20 Years On, “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” Isn’t Fantasy – It’s Prophecy

Movie of the Week #35 is a real bummer

The grim historical poetry of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith celebrating its 20th anniversary now, in 2025, with American democracy crumbling before our eyes, is sobering. Its re-release to theaters this week, coinciding with the grim milestone of the second Trump administration’s ‘first 100 days’ marker – 100 of the darkest and most lawless days in the history of this country – confirms, if it needed confirming, that in this film, George Lucas crafted the single most terrifyingly prophetic blockbuster of the century.

Two decades later, the scorn Revenge of the Sith and the preceding Star Wars Prequels were greeted with has, if not entirely dried up, dramatically reduced in size. There are several possible reasons for this: Because the children who saw the film in 2005 and grew up loving it are now articulate enough to defend it; because Disney has so thoroughly proven how crushingly hollow Star Wars films can be when shorn of Lucas’ auteur influence; and because the movie is genuinely quite good, as Sean Chapman and I discussed at length on The Weekly Stuff Podcast back in 2018, and as I wrote about last year.

But let us be frank: in the main, Revenge of the Sith and its cinematic brethren have been rehabilitated by the United States’ own awful political choices these past 20 years: by our own embrace of fascism, our own widespread denial of reality, our own willing submission to fear and hatred. Revenge of the Sith looks wiser and more accomplished to us now because we willingly walked down the path it told us to avoid.

I wish this were not the case. I wish we could mark the 20th anniversary of this great movie still enjoying it as fantasy. I wish I could take the occasion to wax poetic about my memories of seeing it as a twelve-year-old, on assignment for the Colorado Kids, getting to see it early at a press screening, practically forgetting to breathe as I sat, next to my father, waiting in that magical dark interval between the fading of A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, and the first notes of John Williams’ triumphant, blaring horns. I wish those childish memories still felt accessible. I would so much rather have a functioning democracy and a healthy body politic than a critically rehabilitated Star Wars movie. I would gladly surrender every argument about the Star Wars Prequels this dark reality has helped me win over the past few years for just a few more American voters taking their civic responsibilities seriously.

I wish we could take this anniversary occasion to talk about Revenge of the Sith itself instead of talking about ourselves, around and through the film. I wish I could watch the movie’s phenomenal final hour just appreciating the craftsmanship, the spectacular interplanetary vistas, John Williams’ transcendent music, and the carefully cascading construction of so much thoughtfully laid narrative pay-off. I wish I could watch it all without the deepest of pits in my stomach.

I wish I could watch Palpatine perform to the Senate about the ‘attempt on his life,’ and just enjoy the deliciously lilting contempt with which Ian McDiarmid imbues his performance of triumphant villainy. Instead I watch this scene now with awful recognition, having heard Trump perform the same way, to the same kinds of audiences, about the ‘attempt’ on his life, and how that justifies his demands for God-like authoritarian power.

I wish I could watch the horrible scene where the newly-christened Vader goes to the Jedi Temple to slaughter children, and not have to think about all the children we are now scarring and slaughtering: like the three American children, aged two, four, and seven, we ‘deported’ to Honduras this week, without due process, despite the fact they are all citizens by birthright, and despite the four-year-old’s Stage 4 cancer diagnosis, for which treatment may now be out of reach. It occurred to me this time that the first order Palpatine gives Vader is the single worst thing he will ever ask his pupil to do; and I thought about how plainly we’ve seen that evil logic play out today, where one of the Trump administration’s first official actions was to gut USAID, and abandon countless children around the globe living with tuberculosis, AIDS, and other easily preventable, treatable conditions. We went for the children first, too.

I wish I could watch Anakin lying limbless on the ashen shores of Mustafar, spewing invective at the friend he betrayed while his body starts to burn, and not see in his darkened eyes the soul of the American voter, who also met their pain with hatred and chose to let themselves and their fellows burn rather than suppress, for just a second, their prejudice and contempt.

I wish I could watch that horrible, haunting image of the Darth Vader mask lowering onto Anakin Skywalker’s face, trapping him forever inside a dark, unfeeling cage with nothing but his own seething anger, and not think of all the young men associated with Gamergate, and the Alt-Right, and now America’s burgeoning autocracy, who also wound up trapping themselves away in human-shaped prisons of ignorance and resentment, rather than live, connect, and love in the world as it exists.

I so deeply, desperately wish I could watch this silly children’s movie about space wizards with laser swords riding magical beasts and piloting goofy spaceships and talking to their fun droid pals and still enjoy it as a child would: as an adventure.

I even wish I could still watch it as my young-adult self did: as a warning.

But I can’t. Neither can you. Time has seen to it that this movie became prophecy, and there is no going back.

We cannot be children again. We can never deny that we were warned. This is where we are, and it is arguably an even bleaker place than where our few remaining heroes stand at the end of Revenge of the Sith. Sheev Palpatine was a genius, after all, a masterful tactician whose machinations lay undetected for years; Donald Trump is the dumbest motherfucker to ever wield a modicum of power on this good earth. There is a glass-half-full reading to that, insomuch as our enemy should be easier to defeat than theirs; but then again, unlike Darth Sidious, this dipshit loudly told us every evil thing he wanted to do, and we just kept losing to him anyway.

Maybe, as the film suggests in its closing moments on Tatooine, there is some hope to come. Maybe there is a better tomorrow lying in the shadow of our own binary sunset. I try to hold onto hope, as we all should; and in that attempt I have good days and bad days. I want to believe – as Obi-Wan probably wants to believe, handing off the infant Luke Skywalker to his Aunt – that there is a way to dismantle our new autocracy and start reassembling what we’ve lost.

But it’s April 2025.

Donald Trump has been president again for 100 days today, fancying himself Emperor the entire time.

Revenge of the Sith is 20 years old, and I’m 20 years older. I saw it in a theater again this week, but I was no longer a child, and my Dad was no longer there to sit next to me. He’s been gone for a long time too. You can’t go back. Time won’t let you. To quote another great Hollywood trilogy-capper, itself only two years older than Revenge of the Sith:

How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.

—The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Star Wars shouldn’t have to make us feel these things. The re-release of a 20-year-old blockbuster shouldn’t prompt these kinds of existential crisis. But we don’t have a say in that anymore, because we, like our great fictional heroes, have lost.

It is April 30th, 2025. Revenge of the Sith is back in theaters, and it is back atop the box office, and we are back in its thrall, no longer with anticipation of the new, but with horror over what we have wrought – or allowed to be wrought – while it was away. Here we are, like Obi-Wan and Yoda, shell-shocked, watching our world burn, overwhelmed with our failures, reeling over what to do next.

Read the book 200 Reviews by Jonathan R. Lack in Paperback or on Kindle

Subscribe to PURELY ACADEMIC, our monthly variety podcast about movies, video games, TV, and more

Like anime? Listen to the podcast I host with Sean Chapman, JAPANIMATION STATION, where we review all sorts of anime every week. Watch on YouTube or Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.