Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005)
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith is the most complex film in the Star Wars saga. Back when I reviewed Return of the Jedi, I mentioned that it was possibly the best of the series. The only reason I equivocated in that review is because Revenge of the Sith may be more deserving of the title. It’s a staggering work, one that complicates the very mythological assumptions the series is built upon. It makes the commonly emphasized darkness of The Empire Strikes Back seem superficial in comparison to its vision of tragedy and betrayal. But more importantly, Revenge of the Sith cements the Star Wars saga as something more than a beautiful adventure or a fantastical tale of strange worlds and courageous heroes. It helps the series achieve the level of tragedy and is as heartbreaking a film as exists in modern blockbuster cinema.
As Anders insightfully pointed out in his review of The Phantom Menace, that film introduces the key elements of the Tragedy of Darth Vader and the Fall of the Republic, but it does so sideways, burying these things in the background of larger plot machinations and more straightforward narrative focuses. Attack of the Clones introduces the more familiar dynamic we might expect based on the glimmers of backstory we get about Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Original Trilogy—that of the Clone Wars, Obi-Wan’s (Ewan McGregor) mentorship of Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), and the courtship of Luke and Leia’s parents. It sets the direct events in motion, while also playing with adventure and detective narrative conventions.
Thus, in many ways, Revenge of the Sith functions simply as the payoff and clarification that has been five films in the making. It is meant to answer the fundamental questions of the saga, such as how Anakin became Darth Vader and how the Republic fell and the Empire was born. It ties the two trilogies of the saga together, both narratively and visually. But even as it does so, it subverts the expectations about the Star Wars saga and the core mythical story at its centre.
The most obvious way that Revenge of the Sith avoids the formula of the other films in the saga is in its basic content approach: it is not a children’s film. No matter how much George Lucas says he made the saga for kids, this final film of the Prequel Trilogy is a haunting example of ostensible children’s entertainment going deeper and darker than expected. Not only are the actions in the film shocking, but the moral lesson of the film is far more sophisticated than in any children’s story.
Furthermore, Revenge of the Sith complicates the very formative myth that serves as the foundation of the Star Wars saga: the hero’s journey. In the Original Trilogy, Luke Skywalker is the hero who leaves home to acquire new powers, defeat the forces of darkness, and bring back the light to his civilization. As we learn in the Prequel Trilogy, Luke is merely repeating the heroic quest of his father, Anakin Skywalker, who is meant to destroy the Dark Side and bring balance to the Force. However, Attack of the Clones begins to complicate this portrait of Anakin as the classical hero: his anger and fear are more pronounced than the foibles of most adventure heroes. His massacre of the Tusken Raiders, particularly the women and children, goes beyond any set-back typical of heroes of this type.
In Revenge of the Sith, these seeds of anger and fear have matured into a moral rot within Anakin Skywalker. These attributes of fear and anger have been within Anakin since we met him on Tatooine in The Phantom Menace, but they grow more pronounced when he’s forced to leave his mother. Her death in Attack of the Clones exacerbates them and, as is learned in Revenge of the Sith, his fear that his wife, Padmé (Natalie Portman), will follow the same fate as his mother dooms him. In the hero’s journey, often the attributes necessary for heroic victory are present within the hero from the beginning, but buried. The journey itself will awaken these attributes and bring the inner magic outwards. In A New Hope, this inner magic is the Force, which Luke learns to harness through his innate attunement in order to destroy the Death Star. However, in Revenge of the Sith, the inner magic is Anakin’s fear and anger, which leads him to the Dark Side of the Force.
Thus, Revenge of the Sith upends our expectations of the hero’s journey. It takes the central hero that is supposed to fulfill a prophecy and save the day and sends him on a journey that ends in tragedy and destruction instead of liberation and mastery over evil. Before Yoda heads to Kashyyk in the film, he mentions that the prophecy of Anakin as the hero is a “prophecy that misread could have been.” That line hints at the fascinating conceit of this film and the Prequel Trilogy as a whole: what if Anakin is the chosen hero, but for the Dark Side and not the Light?
