Chad’s Grade: C+
When it came time for George Lucas to wrap up his prequel trilogy, I remember many Star Wars fans being anxiety-ridden. They were burned twice before with the underwhelming The Phantom Menace and the even more awful Attack of the Clones. Could the third film with the very ominous-sounding title Revenge of the Sith deliver? After all, this is where all the cool stuff finally happens.
There’s been some revisionist history that the prequel films are misunderstood and unfairly maligned. The three-film saga that started in 1999, and concluded with Revenge of the Sith in 2005, is beloved by the millennials vs. the Gen Xers who grew up with the original Star Wars trilogy. Each generation has its gateway into that galaxy far, far away, and I get the powerful nostalgic pull these films have. But when you remove the Star Wars sheen from the prequels, you see the weak storytelling and stilted dialogue delivered by actors getting no guidance from their director.
Sadly, Revenge of the Sith suffers from the same weaknesses that plagued the previous entries. Yes, it’s marginally better, mainly as fans noted; this is where the cool shit happens. But George Lucas, like the first two films, returns as writer/director. It’s still a mystery that a director who reportedly hates the writing process wouldn’t hand his outline to a skilled screenwriter, a la Lawrence Kasdan, scripting The Empire Strikes Back. And that’s the chief problem with the prequel trilogy, where we have an epic, large-scale space opera serviced by an undercooked screenplay.
And Lucas’s ambitions are grand for the concluding chapter of Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the dark side of the force, set during the galaxy-wide civil war raging between the High Republic and the Separatist faction. While his writing is subpar, this is a strong and nimble turn for Lucas as a director. The opening battle sequence is a stunner with vertigo-inducing shots of swarm-like battle droids attacking massive star destroyers in the atmosphere of the Coruscant city planet. We go from a large-scale space battle to Anakin and Obi-Wan infiltrating General Grievous’s star cruiser to rescue the kidnapped Prime Minister Palpatine. It’s all capped off with an intense lightsaber duel between the evil Count Dooku and Anakin. When the contest ends in defeat for Dooku, as Anakin brings him to his knees by holding both their lightsabers, Palpatine coaxes the Jedi to kill the dark lord. And Anakin obliges with a vicious double lightsaber beheading, an act of brutality rarely seen in the family-friendly franchise.
It’s a brooding opening and, at the time, ROTS was the only Star Wars movie to earn a PG-13 rating. Lucas leans into the foreboding atmosphere as he paints in broad brushstrokes the implosion of the Grand Republic into a fascist dictator state under the rule of the Emperor. And Lucas once again finds inspiration from the great film director David Lean, where The Phantom Menace borrowed imagery from Lawrence of Arabia; here, he uses Doctor Zhivago as a framework. The Coruscant capitol is drenched in monochromatic greys and long black shadows, not unlike the crumbling Moscow as it falls under communist rule in Lean’s 1965 masterpiece. And we get a few juicy, politically charged scenes in the Senate, where Padme watches Palpatine announce the emergence of the Galactic Empire, and delivers the meme-worthy line: “So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause.”
Sadly, it’s all downhill after the well-staged opening as we finally see the tragic events that “Ben” Kenobi hauntingly described in A New Hope. Yet the film feels overstuffed between Anakin embracing the dark side, the activation of Order 66, the hunting down of the Jedi, the fallout between Obi-Wan & Anakin, Padme giving birth to the twins, then Padme dying, and the Emperor dismantling democracy. There’s enough plot here to fill at least two more movies, and it reveals how poorly structured the prequels were compared to Luke’s well-paced journey in the original trilogy. Anakin’s switch to team Sith is so abrupt that he’s killing Jedi younglings in the next few scenes. As such, Lucas never gives the film time to breathe so we can absorb all the unfolding drama.
It’s frustrating as Revenge of the Sith has some powerful moments only to have Lucas undermine them with a layer of cheesy dialogue. There’s a great montage of Padme giving birth to the twins crosscut with the broken body of Anakin receiving the iconic Darth Vader armor. This is another example of Lucas shining as a director with a POV shot of the Vader mask covering Anakin as Padme looks at her children for the first and last time. The strong visual sequence showing the fate of these two characters is undercut by a robot telling Kenobi that Padme has lost the will to live and just mysteriously dies. Then, Anakin, now in his full Vader armor on a “Frankenstein” style set, yells a melodramatic “Noooo!” as he’s informed of Padme’s death.
With no help from Lucas in the writing or direction department, it’s up to the actors to elevate the picture. Ewan McGregor is still a highlight, playing the young Obi-Wan Kenobi with that playful swagger that Alec Guinness brought to the role. Hayden Christensen is stronger in his second turn as Anakin, but that’s not saying much, as he’s still saddled with Lucas’s trademark whiny dialogue that does him no favors. The same goes for Natalie Portman, who is wasted as Anakin’s doomed love Padme. Portman was the only consequential female role in the prequels, yet she was written to be a love interest for Anakin and not much more. These three characters are the core that drives Anakin to the dark side, but none of their story arcs makes any dramatic sense; they’re just pawns on a chessboard meant to line up with the original trilogy.
One actor who gets to shine is Ian McDiarmid, who’s been playing the Palpatine/Emperor role since Return of the Jedi. As the crafty politician who reveals that he is the Sith Lord Darth Sidious, his scenes seducing Anakin to the dark side of the force are easily the film’s best. After watching Anakin flirt with the dark side during Dooku’s beheading, Anakin was all but auditioning to be Sidious’s next apprentice. With the language of a cult leader, Sidious uses the “both sides have their merits” argument. If Anakin wishes to save Padme from her doomed fate, he must evolve past the small-minded teachings of the Jedi and use both aspects of the force. He points out, quite correctly, that the current Jedi order is more worried about politics than protecting the galaxy.
If only Lucas had brought some of that complexity to the film’s crucial lightsaber duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan, a sequence the entire prequel trilogy has been building toward. This should’ve been a battle royale filled with betrayal, love, and the failure of a master to save his apprentice from his dark nature. This needed to rival the emotion from Luke’s battle with Vader in The Empire Strikes Back. But Lucas stages the struggle in such an over-the-top manner on the volcanic planet of Mustafar, where the two Jedi leap from plank to plank as they surf down rivers of lava. The hellish landscape is the perfect atmosphere for Anakin’s final step to becoming Darth Vader. Yet the scene is filmed with badly aged green screen effects, draining the potential drama from Kenobi’s “you were my brother” speech. There was more tension in the opening duel between Anakin, Dooku, and Palpatine than in this finale, doused in fire and brimstone.
Even with his weak script, Lucas still dazzles in the world-building department as he takes us on a journey through a variety of planets and landscapes. We even visit Chewbacca’s forest world of Kashyyyk (although it should’ve been Endor from Return of the Jedi). And when Lucas keeps the action on Coruscant, he delivers an extremely cool action blowout between Yoda and the Emperor set inside the massive Senate chamber. Watching these two personifications of the force throw floating chamber pods like frisbees evokes that high action energy of the original Star Wars.
Revenge of the Sith is Lucas’ final directorial effort and his swan song to the Star Wars universe. It’s a film that perfectly captures his many strengths and weaknesses as a filmmaker. The movie certainly has its defenders, and fans point to the popular The Clone Wars animated series that the film spawned as proof that it’s unfairly criticized. And yes, the well-done series that Lucas guided is more of a testament to showrunner Dave Filoni and his team of talented writers. But this muddled picture shouldn’t be propped up by spin-off projects; it must stand on its own two feet.