The Lasting Power of 'Revenge of the Sith'

Revisiting Lucas' final installment 20 years later

Over the past few years, a 2012 lecture from art critic Camille Paglia has resurfaced online, in which she makes the very bold claim that the greatest work of art of the last 30 years is none other than Star Wars: Episode III - The Revenge of the Sith.

Now, one does not need to look far to discover that Ms. Paglia has a lot of crazy ideas about art and is most certainly not a religious person by any means, but I can’t help but feel that she is speaking to something much deeper about George Lucas’ 2005 conclusion to his decades-long saga, and about Star Wars as a whole.

Buckle up, because I’m going to be diving deeper into Revenge probably more than you’ve ever thought about it before.

PART I: CONCLUDING A SAGA

Sequels- at the time The Empire Strikes Back hit theaters in 1981- were nothing new in Hollywood. The serials that Star Wars are based off of dominated the box office in the 1930s with fans flocking theaters to see the latest episode of Buck Rogers or Batman.

Where George Lucas completely bucked convention was that when he wanted to make more Star Wars movies after Return of the Jedi, instead of looking forward to the continuing adventures of Luke Skywalker, his instinct was to look backwards.

In the decision to set the next film approximately 30 years before the events of the original Star Wars film- which was now subtitled “Episode IV: A New Hope”- George Lucas turned traditional movie storytelling on its head: instead of a story structure represented by a potentially infinite line he was instead creating for himself the challenge of a defined, closed loop.

And Revenge of the Sith is the closing of that loop (or at least it was intended to be).

In 2014, a Star Wars fan named Mike Kilmo posited a theory about Lucas’ intent with the original six films that led to a whole new way to analyze them: Ring Theory (starwarsringtheory.com).

The theory posits that each of the six films “rhyme” with another, but not just in the sense that the first, second, and third in each trilogy are intentionally similar, but that in fact each film corresponds to another in a “closed loop” as shown above.

By his logic, this would mean that the end of Attack of the Clones (a massive battle with four legged walkers where the clone troopers win) would actually correspond with the beginning of Empire Strikes Back (a massive battle with four legged walkers where the stormtroopers win).

For Revenge, here are some of the similarities shared with A New Hope:

Revenge of the Sith begins with an epic space battle to rhyme with A New Hope’s ending.

And it goes on and on:

And on:

I won’t repost the entire site here, but you get the gist.

Granted, you might look at all this and go, “these are the delusional ravings of someone who spends too much time on the Internet,” and while this is probably true to an extent, the fact that it all lines up so well is a testament to the insanely intricate plotting of George Lucas. No other director or writer in the film business can even come close to this kind of visual poetry on such a grand scale.

Revenge of the Sith has to provide both a satisfying conclusion to the two films before it and a sensible, logical prelude to the films that come after.

And it somehow manages to be the best of the original three prequel films, while also drawing heavily from Greek tragedy and 19th century opera. Those who have tried to emulate this feat (i.e. Warner Bros essentially forcing Peter Jackson to make three Hobbit films for them) have almost always been found lacking.

PART II: THE MOST SUCCESSFUL INDEPENDENT FILM OF ALL TIME

Another Star Wars fan who gives great insight into the films themselves actually plays a part in them, or at least the TV shows. Sam Witwer started out as the voice of “Starkiller” in the Force Unleashed games, which paved the way for him to get the role of Darth Maul in The Clone Wars series, where he got to work very closely with George Lucas. Witwer has often shared his insights both on his X account and at conventions, like in this clip below in which he explains that, essentially, every single Star Wars film from Empire to Revenge has been an independent film:

That’s right: every Star Wars sequel or prequel that George produced was made with his own money. There was a lot of hubbub about Francis Ford Coppola making Megalopolis with his own funds, but Lucas has been doing it since 1978. That means everything- the sets, the CGI, the equipment- is coming out of George’s pocket: every film helped ensure the next one.

A lot of people like to poke fun at the seams of these films especially since in many respects the technology used to make them has advanced in a lot of ways since. Yet after watching the fantastic series on Industrial Light & Magic (aptly titled Light & Magic) on Disney+- about the effects company that Lucas founded to make the first Star Wars- it led me to a reconsideration of my initial criticisms of those seams.

And the realization was this: this movie was made for ONLY $100 million. The price tag on The Force Awakens? $500 MILLION. People always criticize George for all the CGI and greenscreen that was used to make this film, but fail to see the genius of it- by putting all of the money on the screen and developing entire new ways of making movies to do so, George was able to make one of the most ambitious blockbusters of all time, while still retaining final creative control.

And the result is this:

Audiences still love these movies because no films have looked like this since. The Marvel films all have looked progressively more gray as they’ve gone on, and no one else has the time, budget, AND artistry to pull something like this off. The only person who has is James Cameron, and it’s why the Avatar movies are the highest-grossing movies of all time.

The term “maximalist filmmaking” has been way overused in film discussion in recent years, but the Prequel Films represent it in its best possible sense. What other filmmaker has so successfully put his imagination to the screen in such a way?

CONCLUSION

Revenge of the Sith, for all of its flaws, endures because of its ambitious sincerity. People joke about the dialogue, yet what other movie has lines that iconic? The sequels went the wrong way in trying too hard to emulate the way people talk and act in real life, and yet the quasi-Shakespearean dialogue of the prequels is secretly what makes them work. It’s silly, it’s corny, and yet its endlessly entertaining. More importantly, you believe it. You believe in the mythology, that this in fact was how the far away Republic fell, that this is not a film but a retelling of history. And it’s the bombastic yet committed performances of the cast (primarily McGregor and McDiarmid) that sells you on that.

At the time of writing, the re-release of this 20-year old movie (which I attended the day prior to this) is set to make $25 MILLION this weekend. Audiences are increasingly shunning films meant to reflect any political messages or to show us the “grim reality” of an increasingly faithless world: the people want to be transported- for just a little over two hours- to a galaxy far, far, away.