Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)

The road to Episode IV has been paved with disappointment, bogged down as it is by bizarre narrative flights, bad writing, and even worse acting.  By the time we reach Revenge of the Sith, the final prequel, it’s difficult to tell why the film feels like a success – has it truly accomplished what the prequels set out to do, or are we just weary and relieved to see Darth Vader on screen?

As the Clone Wars conclude, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) pursues the villainous cyborg General Grievous while Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) comes under the wing of Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid).  But Palpatine’s intentions are less than noble, and his promise that he can save the life of Anakin’s pregnant wife Padmé (Natalie Portman) leads the young Jedi inexorably toward his dark destiny.

There’s a point in the film, the moment when Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader, when it almost feels like this is the prequel we’ve been waiting for – the film totally dispenses with all the cartoon chicanery and gives us, in fairly rapid succession, (spoilers?) the fall of the Jedi order and a climactic lightsaber duel between Vader and Obi-Wan on a volcanic planet, which explains the necessity of the suit.  I’m certain that a large degree of the third act’s success is the John Williams score, which carries us through the emotional trauma of the scene and bludgeons us with “The Imperial March” as the Empire rises.  The action is really quite impressive, as the Vader/Obi-Wan duel is juxtaposed with Yoda’s fight against Palpatine.

Unfortunately, there’s a pervading sense that this is a moment the trilogy has not quite earned.  It’s remarkable as a tonal shift, a third act that really feels quite out of place for a series that began with a cartoon fish-rabbit version of Stepin Fetchit.  And it draws into stark contrast all the things that the trilogy has done wrong – as Darth Vader cuts down all the political conspirators from the previous two films, one feels a sense of frustration that all those machinations had distracted us from what should have been a compelling yet inevitable tragic fall.

It’s even more painful that Revenge of the Sith, rather than focus on this first-rate third act, introduces a whirlwind of new plot elements – including General Grievous – before realizing quite quickly that the trilogy has done next to nothing to set up the Original Trilogy – the pregnancy that will bear Luke and Leia is a passing subplot, and the characters who need to die because they don’t appear in the Original Trilogy are shuffled off with little fanfare.  Notable exception – the Jedi Order itself, killed off during the aforementioned third act during a beautifully grim montage.  It’s not that Grievous and company are uninteresting material, but they’re perhaps better suited in some of the Expanded Universe material.

The greatest pain in the midst of the third act is that it throws into sharp relief just how poor of an actor Hayden Christensen is.  He has his moments, to be fair, though I wonder how much of the work is actually being done by Williams’s score and the special contact lenses Christensen wears.  Revenge of the Sith is really the only prequel where any acting actually gets done; McGregor embraces the showboat nature of Obi-Wan’s character, Portman does a good bit of emoting, and McDiarmid really chews up the scenery as the snarling Palpatine.  But Christensen continues to yell without much emotion, leaving the characterization work in the hands of the other elements of production.

But I don’t want to take away that sense of accomplishment from Revenge of the Sith.  It’s holding 80% over at Rotten Tomatoes, which might be an overestimation.  The third act, however, is fully worth that, if only because it finally takes the audience where it wanted to go all along.  That’s a little bit funny, actually; usually we criticize prequels for merely setting up the original film, but in this case the world built in the Prequel Trilogy is so poorly misjudged that we’re glad finally to be rid of its ill-advised detours and distractions in favor of the more familiar – and more successful – elements of the Star Wars universe.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi violence and some intense images.”  Two characters are burned alive in surprisingly graphic detail; others, including several children, die bloodless and off-screen deaths (including an implied decapitation).  Palpatine’s transformation into the wrinkly-faced Emperor is a bit disturbing.

We’ll be back in two hours with Star Wars (also known as Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope)!