Photo: Twentieth Century-Fox/Courtesy Everett Collection
Those who weren’t alive or particularly conscious during the initial release of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels might not be able to appreciate what it felt like to live through the weird drama of those movies’ contentious reception. We need not dwell on it too much — I’ve lost track of which part of the sine wave of backlash and revival The Phantom Menace currently occupies — but suffice it to say that by the time the final film, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, premiered in May 2005, the battle lines had solidified. Some fans believed that Old Man George had totally lost it. Others, many of them kids enchanted by this new trilogy of sci-fi adventures, were excited to return to Lucas’s extravagant universe. This put Revenge of the Sith (which is back in theaters this week, to celebrate its 20th anniversary) in an interesting place. The director warned beforehand that this climax to the sad story of Anakin Skywalker, the first Star Wars movie to receive a PG-13 rating, might be too dark and intense for younger viewers. Meanwhile, many older fans had already fallen out of love with these pictures. Who was Sith for, exactly? I’m still not sure — though I loved it when it came out, and I love it still.
Maybe Lucas had lost it, albeit in a productive way. For all his protestations that these were kids’ flicks, one of the beauties of the prequels was the sense that the director’s primary audience for all these films was himself. The original Star Wars trilogy had been inspired by the stuff of his youth: a mash-up of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, westerns, WWII movies, and samurai pictures like Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. The prequels carried that idea forward, with their blending of biblical epics, cloak-and-dagger intrigue, and Ray Harryhausen–style monster mayhem. Even the films’ much-criticized (and admittedly awkward) love story played better when viewed as a riff on the soft-focus, pastoral wooziness of 1950s and ’60s Hollywood romances.
Revenge of the Sith retains some of that nostalgic referentiality, but it also feels like Lucas’s attempt to take a step back from his creation and really reckon with it. The clear-cut, good-versus-evil narrative of the first Star Wars had captured the public’s imagination in the 1970s, and its immediate sequels furthered its reach into the Zeitgeist. By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was referring to the Soviet Union as “the Evil Empire,” and his missile defense system was being called “Star Wars.” It all made for an easily digestible shorthand. The Empire was a sinister, one-note shadow: faceless Storm Troopers, toadying fascistic generals, a cackling emperor, and of course Darth Vader, an enigmatic demon masked and cloaked in black. Vader would be redeemed by the end, but what was behind all this eee-viil? That question remained unexplored. Thus, by returning to Star Wars, and to the story of Anakin’s transformation into one of modern cinema’s great villains, Lucas set up a huge challenge for himself: to go beyond good guys and bad guys and explore the very nature of this evil.
There was a tonal challenge here as well. The first trilogy had been built on sensation and surprise (“Luke, I am your father” is still one of history’s great reveals), but any excitement in these new movies would be tempered by the overarching narrative’s gathering futility. We knew this story’s supposed twists and revelations. We knew that Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) was secretly Darth Sidious, the Sith lord who would become the emperor. We knew that Anakin (Hayden Christensen) would be seduced by the Dark Side of the Force; that his beloved Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) would die; that the Jedi order would be obliterated and Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) exiled to the remote reaches of space. Lucas filmed the stories, though, as if these were still surprises — because for the characters, they were — but we in the audience knew where it was all headed. I think even the kids discovering the story for the first time basically knew. The prequel trilogy was, and remains, the ultimate downer epic.
Photo: Twentieth Century-Fox/Courtesy Everett Collection
And it finally flowers in its full gruesome glory in the second half of Sith. As we watch the Jedis’ massacre, as Palpatine issues “Order 66” and unleashes a galaxy-wide slaughter, we find ourselves in the middle of a Godfather-style gangster-movie montage. Then we enter the realm of horror, as Anakin murders a group of Jedi younglings. When he and Obi-Wan have their climactic lightsaber duel in the hellish lava mines of Mustafar, we’re not really looking for acrobatic swordplay and cool Jedi antics; we’re anticipating the moment when Anakin will have his limbs severed and be burned alive. The film leaves behind the excitement of an action fantasy and embraces the bleak inevitability of grand tragedy.
