Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Director: George Lucas

And at last the backstory comes to an end, in what is frankly superior fashion to the first two parts; even the Golden Raspberry people acknowledged this fact by only nominating it for one Razzie rather than the several the previous films were put up for. Indeed, I think I’d almost go so far as to say the opening sequence alone, i.e. the whole battle to rescue Palpatine, is better than the first two films together. It’s fun in a way those films weren’t, and, to be sure, the rest of this film isn’t. But then again, Revenge was probably doomed to otherwise be the least fun film in the whole saga; this, after all, had to culminate in a very particular way and everything had to build thereto accordingly. And so Lucas hits the “dark and serious” switch, and finally seems to take more interest in the actual story; it’s like he realised “shit, I’d better actually give Anakin a reason for becoming Darth Vader”… the end result is as full of Stuff Happening as the previous two films, but it seems a lot more controlled and less messy. And I do like how it ultimately subverts the usual “chosen one” narrative, the boy meant to reconcile the Force ends up doing bugger all of the sort. And it also gives fuller vent than the previous films to Lucas’ apparent fascination with people getting their hands cut off, which was kind of disturbing before but now attains unpleasant new heights (I spotted a couple more on this viewing that I don’t think I’d previously noticed). Still, that aside, I was a lot happier to see this again than I was Phantom Menace or Clones; indeed, I think this is the only one of the three I’d actually previously seen more than once, and it’s the only one I’d particularly wish to see again. 7mate are rerunning the original trilogy after this, so I’ll be reporting on those in due course too…