(A Revenge of the Sith Essay)

by Lizrpg

What an incredible film, and what an honor to be the first person to write about it.

I saw Revenge of the Sith five times in theaters in 2005, and now once more in 2025. Rowdiness in theaters is having a bit of a moment with the release of A Minecraft Movie, and I was worried about anecdotes I had heard of adult audience members yelling the many quotable prequel memes during showings of Star Wars. Smartly, I went to a sunday matinee attended only by serious cinephiles– there were about thirty of us gripped by the grave storytelling majesty that is, perhaps, more relevant now than it was in 2005.

Media has been pulling the wool over our eyes for too long. Books, movies, and video games have tricked us into thinking that evil people are commonly smart people– otherwise, how would they pull off their nefarious schemes? Think of a cunning killer expertly evading our valorous police force, or a puppet master politician securing his power, à la Francis Underwood. Think of Quora’s charming narcissist, or the imprisoned Hannibal Lecter with his unique insight into the criminal mind. After all, everyone gets more conservative as they get smarter in their old age, right?

However, George Lucas bravely asks the question on all of our minds in current year: “What if there was a really dumb guy?”

Anakin may be a really dumb guy, but he looks great doing it. I had such a crush on him when I was fifteen, I even rented the only other Hayden Christensen movie available at the local Hollywood Video, the 2001 drama film Life as a House starring Christensen as a troubled, eyeliner-wearing teen helping his terminally ill father build a house. It wasn’t my fault! Revenge of the Sith put him in those attractive black robes (what could it mean?), and who could forget the  sweaty post-nightmare topless scene. KyloRenWide.jpg could never.

One might be surprised to find out that I don’t think Revenge of the Sith is a perfect film. In fact, I might be the first ever person to criticize it, and certainly can’t think of any wildly popular comedy-critique videos that cemented specific gripes with all three of the prequel films into the public consciousness. I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out: “These movies are objectively bad” and then were extremely not silent when The Last Jedi was released.

        The computer generated environments in the movie are oftentimes pretty bland. Padmé and Anakin are reunited on Coruscant in front of big fake pillars that are kind of distracting. The pacing of the movie is so fast, but you can bet that there is an establishing scene of spaceships taking off and landing whenever anyone goes anywhere. How else would we know how they got there? It's doubly helpful since I can’t think of any other way to add color and characterization to a setting than an up close and personal view of its airport.

        Environments aside, I’m a sucker for creatures. The buzz droids scuttle around in a very satisfying way, and the feathery lizard horse that Obi Wan rides on Utapau is excellent. Honorable mention to General Grievous, a “this is so stupid, and I love it” kind of guy. They let him do weird stuff with his weird robot body: He scuttles, skulks, coughs, and splits his two arms into four arms.

        Speaking of Grievous's four arms: this is a video game movie. When Grievous spins two lightsabers around like laser fans and then walks forward very slowly? Well, let’s just say the Banjo Kazooie golden feather invulnerability would have been really handy for Obi Wan. “Artoo, hit the buzz droid's center eye!” There’s a platforming intermission during the final fight, and Yoda has to mash the A button to spin the senate seating disc around for extra damage. “Well have you noticed the shields are still up?” I could go on and on.

        Shenanigans are peppered throughout the bulk of the two and a half hour runtime, and they are a laugh and a half! Droids slip and slide around in an oil slick, General Grievous is shorter than we expected, and we enjoy another happy landing. Obi Wan assures us that light-hearted hijinks are the status quo as he shares a chuckle with Anakin over some offscreen antics on Cato Neimoidia. Our heroes are never in peril to the extent that they can’t crack a joke. The massacre of the Tusken Raiders (the women and the children, too!) is just a distant memory. Life goes on…

… or does it? We don’t have all day, so Anakin has to make a pretty hasty fall to the Dark Side, and it comes with an impressively jarring tone shift. Wowie zowie, I can’t think of another movie that has me laughing for the first two hours and crying in the last thirty minutes. Is that a good or a bad thing? Impossible to say.

