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class="hfeed site" id="page"> Home Facebook-f Twitter Youtube Search Close The following posts are written by contributors and do not necessarily represent the views of ZitoBox. $4.5m Of These Rewards Have Already Been Paid $4.5m Already Paid Start With $10 Free - Coupon Code: TV PLAY NOW PLAY NOW PLAY NOW PLAY NOW The following posts are written by contributors and do not necessarily represent the views of ZitoBox. July 18, 2022 Why Revenge of the Sith was Star Wars at its bold, brutal best
Hayden Christensen as Anakin in Revenge of the Sith
This week, Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi finally got its lightsaber out. Featured heavily in the marketing for the series, Hayden Christensen – aka Anakin Skywalker, aka the future Darth Vader – at last had his close-up. Several close-ups, in fact, with episode five of six revolving around a mock-serious duel between Padawan Anakin and Jedi Master Kenobi during their best pal days on Coruscant.
These scenes were in flashback and may well be all we see of Christensen (who has seemingly aged not a parsec). And they were a reminder nobody does boy-band brattiness more convincingly. If Death the Destroyer of Worlds were to come to us in the form of a second-string member of *NSYNC this is what they would look like.
Christensen’s moochiness aside, Obi-Wan Kenobi also harked back to the most underrated moment in the George Lucas cinematic universe (spoilers to follow). The big reveal was that Moses Ingram’s Inquisitor Reva – a target for all the racists in the fanbase – was a survivor of Anakin’s slaughter of the “younglings” at the end of 2005’s Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
We rewound to that chilling Revenge of the Sith sequence in which Anakin, lightsaber casting wonky blue shadows over his face, arrived at the academy for Force-sensitive youngsters with murder on his mind. Reva has waited ever since to take her revenge on Anakin, who in the Obi-Wan Kenobi timeframe goes as Darth Vader.
Anakin v Kenobi was a highlight of Obi-Wan Kenobi, a show which has too often seemed torn between appealing to kids and to older Star Wars fans. And it reinforced how wigged out and transgressive Lucas had become by the end of the prequels.
Children brutally cut down. The main character suffering horrific mutilations. Samuel L Jackson chucked out a window, to his death. These read like selected highlights from a lost Quentin Tarantino masterpiece. But no: this is a rough outline of how it all goes down at the end of Revenge of the Sith.
Star Wars’s reputation was plummeting faster than Empire Palpatine down the Death Star liftshaft when the last of the prequels was released in May 2005. Perhaps that is why it was written off at the time as just another CGI-slathered Lucas misfire, in the inglorious tradition of the Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.
Flawed the closing chapter of the tragic tale of Anakin and his journey to the Dark Side certainly is. Lucas had by 2005 given up even pretending he was interested in directing human beings. Thus Revenge of the Sith suffers from the same stiltedness already all too familiar from the earlier prequels.
With at least one special effects shot in every frame of the picture – 2,300 in total – the CGI overkill is strong in this one. Revenge of the Sith has the sheen of an entertainment assembled not in real life but on Lucasfilm mainframes. There are 65 human characters and 42 generated by computer.
Obi-Wan and Anakin clash in Revenge of The Sith – Reuters
But none of that obscures the fact this is among the most whipsmart, taut and darkest Star Wars movies. The plot is cranked tighter than Darth Vader’s chestplate ; despite the digital overkill, some of the performances are genuinely compelling. Not least that of Jackson as Mace Windu, the Jedi Master tossed from a height by freshly-unmasked Sith Lord Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid).
Revisited a decade and a half on on, the first thing to say, then, is that Revenge of the Sith deserves better than its footnote status. The injustice has been put into even sharper relief as we process The Rise of Skywalker, the flailing and creatively exhausted end point in Disney’s 2015 – 2019 “sequel” trilogy. Though it has its moments – this is one of the most visually epic Star Wars films ever – Rise of Skywalker fumbles everything Revenge of the Sith got right.
Revenge of the Sith is a masterclass in atmospherics and meticulous story-telling. The contrast is easily explained. Where JJ Abrams and co-scriptwriter Chris Terrio had to scramble to put together the outline for Rise of Skywalker in just a few months, Lucas conceived of the overall arc of Darth Vader’s fall and redemption as far back as 1973.
Likewise plotted decades in advance was Anakin’s climactic light saber smackdown with Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor, who for once does not seem completely miserable portraying the Jedi Master).
The tussle and Anakin’s subsequent lava plunge entered Star Wars lore via James Kahn’s 1983 novelisation of Return of the Jedi. There, Obi-Wan’s Force ghost describes to Luke how his fight against Anakin culminated in Darth Vader “falling into a molten pit”. As a result of his injuries he became more machine than man. And so was born the Darth Vader of the heavy breathing and nattily contoured helmet (this part of the exchange got cut from Jedi itself).
With those set-pieces to work from, Lucas had plenty of time to fine-tune Revenge of the Sith after the release of Attack of the Clones in 2002. He was clear from early on that this would be a bleaker, more violent Star Wars than any before.
Anakin’s journey into Vader-dom is certainly a brutal business. He turns against the Jedi, kills the pre-teen “younglings” at the order’s temple and gets it into his head that his lover Padmé and best pal Obi-Wan are conspiring against him. Palpatine, meanwhile, is truly nightmarish when finally unmasked in all his Sith Lord horror (shortly before tossing Windu out the window).
“People think Star Wars is extremely innocent, although we do cut a lot of people in half and cut off a lot of arms,” said Lucas who can’t have been surprised when Sith became the first Star Wars to receive a PG-13 rating in the US (PG in the UK).
