like so many sequels, the novelty has to some extent worn off, but it must be said that this film is identical in quality of production and general appeal to Star Wars.

| Apr 23, 2025

As the thing wore on... crescendo upon crescendo, my attention began to lag. And after two or so hours, I found myself wishing that Luke, Han, Leia, Chewbacca and even C-3PO and R2-D2 would take their troubles to another universe.

| Apr 23, 2025

Star Wars has grown up. Although it is full of the technical wizardry that transported millions of people into a world they had no wish to leave, The Empire Strikes Back is stripped of the comic-book aspects... and fashioned into an epic fairy tale.

| Apr 23, 2025

While it lacks the shading of the Star Wars, it takes the kind of risks -- some of which seem pretty drastic -- that the first film avoided. Now, this I find exciting.

| Apr 23, 2025

It is awesome, wondrous, and very nearly perfect. The movies finally have mastered a challenge almost as old as the Force itself -- conveying the thrill and excitement, danger and terror of interplanetary battle.

| Apr 23, 2025