Star Wars Saturdays: Why "Revenge of the Sith" is great, actually
Featuring a guest appearance by 12-year-old Jonathan
On Saturdays, we’re going through the entire STAR WARS saga in episodic order, a series that will include a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with the third film in the prequel trilogy, REVENGE OF THE SITH. Enjoy…
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
2005, Dir. George Lucas
Composite of notes written March 24th, 2018 and excerpts from reviews published September 20th, 2011 and May 2005
While the most excited I ever got for a movie as a kid was probably Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 2001, the release of Revenge of the Sith in May 2005 was a close second. You have to understand that the Prequel Trilogy was not viewed with widespread derision by the children growing up with them, and as the film poised to bring the story of Star Wars full circle by revealing the origins of Darth Vader and the birth of the Galactic Empire, Episode III had a level of immense anticipation that even the more jaded adults who had written off Episodes I and II could get behind. The hype was almost overwhelming; my circle of sixth grade friends talked about little else in the weeks leading up to the film, and I even read the Matthew Stover novelization – which has since gained a second life in meme form on the internet for its extraordinarily self-serious prose – before the movie came out.
To add to my personal excitement, I was going to get to see this one early. I had started attending press screenings regularly as the youth critic (or ‘Movie Kid’) for the Colorado Kids section of The Denver Post the year before, but no advance screening got me anywhere near as excited – or earned as much jealousy from my friends – as the prospect of seeing Revenge of the Sith two weeks ahead of its official release. I remember that screening vividly; to this day, even with three more Star Wars films having come and gone, I have never felt more thrilled or awed by that small break between “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” and the title flying out while the John Williams fanfare blared, that moment of darkness and silence before the film sprang into life.
What followed did not disappoint. Here is what I wrote back then for the Colorado Kids, as a 12-year-old critic:
I love Star Wars films. Since I saw the original one a few years ago, before The Phantom Menace came out, I’ve been a fan. The newest addition to George Lucas’ epic saga lives up to my expectations, and judging by the applause at the end of the movie, everyone else’s too.
Revenge of the Sith begins like every other Star Wars movie, with the opening logos, title and prologue. The coolest thing about this movie is the very first scene, a blazing war in the sky above Coruscant. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker are leading a team of clones and Jedi into the ship of the ruthless droid-man, General Grievous.
General Grievous has kidnapped Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (aka Darth Sidious). Anakin and Obi-Wan land on the ship, and after getting rid of some droids, find Palpatine. But the Sith lord Count Dooku is there waiting for them, and after giving Obi-Wan a slight concussion, Anakin kills him, leaving Sidious to find a new apprentice. When the successful Jedi heroes return to Coruscant, Anakin is appointed onto the Jedi council, to spy on Palpatine. The Jedi think he’s involved with the Dark Side of the force, which makes Anakin mad. He doesn’t want to spy on his friend Palpatine. More and more events lead Anakin down the path to the dark side, all ending with the greatest battle to ever in a Star Wars film, the climactic fight between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin (now known as Darth Vader).
I would have to say this is the best movie of the prequel trilogy. George Lucas has once again raised the bar for how special effects are done in movies. The effects in this film are dazzling, mixing CGI images with sets and actors to create amazing new environments. Also, the epic Lightsaber battles are the best-done scenes yet. The first battle in the movie, Anakin versus Dooku, hooks you in for two more hours of intense fight sequences.
Finally, this movie ties together every loose end you were wondering about. The injury that put Vader in the suit, when Luke and Leia were born, what happened to the kids, where all the Jedi went, and more. The way the story progressed made you keep thinking back to the original trilogy, and the first two episodes. Although the story is not a happy one, and does not end happily, you have to give credit to the complex design of the final Star Wars story.
I would recommend this movie to ages nine and up. Revenge of the Sith is the first Star Wars to be rated PG-13, and for good reason. The movie is very intense in parts, and there are many intense and grotesque images. So grab your Lightsaber and buy your tickets early, Revenge of the Sith will take you to a galaxy far, far away!