There’s certainly a lot of lopping and chopping here. Revenge of the Sith culminates with Anakin, now irredeemably gone over to the Dark Side, fighting Obi-Wan on the lava planet of Mustafar. At the conclusion of the confrontation Obi-Wan lops off both Anakin’s legs. The stricken ex-Jedi flails, limbless, on the basalt.
“You were my bother Anakin. I loved you,” howls Obi-Wan as Anakin’s leg stumps catch fire and the flames engulf him (he has also misplaced an arm by this point).“Aaaargh,” responds Anakin. “Aaaaaargh!”. His former mentor leaves him to die. It’s Star Wars, George, but not as we know it.
“This one is a little tougher, and I think children, young children especially, should be warned that this is not your average Star Wars,” Lucas had confirmed to Vanity Fair. “It’s a lot darker. There’s a lot more scary stuff in it. It’s brutal in places, and they should be aware of that.”
Hayden Christensen as Anakin in Revenge of the Sith
Lucas lobbed in the kitchen sink making Revenge of the Sith and then threw in a new worktop and breakfast bar for good measure. The final product was so overstuffed that radical trimming was required in post-production. Out went an entire subplot in which a group of Republican leaders, led by Natalie Portman’s Padmé and Genevieve O’Reilly’s Mon Mothma, try to outwit Senator-turned-Emperor Palpatine.
So too was a sequence in which Yoda (Frank Oz) begins his exile on Dagobah. Chinese-American actress Bai Ling, meanwhile, claimed her performance as a Senator was cut because she posed for Playboy the month the movie came out. Lucas insisted the character had been expunged a year earlier.
Some of the pruning can be considered judicious. Lucas had written a scene in which Palpatine tells Anakin that he created his new Sith acolyte out of Midi-chlorians, echoing Darth’s “No, I am your father” line to Luke in Empire Strikes Back. Even the biggest defenders of Lucas’s prequels will agree we are better off without. And the director had briefly considered a cameo by a 10 year-old Han Solo. Liam Neeson had, for his part, agreed to play a Force ghost version of the Phantom Menace’s munificent manbun Qui-Gon Jinn and to have a confab with Yoda. Ultimately there just wasn’t room.
None of these omissions are deal-breakers. Revenge of the Sith already has more than enough going on. Sitting through it anew after Rise of Skywalker, what’s especially striking is the extent to which it widens and deepens the Star Wars universe. Where all Abrams and Disney could do was drill down and down into the Skywalker family, Sith looks to the stars and the huge galaxy spinning above.
Has a Star Wars movie, after all, ever began more thrillingly than Sith does with its spectacular battle between the Old Republic and the Separatist fleets above the capital planet of Coruscant? It’s a whizz-bang affair, featuring sentient proto-TIE Fighters and zero-gravity mini-bots buzzing like dystopian hornets.
Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen – Reuters
Later we travel to the partly-submerged world of Kashyyyk to see Wookie tribes fighting droid Separatists (this was where schoolboy Solo was to pop up). And then to Utapau where Obi-Wan tracks down Separatist leader General Grievous (originally supposed to be voiced by Gary Oldman – accounts differ as to why he wasn’t ultimately cast).
The Jedi Master does all this while riding a giant multicoloured space lizard. Cornered, the asthmatic, half machine/half biological Grievous rips off his cape to reveal four arms, each bearing a light-sabre. Subsequently, he tries to run over Obi-Wan over in a huge armoured wheel. By way of riposte Kenobi targets the flesh and blood organs concealed at Grievous’s midriff. The droid leader burns to death. Whatever else you might say about Sith, you can’t claim it’s dull.
Anakin’s seduction by Senator Palpatine is no less transfixing. It helps that McDiarmid, reprising his part from Return of the Jedi (he’s back in Rise of Skywalker), brings real Shakespearean menace in the part. Christensen, acting against his boyband looks, is every bit his match, communicating genuine confusion as Palpatine by degree wins him over.
Ironically the weakest performance is from the cast member who would walk away with her reputation essentially intact, Natalie Portman. She has complained that after Star Wars she was widely assumed to be a terrible actress and that for years nobody would cast her. Still, within a decade she was winning an Oscar for Black Swan, so the fall-out was relatively short lived.
George Lucas with Samuel L Jackson on the set of Revenge of the Sith – Reuters
Besides, for once Hollywood was right: Portman is incredibly stilted in Revenge of the Sith. In her defence, Padmé is one of the thinnest ever Star Wars characters. Speaking at the time, Portman claimed Padmé had the makings of a feminist icon. Obviously that wasn’t Lucas’s intention. Despite Portman’s best efforts, Anakin’s lover and the mother of Luke and Leia feels like a two-dimensional transplant from a children’s morality tale.
Revenge of Sith suffers, it is also true, from some horrendous closing scenes. Padmé gives birth to Luke and Leia and then loses the will to live and so surrenders her spirit. Reborn as Darth Vader, the horribly charred Anakin does not take the news well. “Noo!…..,” he shrieks in a sequence that scores high for unintentional comedy.
Lucas was combative during promotion of the movie (he had, he said, “earned the right to fail”). It must have frustrated him that the blowback from the (truly horrendous) Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones made it impossible for critics and cinema-goers to watch Revenge of the Sith on its merits.
He was distressed, moreover, to see Christensen, whose career would quickly fizzle out, dismissed as a mannequin with a light saber. “Poor Hayden,” Lucas said on the eve of the Sith’s release. “His performance is great. They just don’t like the character.”
As Jedi junkies survey the wreckage of Disney’s attempt to resurrect Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi will surely help rehabilitate Revenge of the Sith. It is in places clunking and silly, yes. But it is also epic, thrilling and suffused in tragedy. And it reminds us that, unlike JJ Abrams, George Lucas knows how to bring a Star Wars trilogy to a satisfying conclusion.
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