The history of the Dies Irae is that it was the opening words of the Latin hymn “Last Judgement” which is a hymn talking about Christ coming back and the rapture happening. This little bit of the hymn was used in Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastiqué (Fantastical Symphony) op14 in the 5th movement “Songe d'une nuit du sabbat” (Dream of a witches' Sabbath) In this movement the Dies Irae was used to represent a character's death by sounding loud an ominous. The entire symphony is an amazing listen and I suggest everyone should listen to it here Ever since that symphony used it, a lot of movies have used it to symbolize a character’s death for example The Lion King, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

This act begins with the entire crew jumping into hyperspace. When they jump into hyperspace, we cut to a scene on the Death Star with Tarken and Vader escorting Leia to the bridge. It is here that they reveal to her that they are going to test the Death Star on her home planet of Alderaan. Leia protests that they shouldn’t use it on her planet because it’s peaceful and has no business in the war, Tarken then offers her a final chance to save her planet if she reveals where the secret base is. The camera pans from her face to the planet a couple of times until she finally admits it is on Dantooine, after she admits this Tarkin then double-crosses her like the villain he is and gives the order to blow the planet up. After the planet is blown up, Obi-Wan says that he has felt a great disturbance in the force saying that he could feel the life force being drained from all the people on the plant. He tries to ignore these feelings by training Luke to use a lightsaber by putting a helmet on him which blinds him. It is during this interaction where we get some foreshadow of Obi-Wan saying that his eyes will deceive him and act on his instincts. Straight after this interaction, they leave hyperspace to where Alderran should be, but instead, they see a meteor field and the Death Star. They get caught in its tractor beam and get brought into the loading bay.

Onboard, a scanning crew is ordered to search the ship for life forms while they are scanning, they are ambushed and the crew steals their uniforms so they can sneak up to the command post unnoticed so that they can deactivate the tractor beams. In the post, they use R2 to locate the seven power converters that power the tractor beam, while they are locating them, they find out that a loss of power at one of these stations will deactivate the entire tractor beam system. Obi-Wan says that he should be the one to deactivate the power converter and that he needs to do it alone. Luke protests that he should come with but, Obi-Wan shoots him down by saying his job is to stay with the droids.

After Obi-Wan leaves, they find out that Leia is there on Level Five detention hall. They argue about it for a while and Luke convinces Solo to rescue her by telling him that she’s rich and that she would pay him more than he could ever imagine. They decide that if they’re going to rescue her then they need to do it stealthfully, they plan to handcuff Chewie and take him down to the Detention level by using the elevators. When they get down to the detention level, everything hits the fan when the Officer working booking has suspensions when he isn’t notified about the prisoner transfer. It is here that they open fire, blasting the Officer and Stormtroopers standing guard. When they finish, they search for what cell the princess is in and they find out she’s being kept in cell 2187. Solo stays at the front while Luke goes to rescue the princess, while Solo is upfront, he gets radioed asking if everything is going all right down there and he plays it off as cool as a cucumber by stuttering through his sentence and asking how they were. Of course, once he gets backed into his communication barrier, he does the only logical thing and shoots the radio before screaming to Luke that they’re about to have company. Coincidentally, Luke just gets to Leia’s cell right after he finds out about the company they’re about to get when he enters her cell, she tells him that he’s a little too short to be a Stormtrooper. At the same time on the bridge, Tarkin gets an alert about how there’s an emergency alert in the princess’s cell block, in response to this he puts all sections on alert. Back down at the cell block, they’re in a shootout with Stormtroopers when Leia has the bright idea to shoot out a vent with a blaster and have them all jump down into the garbage disposal. In this room, Luke gets grabbed by this garbage monster and almost dies from it suffocating him. But, after this close call, the walls begin to close in, they try to stop the walls from closing by using a long pipe but that doesn’t work but then, at the last second C3PO stops the walls from crushing them all to death.

When the crew is returning to the ship, they get split up when they run into a small patrol of stormtroopers, Han and Chewie go right and Luke and Leia go left. While Luke is running, they get caught between a bottomless pit and some stormtroopers. Here we get the famous Wilhelm Scream. This is a stock sound effect that was used in countless films and tv shows. It originated with the 1951 film Distant Drums, where the protagonist is heroically shot and makes the scream in response. The scream was used in numerous films like Toy Story, Cars, Game of Thrones, and every Star Wars movie except the sequel trilogy (mainly because the sequel trilogy sucked. The sequel trilogy consisted of The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker.) When Luke and Leia finish their stormtrooper massacre, they grapple across the pit heroically and Leia kisses him on the cheek. While Luke and Leia were running Han and Chewie had their own adventure. Right after they got split up Han started chasing one of the stormtroopers, but he ended up running into the entire battalion and pulled a quick 180 and mad dashed out of there.

Right as our heroes return to the ship, Obi-Wan encounters Darth Vader in the hallway. When they encounter each other, they exchange some brief dialogue about how Vader is the master now, but Obi-Wan comes back with a nice roast of him saying if he strikes him down then he will become more powerful than he could ever imagine. When they regroup in the hallway, they see that the way to their ship is cleared, so they run to get on it. While they’re getting on Luke see’s Obi-Wan and Vader fighting. Obi-Wan notices Luke then smirks and giving up the fight. At this moment, Vader strikes him. But instead of his body falling to the ground, only his coat did. Luke retaliates to this by shooting at the stormtroopers because he’s angry his mentor got killed. He’s told to shoot the blast doors and he does but continues to fire upon the stormtrooper until a disembodied voice of Obi-Wan tells him to run. He boards the ship along with everybody else, and they escape the Death Star. When they escape to space they start to get followed by a fleet of Tie Fighters so Han and Luke arm the guns and start to shoot the guns and destroy the ships. When they fight off the fleet they jump to hyperspace and retreat to the rebel hideout on Yavin 4. This is the end of the second act and I enjoyed this act mainly because it was more suspenseful from the first act and it was more than just exposition. I would rate this act 4.2/5 stars.