It teases this reversal of expectation from the words of the opening crawl: “There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere.” This phrasing, particularly of “heroes on both sides,” perplexed me when the film came out. The generic wartime meaning—that both sides of a conflict have tales of wartime heroism—seemed inadequate to satisfy my curiosity about the phrasing. However, once I began to view Revenge of the Sith through the lens of an inverted hero’s journey, it clarified. Anakin is the hero on both sides. He chooses the Dark over the Light during the course of the film.
Throughout the Prequel Trilogy, characters discuss the Balance of the Force. Ostensibly, this means the destruction of the Sith and the elimination of chaos in the form of the Dark Side. However, it is equally likely that the phrasing actually means a true balance between Dark and Light: the reduction of Jedi to the same number as the Sith—two—and the emergence of a chosen one for the Dark Side that offers a dualistic counterpoint to the heroes of the Light Side.
In Revenge of the Sith, Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) emphasizes this balance. He speaks of the Jedi and Sith in identical terms to Anakin—”the Jedi and the Sith are similar in almost every way, including their quest for greater power.” He explains how, in his view, true wisdom is an understanding of the Dark and the Light and an implementation of whatever skills are necessary to the task at hand. In many ways, Palpatine speaks in a postmodern way, emphasizing equality and a relativistic understanding of good and evil. He refutes the “dogmatic, narrow-minded view of the Jedi” and says that if Anakin is “to become a complete and wise leader, [he] must embrace a larger view of the Force.”
Of course, like all villains, Palpatine does not actually believe in a true balance, but the elimination of the Light Side of the Force. But he weaponizes human nature and an all-encompassing understanding of morality to seduce Anakin to the Dark Side. He speaks to Anakin’s very-human desires, much as Satan speaks to Adam and Eve’s human desires in the Garden of Eden. In this way, the film inverts the hero’s journey, making a tale of triumph into a tale of tragedy.
Because at its core Revenge of the Sith is a tragedy and a genuine space opera. It combines the tragic hero and the legendary chosen one into one complicated, frustrating character. It shows the downfall of an exceptional hero and the collapse of a civilization. Both falls come from within, but the fate of the personal and the political are intertwined here; as in classical tragedies, the fate of a great individual dictates the fate of the society. While there are many references to draw on when analyzing the tragedy of Revenge of the Sith, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, none are more useful than the works of Shakespeare, particularly Macbeth and Othello.
Like Macbeth, Anakin is a military hero at the beginning of the story. He is seduced to evil by the chance for power—in Macbeth’s case, the chance to become king, in Anakin’s case, the ability to save his wife from death. The promise for this power comes in supernatural forms: witches for Macbeth, prophetic dreams for Anakin. As well, both prophecies are self-fulfilling: knowledge of the prophecy brings it to fruition. In the end, both characters achieve their power, but destroy everything they were hoping to achieve in the process: Macbeth loses the throne, Anakin loses his wife. Each succumbs to their fatal flaw.
Macbeth is useful as a reference for the broad strokes of the story, but Othello is particularly useful for an understanding of Anakin as a character. Essentially, Anakin operates as Othello, Padmé as Desdemona, and Palpatine as Iago. Like Othello, Anakin is greatly respected and deeply in love with his wife at the beginning of the story. However, both are prideful men and scared of losing the women they love. Anakin is particularly obsessed with loss of control. It drives his actions throughout the films. In The Phantom Menace, he wants to become a Jedi to save his mother. In Attack of the Clones, he fails to save his mother, highlighting his lack of power. So in Revenge of the Sith, he replaces his mother with his wife and does anything he can to save her from the fate of his mother.