I don’t love reading my reviews from that long ago, but this is at least a case where my opinions have not significantly changed. If anything, as the years have gone by and I’ve grown up with this film, and as the course of American and global politics have developed in ways that make Revenge of the Sith one of the single most prescient Hollywood texts of my lifetime, I only have more admiration and respect for what Lucas and company accomplished here than I did as a child. Revenge of the Sith is the real deal, a film that fully commits to the dark, tragic story it is tasked with telling, and as a result delivers one of the smartest and most powerful chapters of the Star Wars saga.
Clunky dialogue remains, here and there, as it always has in George Lucas’ Star Wars scripts stretching back to 1977. But there is so much stealthily brilliant writing going on here beneath and beyond that handful of groaners. Look at how Lucas juxtaposes the advice Anakin gets from Yoda after he has his premonition of Padme’s death with what he gets from Palpatine in the iconic sequence at the space opera: Yoda gives Anakin empty dogma, Jedi wisdom taken from the textbook, not the words Anakin needs to hear as an individual human being. Palpatine tells him a story – a story that gives him hope and makes sense of the world’s perils and contingencies. It is not just that Palpatine ‘wins’ in this film, but that the heroes fail – that those responsible for maintaining the peace are blinded by ego and doctrine, that there is a hypocrisy within the Jedi Order that Palpatine knows to manipulate for his own ends. There is a pretty direct correlation, honestly, between where Star Wars fandom rejects the Prequels and the vitriol unleashed upon Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, becausethere is a thread in these films committed to challenging franchise tropes and preconceptions, to work against the fantasy and wish fulfillment that brought some viewers to this world in the first place. It is what makes these films such interesting slices of pulp storytelling, and of all the Star Wars movies, Revenge of the Sith does this best.
This is true in no small part because of the film’s political prescience; Lucas was drawing from 20thcentury history and reaction to the lies and power grabs of the George W. Bush administration in writing Revenge of the Sith, but he wound up predicting much of the coming decades of both global and American politics, in telling a story about how effortlessly a staid, compromised democracy gives way to a brutal fascist autocracy. “So this is how liberty dies – with thunderous applause,” Padme says as Palpatine is handed the title of Emperor within the supposedly democratic Senate; this line is rightly celebrated, as it is the best piece of dialogue Lucas has ever written, a brutally blunt observation that echoes through time with increasing weight and veracity. But this kind of insight is all over the film. For instance, there is a very eerie echo between how Palpatine isolates and seduces Anakin to the way we have seen the American alt-right corrupt and radicalize young men online: Dividing them from friends and family, stroking their ego, teaching them to create and blame enemies, preaching hate as a means of empowerment. Anakin at the start of this film has almost everything he could want – love, friendship, respect. Yet he wants so much more, to claim ultimate ownership of his love, to expand his respect endlessly, to remove from the world anyone he cannot call a friend. There is so much resonance here with the hate spread in right-wing circles and echo chambers today, and Anakin’s ultimate fate – living life as a shell of himself, encased in a suit and hidden behind a mask he cannot remove, unable to touch or feel ever again – is downright prophetic.
Hayden Christensen is probably still the weakest link here among the cast, but his performance is leaps and bounds sharper and more confident than what he delivered in Attack of the Clones, and the way he crafts character through physicality – not just the lightsaber duels, which he excels at, but small expressions and the way he holds himself – is actually very accomplished. And of course, the entire ensemble around him is, like a de-limbed Darth Vader on the shores of Mustafar, simply on fire. Ewan McGregor continues to steal the show as Obi-Wan, and I love how he subtly tweaks his performance with each film to bring the character closer to Alec Guinness’ iconic portrayal. Ian McDiarmid brings the Emperor full circle in brilliant fashion, and manages to make his calm, collected Palpatine personality just as frightening as Sidious’ true nature. Frank Oz may not have been puppeteering Yoda at this point, but vocally, his final turn in the role (until his brief appearance in The Last Jedi years later) is a memorable send off to the character. Natalie Portman isn’t given a whole lot to do this time, which is one of the film’s few obvious weaknesses, but what she does get is her best work in the franchise; she is the one who delivers the “thunderous applause” line, of course, but she also manages to sell the weight of Anakin’s tragic downfall through some spectacular nonverbal acting.
