My Revenge of the Sith review lands at a 3.5 out of 5, which is a step up from the other two prequels, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, but not a big one. The birth of Vader is the part I found useful and informative, and it’s what I came for. The rest of the movie was average at best. It’s the darkest of the three, and the first Star Wars with a PG-13 rating, and I can feel the difference. It’s the one I’d actually recommend of the three, and that says as much about how low the bar was as it does about this film.
Three years into the Clone Wars
It starts three years into the Clone Wars with a big space battle above Coruscant, where Anakin and Obi-Wan rescue Chancellor Palpatine from General Grievous. It’s a loud, busy opening, with ships swarming around each other and the two heroes crash-landing their way through Grievous’s flagship, and it gets things going quickly. After that Anakin gets home to find out Padme is pregnant, and then he starts having visions of her dying in childbirth. That’s what the whole thing hangs on, because Palpatine knows it and plays on it. He befriends Anakin, tells him about a Sith lord who could save people from death, and meanwhile the Jedi Council asks Anakin to spy on the Chancellor, which makes him uneasy. You can see where it’s going, and the film knows you can. It’s the slide that makes the Vader of Return of the Jedi mean something, because you’ve watched how he got there.
The set-up is the part that works as a story, because it’s about a man so afraid of losing the person he loves that he’s willing to do anything to stop it. I can follow that. What I found harder was how long the film spends getting there, with a lot of talking in rooms and not a lot that held my attention. Anakin is torn between the Council and the Chancellor, and the more time he spends with Palpatine the more you start to see how this ends. It’s a slow burn, and it burns for a long time.
The rescue of the Chancellor is a set piece in itself. Anakin and Obi-Wan fly into the middle of a space battle, board General Grievous’s flagship, and fight their way through droids and a crashing ship to get Palpatine out. Grievous is a cyborg general who coughs and stalks around with four arms and a pile of stolen lightsabers, and he’s a distinctive villain. Count Dooku is back there too, and the way he’s dealt with sets the tone for how far Anakin will go. The whole sequence is fast and flashy, and it’s a decent way to kick off the last film of the trilogy.
Afterwards the film settles into its real work, which is getting Anakin to the dark side. It’s a story of small steps, each one slightly worse than the last, and it’s the only way the story could work. There’s the secret marriage, the visions, the Council that won’t give him the rank he thinks he deserves, and the Chancellor who always has the right word at the right time.
Anakin and the Chancellor
The real engine of the film is the relationship between Anakin and Palpatine. Palpatine is patient and friendly, and every conversation he has with Anakin is another small push in the wrong direction, until Anakin starts to see him as the only person who understands. The Jedi Council doesn’t trust Anakin, and Anakin doesn’t trust them, and meanwhile the Chancellor is whispering that he could save Padme if only he’d learn what the Sith know. Watching a good man get talked into something terrible is the best idea in the film, and it’s the part where the story really works.
It’s a slow, creeping thing, and you can see it coming a mile off, but there’s something grim about watching it happen. Anakin is a hero who’s about to do something awful for the best of reasons, and that’s an interesting thing to put on screen. I just wish the dialogue and the acting had been better, because the idea is stronger than the way they got it across. It’s a story I liked more than the film itself, and I came away wishing the film had been better.
Order 66 and the clones
The part of the film I found most interesting was Order 66 and the clones. When Mace Windu confronts Palpatine, who turns out to be Darth Sidious, and Anakin steps in, he ends up helping to kill Windu, and then he pledges himself to Palpatine and gets renamed Darth Vader. Right after that, the clone troopers turn on their Jedi generals all at once, and I found that really interesting. The troopers I’d gotten used to as Jedi allies suddenly become the Empire’s weapon, and the way it plays out is dark and shocking. Anakin leads the assault on the Jedi Temple, and only Obi-Wan and Yoda survive.
The whole idea of the clones was interesting to me, and it’s the part of the film I’ll remember. It isn’t enough to carry the rest, but I’ll give it that. Seeing the Jedi taken by surprise by the very soldiers they’d been fighting alongside is the one thing in the three prequels that actually made me feel something. It’s a big, grim moment, and it’s played straight.
The film also leaves plenty of room for the darkest moment in the whole series, when Anakin goes to the Jedi Temple with a squad of clone troopers and the Temple falls. You don’t see everything, but you see enough, and it’s a hard scene to sit through. Obi-Wan and Yoda come back afterwards and see what’s happened, and both of them make for the Chancellor’s rooms with the same terrible thought. Yoda goes to face Palpatine himself while Obi-Wan goes to face Anakin, and the two fights are cut together, one against the other. It’s a gutsy way to structure the climax and I liked it. It’s the one place in the whole film where the cutting felt confident and the story was moving fast.
Mustafar and the birth of Vader
Then there’s the duel on Mustafar, with Obi-Wan and Anakin going at each other across rivers of lava. Obi-Wan confronts him after hunting him down, and the two of them fight all over the volcanic planet, in a lava-filled landscape that’s about as hellish as you can get. It ends with Anakin badly burned, and Padme dies after giving birth to twins, Luke and Leia, who get hidden away. Vader gets his armour and the suit goes on in that scene, and Palpatine declares the Empire. That’s the bit that links up to A New Hope, and the birth of Vader is the useful and informative part, the piece of the story I wanted filled in.
The last stretch ties everything together, with the twins sent off to be raised in secret, Obi-Wan and Yoda going into hiding, and Vader standing next to the Emperor looking at the first Death Star being built. It’s the part of the film that most made me want to go back and watch the original trilogy again. Everything between those big moments felt average to me, though, and I kept waiting for the film to catch up to what it was building towards. I’d call it a fair end to the prequels. It tells me the story I was missing, even if it doesn’t tell it as well as I’d hoped.
What I made of it
I went in expecting to be disappointed, and I wasn’t, quite. This is the film in the series that has to do the heaviest lifting, because everyone already knows how it ends, and it mostly gets the big beats right. Order 66 is the standout, and the birth of Vader is the reason to see it. The rest, the talking, the romance and a lot of stiff dialogue, is average at best, and I couldn’t get excited about it.
It’s a 3.5 because the parts that matter work, and the parts that don’t are easy enough to sit through. If you’ve stuck with the prequels this far, you’ll want to see how it ends, and I think you’ll come out of it satisfied. Rating: 3.5 out of 5. Better than the other two, and it earns that, but only just.