George Lucas is redeemed!!!!

Rating: 10/10 (26 February 2017)

Revenge of the Sith is one of the most indulgent, operatic and grandiose films I have ever seen, and the most courageous entry into the Star Wars saga. The film reeks of a beautiful desperation from a director moving mountains to improve on his widely despised prequels. It's a crushing film for hardcore fans of the franchise, literally killing off an entire era of mythology and history in the name of transitioning to the original trilogy. Every part of the film feels absolutely necessary to Lucas' tale of hope and despair, dispensing with the frivolities he enjoyed in the first two films. It treats its characters with sincerity, reveling in broken relationships and budding ones alike.
Revenge of the Sith is successful in part because of Lucas' clear attempts to return to the originals, that is the classical wide- shots, exciting and clearly eloquent action set pieces, passionate montages and close ups that are bursting with an emotional depth that the prior two films were nearly devoid of. He strikes a key balance, in that he clearly delights in barraging us with intricately designed species and beautiful landscapes, but allowing them a level of sincerity so they don't feel like an obvious embellishment. Politics are addressed, but the characters retain their prominence. New worlds and species are seen, but the Jedi Temple and Tatooine hold the heart of the film. The action and effects in the film are criminally unrecognized, boasting perhaps the finest world-building and creature animation this side of The Fellowship of the Ring. The lightsaber battles and clone wars are exciting and an absolute delight to see, but Lucas never allows them to proceed with being grounded in some sort of stakes. The opening space battle is breath-taking, parallel saber-duels between Yoda and the Emperor and Obi-wan and Anakin is heart wrenching, and Grevious's demise is devilishly fulfilling.
I rarely get more emotional while viewing a film than I do during the final twenty minutes of Revenge of the Sith. It's such a beautiful culmination of 6 hours of film into one final moment, literally bursting with gratuitous emotion and deeply felt tragedy. It encapsulates the meaning of operatic, with the finest cumulative score of the legend John William soaring behind Lucas' powerful script delivered by two actors finally settling into their roles in the finest way possible. Relationships are destroyed, characters are born, and the simple heft the sequence carries to a die-hard Star Wars fan such as myself and many others is simply overwhelming. The duel is so pure and honest, with the fiery landscape of Mustafar as backdrop, it's an absolute powerhouse of emotion.
I didn't have much of a problem with Hayden Christensen in Attack of the clones (even though his scenes with Padme were hardly something to call praiseworthy), but here he really seems to have grown into the role. His descent into evil is surprisingly well acted and comes off best during the climactic moments. Ewan Mcgregor, too, is excellent. He was good in episodes I and II, but in this chapter he really sinks into the character and comes close to matching Alec Guiness's legendary performance as Obi-Wan. The same is true for Samuel Jackson as Mace Windu. Whereas he was pretty stiff in the earlier chapters, his confrontation with Palpatine carries a grand dramatic weight and he actually had me rooting for him. Yoda is once again a pleasure to watch whenever we see him on screen; he is upstaged only by Ian McDiarmid, who delivered a deliciously raspy evil to the Emperor in Return of the Jedi and played Palpatine for the prequels. McDiarmid speaks his lines with intonations so chilly that he tears into every sequence involving him. Revenge of the Sith is, without a doubt, his movie.
George Lucas' Revenge of the Sith is a masterpiece of the fantasy genre, infused with so much tangible emotion and tragedy that it easily compares the finest in the saga. It's a film that does away with all the woes of it's prequels, and capitalizes on the one relationship that had managed to hold a place in all Star Wars fan's hearts, Obi-Wan and Anakin in the most powerful way imaginable. Chock full of visual poetry and technical wizardry, Revenge of the Sith solidifies George Lucas's place in the pantheon of directorial innovators, and ought to silence all of his haters entirely. Despite a few less than stellar entries into the genre, his efforts over the past five decades have effectively given life to an entire genre of film and has altered the world of movies forever. This is the work of a man in love with his craft, letting loose all the indulgences he had for years restrained. One of the great travesties of the cinematic world is that it is so often lumped in with it's inferior predecessors, lost to the blind hate of fans everywhere despite it's deserving of a spot alongside the original trilogy. One of my favorite films.