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 24^th, 2018 and excerpts from reviews published September 20^th, 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: