3) Attack The Death Star – A New Hope
Space battles don’t come any better than this.
At the end of A New Hope, the Rebel Alliance sets out to destroy the Death Star before it wreaks untold damage on the cosmos. X-Wings fall to TIE fighters before Luke Skywalker remembers Obi-Wan’s messages about the Force. But, shock horror, Vader is about to take him out before he fires into the station’s weak point: its exhaust port. Thankfully, the Millennium Falcon rises up out of nowhere and takes care of Vader. Finally, Luke calls on the Force to fire the torpedoes and the Death Star is history.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more exhilarating sequence in the whole of Star Wars than this climax to top all movie climaxes. It’s so iconic that both of the recent outings – The Force Awakens and Rogue One – have consciously harked back to it. You can never beat the original, of course but, hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. When future movies are always trying to recapture the heights of this scene, that’s when you know it’s truly iconic.