Like Othello, Anakin is driven by jealousy and pride. When he realizes Obi-Wan has visited Padmé before leaving for Utapau, he voices displeasure at his presence, allowing suspicion and jealousy to drive his actions. This only escalates as the film progresses, with Anakin implying that he suspects Obi-Wan and Padmé of conspiring against him, and potentially cheating on him together. When Padmé confronts him on Mustafar, he sneers back at her resistance to his plans—”Because of Obi-Wan.” When Obi-Wan appears on the ramp of Padmé’s starship, he grows violent. He force chokes Padmé and is responsible for killing her, much as Othello strangles Desdemona out of jealousy in Shakespeare’s play.
However, Anakin is not only driven by his possessive feelings for Padmé. Pride and pettiness are also powerful emotions within him. When he is placed on the Jedi Council at Palpatine’s request, but not made a Jedi Master, he’s enraged—“To put me on the council and not make me a master. It’s insulting.” Palpatine stokes this distrust and pettiness by implying the Jedi Council is purposefully undermining him. Anakin’s pride swells to such a degree that he even has the hubristic notion of overthrowing Palpatine and ruling the galaxy himself. He propositions Padmé to join him in his rule, much as he later does with Luke in The Empire Strikes Back. When she refuses, he’s not concerned with Padmé’s rejection of the Empire, but of him personally: “Don’t you turn against me,” he tells her. With Anakin, although his love of Padmé is his ostensible motivation, everything ultimately boils down to his own pride and need for control. He’s a boy driven by fear, and as Yoda warns in The Phantom Menace, that fear leads to the Dark Side.
The tragedy of Anakin is that such a promising hero descends to such moral depths. He not only betrays his friends and kills his wife, but he’s responsible for the fall of the Republic and the founding of the Galactic Empire. Many of Anakin’s actions in Revenge of the Sith are shocking. His gleeful murder of the Separatist leaders on Mustafar recalls the massacre of the Tusken Raiders, but unlike in Attack of the Clones, Lucas shows us the slaughter, focusing on Anakin’s inhuman rage throughout—the shot of his eye turned yellow by the influence of the Dark Side is particularly troubling. No moment is more shocking than Anakin’s massacre of the Younglings in the Jedi Temple, but also as disgusting is his conversation with Padmé afterwards, where he swears allegiance to Palpatine and speaks of his former Jedi allies as traitors. While it does not make a film inherently more complex to show such nastiness, the depiction of Anakin’s actions in Revenge of the Sith in contrast to his innocence in The Phantom Menace is genuinely heartbreaking. It is key to the film’s power.
Intertwined with Anakin’s fall is the political degradation of the Republic and the formation of the Empire. Much has been made about the political focus of the Prequel Trilogy—most commentary is dismissive of the political elements—but the political focus is central to the saga’s tragic arc in these first three films. Palpatine’s dismantling of democracy and the creation of the Empire is an edifying reminder of how fear is exploited on the scale of a society—the senators are exploited much as Anakin is exploited on a personal level. It also allowed George Lucas to make direct commentary on the contemporaneous events of the War on Terror.
The broad strokes of how Palpatine manipulates the Republic and the Separatists to start the Clone Wars bear similarity to how George W. Bush and Dick Cheney falsified reports on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to justify an invasion. As well, just as the tragedy of 9/11 allowed Bush and Cheney to start the War on Terror and start peeling back civil liberties through the Patriot Act and the development of the mass surveillance state, the invasion of Naboo and the attempts on Padmé’s life allow Palpatine to create an Army of the Republic and gain emergency powers as chancellor. Few lines are as insightful as Padmé’s reaction to the establishment of the Empire: “So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause.” It’s an indictment of the ways that lawmakers almost unanimously lined up to support the War on Terror and the shrinking of civil liberties in the name of security.