        Anakin is a very stupid man, and is at least somewhat tricked into evil choices. Do the Jedi not have some kind of Dark Side DARE program for their padawans, because Anakin is entirely unequipped to resist Palpatine’s first and dumbest attempts at persuasion. Just kidding, I won’t pretend like it isn’t established that Anakin is fertile soil for seeds planted by an evil politician sorcerer guy. And really, aren’t there a lot of people out there who are vulnerable to evil politician sorcerer guys? The Jedi Council’s reluctance to accept Anakin as “too old” means that he has become too pre-occupied with worldly things. With that in mind, it becomes a clever mistake for the Jedi to allow him to train because of his power.

        While Count Dooku and Anakin are in a life and death battle, Obi Wan lies unconscious under a big metal platform (ouch!). Anakin gets the advantage and cuts both of Dooku’s hands off, and with Palpatine’s encouragement, executes him. It is an action in conflict with his identity as a Jedi, and his desire to continue to be one.

        Later, Anakin gets a do-over. Jedi Master Mace Windu has Palpatine on the ropes when Anakin arrives on the scene. “He is too dangerous to be kept alive,” says Windu, echoing Palpatine’s words of comfort after Anakin executed Dooku (“He was too dangerous!”). Masterful parallels from George, of course, but they are a tidy pair of scenes that demonstrate Anakin’s lack of moral compass outside of whatever  he observes in  the moment. He’s a very stupid man.

        We’re cruising now and on board with Anakin’s two-and-a-half hour fall to darkness. But strap in, we’re about to hit a real clunker. I think Anakin’s attack on the Jedi temple, particularly the killing of the younglings, is the biggest mistake of the entire prequel trilogy.

        The killing of the Cutest Little Jedi Boy Ever to Live is so outrageous, and such a heinous moral transgression that it obliterates any remaining sympathy for Anakin. He is no longer the stupid, angry young man who is making bad choices, he is a child executioner. It is so jarring and gratuitous that you can’t help but laugh. For the record, I think Anakin’s slaying of  “not just the men, the women and the children,” in Attack of the Clones is similarly out of place.

        It’s easy to laugh off the child murder as a buffoonish attempt by George to really hammer home: “Anakin evil now.” Maybe he was operating under the idea that he had to show Anakin reaching a level of evil that would make him capable of blowing up an entire planet twenty-ish years later. Darth Vader killed, like… a lot of children when he blew up Alderaan, but calm down, George! Revenge of the Sith needed to show Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side, but let’s have faith that the audience can connect the dots between Anakin’s fledgling steps into darkness, and the man twenty years later who had two decades to harden his heart.

        But what if George was actually trying to get out ahead of a different question entirely? “How much evil would Anakin need to do in order for Obi Wan to go on a mission to kill him?” Doubtful, but I can sort of see the angle. Regardless, Obi Wan could have ended up on Mustafar whether or not his mission was to put Anakin down like a rabid dog. Was there ever much of a chance to avoid a fight with the armed “if you’re not with me, you’re my enemy” guy?

        I’d like to indulge a proposed “fix” for Revenge of the Sith. For what it’s worth, we’re going to ignore Attack of the Clones because it sucks, so Jedi mind trick yourself into forgetting about the Tusken Raiders massacre. To establish our fix, consider that Anakin is attacked by Palpatine on two fronts: the personal and the political. Personally, of course, Anakin doesn’t want Padmé to die in childbirth. Fair enough. Politically, he’s a complete idiot who doesn’t know anything. Maybe the Jedi didn’t have him take a political science class, but you know who did take political science? Senator Padmé Amidala.

        I genuinely like that Anakin manages to step in it with his wife both personally and politically, mirroring Palpatine’s modes of attack. “So love has blinded you?” she asks him playfully. Later, they have a spat over Anakin’s political leanings after he gets really into The Joe Rogan Experience. Padmé has to learn a tough lesson: when Anakin said he was “not political” on his Tinder profile, that really meant he was going to vote for the evil sorcerer guy.