I am thinking here of the sequence after Anakin tells Mace Windu the truth about Palpatine, and stands alone thinking about whether or not to take further action – to betray the Jedi, or stand firm in his duty and potentially lose his wife. Lucas intercuts between Christensen and Portman, both speaking volumes without words, staring at each other from miles away across a Coruscant lit by a haunting orange sunset, scored to one of the best and most unsettling cues in John Williams’ oeuvre. It is, simply put, an outstanding piece of filmmaking, selling the greatest narrative jump in the entire Star Wars saga – the moment Anakin turns to the Dark Side – without a single word.
From a technical standpoint, Revenge of the Sith is another landmark in the history of digital filmmaking, one that may still be in a league of its own nearly twenty years later. The special effects are simply awe-inspiring: so much is happening in most every frame, and yet no individual element is out of sync with the rest of the movie. The artists at ILM illustrate epic, complex space battles, design dense alien worlds full of personality and history, and more without ever missing a beat. It is all uniformly gorgeous and striking, and especially as we now live in a time when Hollywood struggles to do something as simple as convincingly composite actors on a green screen into a virtual environment, it is stunning how little these effects have aged. And unlike your average Marvel film, where green screens are used to paper over all manner of story problems and directorial issues, Revenge of the Sith truly uses those effects to augment and empower the narrative. This is not a story that could have been told in the era of practical effects, and while I wouldn’t trade the model and miniature work of the original films for anything, Lucas’ deployment of CGI here gives Episode III the vast scope necessary to properly illustrate the total destruction of this advanced society. To this day, few, if any, live-action films so heavily augmented by digital work have surpassed Revenge of the Sith; 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water is the only one that immediately comes to mind.
It should also be noted that Revenge of the Sith features one of the all-time great John Williams scores. As strong as his work was on the last two films, his score for Episode III is a real masterpiece. Fully cognizant that this would be his last time ever scoring a Star Wars film – at least, until Disney bought the rights and kicked things back up again – Williams masterfully mixes all the major motifs from across the entire saga in with an amazing assortment of new material, including one of my all-time favorite film compositions, “Battle of the Heroes,” which plays over Anakin and Obi-Wan’s fateful duel. And at the end of the film, Lucas more or less hands the narrative reigns over to Williams, who uses Leia and Luke’s original themes to signify the focus away from Anakin and towards his children. The entire last act is an unrelenting musical powerhouse, and quite possibly the best stretch of Star Wars music in the entire saga, driving home the end of this story and tying it back to the beginning with immense power. Genius doesn’t even begin to describe it; this is one of Williams’ greatest achievements.
And the film as a whole is George Lucas’ masterstroke as a filmmaker, filled from start to finish with powerful culminating moments, and a closing act that pummels the audience with relentless precision. This is the kind of legendary story our imaginations ran wild with when we heard Obi-Wan and Yoda tell Luke the story of Darth Vader in the Original Trilogy, and the last ten minutes, where Lucas brilliantly moves us out of the prequels and into the original Star Wars, not only fully achieves the potential of the Prequels, but pays off on thirty years of storytelling, vindicating Lucas’ instincts to go back and complete his grand space opera. The best Star Wars film is and will always be The Empire Strikes Back, but as crazy as it sounds, I think there is a good argument to be made that Revenge of the Sith is the best film Lucas himself ever directed; as structurally perfect as that original 1977 film is, I cannot lie – Episode III is the one that looms larger in my mind, its presence only growing bigger as the years pass by.
We also devoted an entire episode to REVENGE OF THE SITH on The Weekly Stuff Podcast a few years back, so here is that episode again for posterity’s sake:
All STAR WARS SATURDAYS Pieces:
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