Lucas is a tried-and-true liberal of the 1970s and just as he used the Original Trilogy to subtly comment on American imperialism in Vietnam, he is even more blatant in his critiques of the War on Terror in Revenge of the Sith. He uses the plot of his space opera franchise to warn about the erosion of liberty and the rise of fascism. Rarely one for subtly, Lucas has the villain of the film, Palpatine, literally use the representations of democracy—the Galactic Senate itself—as a cudgel against his enemies, as shown in his battle with Yoda. And if that weren’t blatant enough, the shot of the Coruscant skyline with the Jedi Temple smoking against a clear blue sky recalls the images of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and erases any doubt about the film’s political messaging.
Along with being a great tragedy and in addition to its subversion of heroic storytelling and commentary on the erosion of democracy, Revenge of the Sith is also a technical marvel. In 2019, we are currently in the age of the one-take tracking shot, where directors simulate the appearance of one continuous take during action scenes in order to show off their technical mastery and immerse the viewer in the action of the film. However, back in 2005 before the popularity of the one take action scene, Lucas perfected this approach with his opening shot, which shows Anakin and Obi-Wan pilot their starfighters through the space battle raging above Coruscant. It’s a cinematic flex like few others, and the broadest vision of a true “star war” that exists in these films.
In fact, Revenge of the Sith is constantly showing off the scope of Lucas’s imagination. While most of the Star Wars movies are restricted to a few different planet locations, Revenge of the Sith jumps from planet to planet to show off the scale of the Clones Wars and the galactic ripple effects of Anakin’s actions. We get marvellous worldbuilding on the likes of Utapau, Mustafar, and the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk. Lucas even continues to expand the universe during one of the film’s most moving sequences, which shows the Clone Troopers carrying out Order 66, eradicating the Jedi. We see glimpses of several exotic worlds as the troopers betray their Jedi generals and shoot them down in cold blood. Lucas is pulling out all the stops for his final film in the series.
There are numerous exciting action sequences throughout. While no single lightsaber duel in Revenge of the Sith matches the elegance of the Duel of the Fates in The Phantom Menace, the film does hold the record for the most lightsaber duels within one film, with each fight emphasizing the unique characteristics of the fighters involved. Several of them are spectacular, most notably Mace Windu’s fight with Palpatine in the offices of the Chancellor and Anakin and Obi-Wan’s battle above the lava rivers of Mustafar. However, this later battle is also weighed down by the emotional turmoil on display. Like the battle between Luke and Darth Vader aboard the Second Death Star in Return of the Jedi, it’s both the most intense battle in the trilogy, and the saddest. All of this is to say that even if Revenge of the Sith wasn’t perceptive in its tragic storytelling, it would still be a remarkable action film. That it both dazzles with its formal techniques and shocks with its emotional storytelling is proof of its brilliance as a film.
Before I wrap up this review, I’d like to look in some detail at three key scenes that are evidence of the film’s sophistication. The first is the duel between Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) and Anakin aboard General Grievous’s flagship. The battle is meant to be a rematch after Anakin’s defeat at the hands of Dooku during the climax of Attack of the Clones. It’s a chance for the hero to get revenge, but nothing about the scene plays out according to expectation. Instead of a drawn-out battle between two equals, Anakin handily defeats Dooku. Not only that, but he executes him in cold blood. It’s the first indication in the film that things are not going to play out as the series formula dictates. In fact, the scene is actually a brilliant repetition and inversion of the final lightsaber battle in Return of the Jedi. For one, the room recalls the Throne Room of the Second Death Star. Palpatine oversees both battles from his throne. Both battles have the hero succumb to anger and defeat his enemy, cutting off his hand. However, unlike Luke in Return of the Jedi, Anakin does not hold back from his rage, but succumb to it. He gives into his feelings and kills Dooku, unlike Luke who throws away his lightsaber and refuses to do Palpatine’s bidding. This entire sequence shows how much Anakin and Luke’s journeys mirror each other, while also illuminating the key differences that make one character heroic and the other tragic.