        So I don’t think it’s that much of a leap to say that Anakin becoming Palpatine’s primary enforcer, betraying the Jedi Order, and slaughtering the unarmed separatist leaders in cold blood is offensive enough to Padmé both politically and personally. My husband, who is smart about this sort of thing, pointed out that Anakin could just not attack the Jedi Temple at all– the  Emperor and the clones have the slaughter of the Jedi covered, and Anakin is plenty complicit. Instead, Palpatine would send Anakin to kill the separatist leaders while the Jedi Temple is under siege. Padmé and Obi Wan can have a near identical conversation that prompts her to go to Mustafar. No child executions necessary.

Not having killed the Cutest Little Jedi Boy Ever, Anakin’s personally relevant bad choices are not diminished by an impersonal act of violence that only matters due to abstract heinousness. “Come away with me. Help me raise our child. Leave everything else behind while we still can!” Padmé begs Anakin. I think the movie wants us to root for Anakin’s last chance to make a good choice, and for our hearts to drop when Obi Wan steps out of the ship– Palpatine’s ridiculously obvious tricks have twisted Anakin’s heart, and now he blows his last champ at redemption by tricking himself into thinking the worst of his allies. Ironic, isn’t it?

I think the whole scene is fantastic. Anakin is too blinded by anger and paranoia to see that his wife never gives up on him. “You turned her against me!” “You have done that yourself!” Chilling. Hayden Christensen prowling back and forth like some kind of evil sexy panther man (just me? okay). “If you’re not with me, you are my enemy” is corny, but it’s a thesis statement.

…but wait a minute, didn’t Anakin just personally slaughter a bunch of young children? Unfortunately, it’s giving school shooter.

Anyway, maybe I’m wrong and Anakin did need to do something abstractly evil to bridge the gap between his pledge to Palpatine and killing the separatists. But I humbly submit that at that point in time Anakin should not have been so far gone that he would slaughter a room full of first graders. We need him to be a sympathetic character to be invested in his downfall.

The final battle between Obi Wan and Anakin is pretty cool, but I won’t pretend the John Williams score isn’t doing some serious heavy lifting. Then, we zip right along to make sure the audience knows exactly how all of the characters come to be where they are when we catch up with them twenty years later in A New Hope.  After trying his first and only idea, Yoda exiles himself to Dagobah. Anakin gets his Darth Vader suit. Padmé names her children and then promptly dies. Ooo-bah. Ooo-bah.

After Anakin’s child killing incident, Padmé dying for no reason feels like a pulled punch. Is it too dark for a children’s movie to have Anakin directly kill Padmé? Obviously not. “She’s too weak, she won’t survive childbirth!” would be more specific. And really, Anakin did kill Padmé, Star Wars fans just like to play dumb with the unforced error:“for reasons we can’t explain.” It’s just a bad line, she obviously died of a broken heart.

Revenge of the Sith is a really clumsy movie. I don’t know why every line of dialogue is stilted and awkward, but I don’t really blame the actors as much as the script. Characters often prioritize the Rule of Cool above anything else, causing them to make inexplicable choices, like Obi Wan jumping down to confront General Grievous before his backup arrives. “Hello there!” Palpatine does some kind of corkscrew spin jump maneuver to initiate his fight with Mace Windu. There’s a long montage set to heartbreaking music of a bunch of characters we don’t know getting shot by clones who we also don’t know. The way the sexy blue twi’lek falls down like a Victorian woman with a bad case of The Vapours is very funny.

So I won’t be out there rehabilitating any of the prequel films. They are a mess, and there is no love lost between me and the first two. But I still hold a special place in my heart for Revenge of the Sith. It keeps me in touch with myself at age fifteen, heartbroken that my future husband gets burned to a crisp. He was so beautiful…

… also, George Lucas was right about everything.