Revenge of the Sith is the one entry in the trilogy whose grimness matches the series’ prevailing mood. Up until this point, we’ve only had hints at Anakin’s ambition and growing resentment and rage. (His murder of the Sand People after they’ve captured and tortured his mother is the high point of Attack of the Clones.) But now, we see them in every scene — his anger at the Jedi for not letting him become a master, his inability to control his wrath, his suspicions of Padmé, his constant fear that something awful will happen to those he loves. Christensen, who had endured critical fire for his stiff performance in Attack of the Clones, comes into his own here. Maybe his Anakin wasn’t an ideal romantic lead — especially since, again, we knew it wasn’t going to work out — and maybe he didn’t quite have the dash to be the action hero the earlier film required. But watching this anxious young man channel Anakin’s haughty and petulant fury, we finally understand what Lucas saw in him.
More important, we witness how now-chancellor Palpatine taps into these feelings, as he massages Anakin’s grievances against the Jedi and beckons him to “a life greater than that of an ordinary Jedi — a life of significance, of conscience.” He lures Anakin by telling him the story of Darth Plagueis the Wise, a Sith lord who supposedly found a way to transcend mortality and prevent the death of his loved ones. Anakin, tormented by visions of Padmé dying in childbirth, is immediately taken in by this. In their further conversations, Lucas even lets us hear a bit of Palpatine’s supposed justifications for his actions. “If one is to understand the great mystery, one must study all its aspects,” the chancellor tells Anakin. “Not just the dogmatic, narrow view of the Jedi. If you wish to become a complete and wise leader, you must embrace a larger view of the Force.” In other words, the narrow-minded, censorious, and cliquish Jedi are keeping the truth from everyone else; why not see the bigger picture — so you can double down on protecting those closest to you? It’s the pitch many a totalitarian charlatan has made over the centuries: a supposedly omniscient vision, purporting to see through the curtain of base reality, all for the survival and ascendance of a select few. This is a truer and more resonant vision of evil than the movies tend to give us.
To inform his portrait of a civilization giving itself over to tyranny, Lucas had harked back to history and myth. He’d already borrowed heavily from Joseph Campbell for the first Star Wars movies. Now he looked to the stories of Caesar and Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin. But he also probably just looked around him. (Lucas was, after all, a child of the 1960s, and at the time he began work on the first Star Wars, America’s involvement in Vietnam wasn’t far from his mind; he was still hoping to direct Apocalypse Now.) Revenge of the Sith came under fire from some quarters for what many perceived as an attack on the Bush administration’s imperial overreach in the wake of 9/11. Certainly, some lines rang queasily familiar, and anyone who had watched the news felt a certain chill upon hearing the words “so this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause,” uttered as Palpatine received extraordinary powers to return peace and prosperity to the galaxy. The prequel cycle had begun well before George W. Bush’s election, but its tale of a society giving up its freedoms in the face of an outside threat eventually found an unnerving echo in the real world.
Lucas’s timing was, strangely, both fortuitous and uneasy. Ever since September 11, 2001, American audiences had been hungry for simple tales of good versus evil, and Hollywood had (perhaps inadvertently) delivered. The first of the Lord of the Rings films, long in production, premiered in the fall of that year; so, too, did the first Harry Potter movie. The first X-Men had premiered the year before, and Sam Raimi’s (wonderful) Spider-Man would open in 2002. These hits were all ongoing iterations of a pop-culture revolution Lucas had helped kick off in the mid-1970s. Now, he seemed to bring a dose of nuance and engagement lacking in the average blockbuster.
Maybe that’s why the prequels felt so messy. There was a tension throughout between the rip-roaring children’s fantasies the films wanted to be, the high-tech megahits they had to be, and the clearly personal visions Lucas needed them to be. We could feel the director trying to cram everything he could into these movies — and because they weren’t typical franchise fare managed by armies of executives, we could also see the seams. But this messiness turned out to be these pictures’ secret strength and the key to their lasting appeal. You can still behold it in Revenge of the Sith, the saddest and sincerest of all the Star Wars epics, the mad work of a man desperately trying to understand his own creation.
