Revenge Of The Sith Is Star Wars Creator George Lucas' True Masterpiece

Yes, I'm that guy — the dude standing up courageously in the Norman Rockwell painting meme. I have the courage to say what we've all been too afraid to admit for 20 years now: When George Lucas made his final "Star Wars" film, 2005's "Episode III — Revenge of the Sith," he made his magnum opus. Doomed from the start after two predecessors that got critics and moviegoers alike in an unprecedented tizzy, the final "Star Wars" prequel was likewise dismissed by many filmgoers as horribly directed, poorly plotted, and badly made.

But that's wrong. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

Yes, I admit that I'm a "prequel kid' — one of those dang millennials born too late to see the original "Star Wars" trilogy in theaters but just in time to think that podracing is really wizard. I was nine when "Revenge of the Sith" — the first PG-13 "Star Wars" film — came out in theaters, and while I was certainly too young for the movie's brutally violent third act, I convinced my parents to let me tag along with my older brother to the theater because this was going to be my last chance to see a "Star Wars" film on the big screen. (Funny, I know, but true at the time.) See, over the previous few years, I'd become obsessed, first through VHS family movie nights for the original trilogy and then through a taped-from-TV-broadcast copy of "Episode II — Attack of the Clones," of which I admittedly only watched the Geonosis battle on loop.

I was the ideal audience member for "Revenge of the Sith," despite being young enough that I shut my eyes when Anakin (Hayden Christensen) got turned into a Texas burnt end. I played "Lego Star Wars" and "Star Wars Battlefront II" religiously on my PlayStation 2 — two games critical to my generation's "Star Wars" experience that came out within a six month window of "Revenge of the Sith." And yet, I still quickly fell victim to the popular sentiment of the time, largely thanks to an early YouTube meta that made pooping on the prequels a daily practice. I came to accept that "Revenge of the Sith" was a disaster. But I was wrong. And so were you.

To start, let's address the one massive, glaring issue with "Revenge of the Sith" that no number of rewatches can fix: It is the most sexist the "Star Wars" franchise has ever been. The gall to turn Padmé (Natalie Portman) from an action hero and opposition political leader to a "What are we going to do?" woman who's defined by pregnancy and dying of a broken heart is ... it's pretty unforgivable. And it's an extra shame because the rest of the film, for all its quirks, is kind of incredible.

Like all of the prequels, "Revenge of the Sith" has received significant criticism for its dialogue, acting, and heavy reliance on special effects. Lines like "I have the high ground" and "unlimited power" have become some of the biggest memes in "Star Wars" — lines that feel impossible not to laugh at. But is it so wild to suggest that was the point all along? Lucas once said that the "Star Wars" movies were, in essence, silent movies "because they are stories that are told visually; and in silent movies the relationship between image and music is everything." His dialogue is less a way to carefully develop the story and more another method by which he can create these larger-than-life, hyper-memorable crescendo moments.

"Revenge of the Sith" is operatic — not in that it's high art, but in that the emotional circumstances of the story define the larger world. Tableaus like Anakin crying in the council chambers thinking about Padmé, leading clone troopers into the Jedi Temple, locked in a grapple with Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) on Mustafar as lava erupts behind them — these moments are the whole point of the movie. It's a story painted with the biggest possible strokes, which admittedly makes the detail work a bit ridiculous when you zoom in. But it's pretty clear that was Lucas' intention all along.

Through six films, George Lucas tried to blend the aesthetics and filmcraft of old sci-fi adventure serials with the broad legibility of the mythopoetic epic. And to be clear, those original "Star Wars" movies are fantastic — better by most standard metrics of film criticism than the prequels, perhaps because Lucas had less singular control at the beginning. But at the same time, it's so clear that "Revenge of the Sith" is the movie he'd been wanting to make all along — something that blended high melodrama, bold audiovisuals, Greek tragedy, swashbuckling action, and a contemporary critique of American neoliberalism.

Fans of the prequels often call them "Shakespearean" in their defenses, which I think is a little off-base. Shakespeare's characters live in an elevated world, certainly, but one of a different kind. "Revenge of the Sith" is ballet, shadow puppetry, commedia dell'arte. It's a place where costumes show your moral alignment, where General Grievous is the monster in the cave, where you laugh watching an evil emperor achieve supreme power because he is just so ridiculous. The emotional circumstances are lifted so high that they twist into something else entirely. The artifice of the special effects is obvious, but perhaps with a purpose. You are not supposed to see this world as real nor its dialogue as natural. It is the stage decorated with dazzling set pieces, the fly loft, the smoke machine, brought to life by the orchestra in the pit.

There are so few singular blockbusters these days. Regardless of angle, almost everything of a certain scale seems aimed squarely at the center of the bell curve. Maybe that's because we all bullied Lucas so hard in the early 2000s that no studio franchise dared to try it again, at least not with that kind of budget and spotlight. But sitting in the theater for my 20th anniversary "Revenge of the Sith" screening, I can't help but think how well a film like it might do today, simply by throwing a completely different style, complete with a downright confounding tone, into the mix. I'm not claiming that abstraction and extreme clowning make a movie objectively better. But I do think that if you watch "Revenge of the Sith" accepting what Lucas set out to do, there's no question that this is his masterpiece.