The second sequence is the opera scene, where Anakin joins Palpatine at a performance of an alien bubble opera. It’s among the strangest scenes in the saga and one of the most brilliantly written and performed. Lucas took a lot of flak for his supposedly-tone deaf writing during the release of the Prequel Trilogy, but this scene shows a masterful control of tone and exposition. As Palpatine tells Anakin the story of Darth Plagueis the Wise and sows the seeds for his turn to the Dark Side, Lucas relies on subtle cinematic techniques to unsettle us. He keeps a deep choral bass playing beneath the conversation to throw a pallour of doom over the entire scene. He uses classical visual construction to continually move the frame closer to the characters throughout the progression of the scene, amplifying tension and intimacy. But most impressively, he tells the origin stories of Palpatine and Anakin—that Palpatine learned to control the Midichlorians from Plagueis and used them to create Anakin—without ever blatantly indicating that he has done so. For a storyteller who is so often lambasted for a lack of subtlety, the scene is a masterful implementation of subtext. It’s also the best example of Ian McDiarmid’s exceptional work throughout the series.
The final sequence takes place after Anakin has told Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) that Palpatine is Darth Sidious. Mace tells Anakin to stay in the Jedi Council Chamber while he arrests the chancellor. The scene takes place at sunset, with the fiery red and oranges of the sky externalizing the emotional torment raging within Anakin. John William again uses choral vocals to unsettle the viewer here. The entire scene is disarmingly simple, but absolutely devastating. It plays out as follows:
We see Padmé in her drawing room, in wide and then close up. She looks to the window, clearly thinking about Anakin. We cut to a similar shot of Anakin in the Jedi Council Chamber, then to a medium shot during which we hear Palpatine’s words about saving Padmé. He is dwelling on his wife. We see another medium angle and then a close up before cutting back to Padmé as she goes to the window and looks outside. We see her view: a wide shot of the Jedi Temple in the distance. We cut back to the high angle wide shot of the council chamber and like Padmé, Anakin goes to the window. There’s a medium shot, followed by a close up, and he looks outside. We see his view: a wide angle of Padme’s apartment building. Lucas is linking these two through the parallel editing; his shot sequence is putting them in conversation across the distance.
We go back inside Padmé’s apartment and see another close up of her looking out the window. We again see her view: the wide shot of the Jedi Temple, but it’s a closer angle than before. Lucas is intensifying the intimacy of the scene. We cut back to a close up of Anakin, who is distraught, and back to Padmé, who seems to feel his pain. Finally, we go back to Anakin, who starts crying in torment, and turns away from the window. He is consumed by thoughts of his wife, but in order to save her, he has to turn his back to her. He severs their deep connection. A deeply-emotional conversation has taken place, but without a word spoken.
The entire scene lasts only a little over a minute and is entirely wordless, but it’s the most important emotional sequence in the film and occurs almost halfway through. It’s the moment where Anakin decides to join the Dark Side. That Lucas would trust viewers to understand the emotional magnitude of this scene without using any dialogue or more conventional storytelling approaches to convey the message shows his skill as a director. It’s a haunting sequence and another example of his mastery of editing in order to control the emotional tenor of a film.
These three sequences are exceptional works of editing and acting, but they’re absolutely unconventional for a Star Wars film. They capture the film’s inversion of classical storytelling and the complexity of the saga as a whole, while also showing the tragedy at the film’s centre. No other Star Wars films have anything quite like them. That’s because Revenge of the Sith is one-of-a-kind in the franchise. It’s both the culmination of the Prequel Trilogy and the clarification on Lucas’s use of myth and classical storytelling techniques. It’s the definitive look back to the origins of the Star Wars world, and the connective tissue to the stories to come. As is so eloquently shown in one of the final sequences, where we witness Anakin become the familiar vision of Darth Vader crosscut with the births of Luke and Leia, Revenge of the Sith offers devastating tragedy, with a glimmer of hope for a future redemption.
10 out of 10
Star Wars – Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005, USA)
Written and directed by George Lucas; starring Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid, Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Lee, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Frank Oz.