IronWatcher’s review published on Letterboxd:
Rewatch-a-thon to Star Wars Episode 9
Step 3 of 10
Watched on Blu-Ray
"Star Wars: Episode III-Revenge of the Sith" fills a well-known gap. Everyone knows the outcome around the key figure Anakin Skywalker. It must be told, how and why the brave young Jedi became an asthmatic-roaring, dark figure, which brought endless many children's hearts to a standstill. George Lucas can't really surprise, nor can he tell a compelling story. The (fallen) mogul apologizes for his two previously hated movies with a brute forward attack and does what he does best: He delivers a powerful, fervent space opera.
Immersed in fantastic-exotic backdrops, intoxicated by his special effects machinery. The computer-generated battle painting never has this loving naivety of the "old" trilogy, which is hardly possible, though, since it was also a child of its time. But "Star Wars Episode III" is a successful transition to this trilogy.
The fact that the Republic was founded and the end of Anakin's Homeric developmental journey that came along with it, ties up emotionally-dramatically to the cult successors of the series. After the infantile first part (childhood) and the semi-dark second part (puberty), the third part (becoming a man) is marked by a tense, nihilistic-dark mood. The brightly coloured colour pot becomes a thunderstorm of symbolic warning colours of black and blood red. Death-dramatic and powerful, with rampant surges of emotion, the film ends in a blazing hell of volcanic violence, the saga is given a finale of grand gestures.
This comic-like, poppy variation of a Shakespearean drama, with all its mythological references, is never intellectual or clever. However, the Star Wars universe has always been a trivial soap show of cosmic breadth. An exuberance of technique, a conglomeration of religious, spiritual, military and political motifs that can never be grasped with logic, but only with the heart. Precisely because of its infantile power to mix the themes crudely, the series generates so much magic. The third part satisfies these requirements satisfactorily.
The mannequin Hayden Christensen still manages to perform the already embarrassing dialogues even more embarrassingly, the love story around Padmé (her story arc ends as unsatisfying and inevitable as it aready was hinted at in Episode 2) has as much passion and depth as an advertisement for a hair shampoo and the story, which continues to be told like a woodcut, is not free of involuntary comedy ("Nooooooo!!!!!"), but staggers powerfully and with an epic look at great choreographed fighting scenes towards an end, which compensates all the previous weaknesses.
"The Revenge of the Sith" is great, monumental cinema and an appropriate (first) endpoint of a technically and commercially sophisticated franchise that has a rich impact on modern pop culture.
