Yoda warned me, but I didn’t listen. “Fear is the path to the dark side,” Frank Oz’s wise Jedi master wheezed in “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace” (1999). “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads…to suffering.”
Did I suffer when I first saw “The Phantom Menace”? Hardly. I was 11 years old—not yet seasoned enough to know that Jar Jar Binks’ Gungan colloquialisms weren’t the height of cinematic wit (okay, I’ll admit it: “Mesa no have a booma!” still cracks me up).
Yet when “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith” (2005) was released, I was old enough to experience the allure of the dark side. I was afraid, I was angry, and I suffered…though not for the same reasons that many of my fellow “Star Wars” fandroids did.
Nebulously rated PG-13 for “sci-fi violence and some intense images,” “Revenge of the Sith” was rife with grotesque visions, including the interplanetary slaughter of the Jedi Knights by the clone minions of Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid).
“Execute Order 66!” Palpatine gleefully commands. If you’re a millennial fan, the horrors that follow probably still haunt your nightmares: Clones blasting Aayla Secura’s cold corpse…Ki-Adi-Mundi’s stunned look of sadness and disbelief…Yoda clutching his heart.
The first time I saw “Revenge of the Sith,” I was 14, and well-versed in the conventions of movie violence. But that didn’t mean I was ready for, say, the sickening scene where Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) executes Nute Gunray (Silas Carson).
“The war is over!” Gunray pleads. “Lord Sidious promised us peace. We only want—” Before he can finish his sentence, Anakin raises his blazing blue lightsaber, fatally slashing the whimpering alien’s chest.
As a teen, I took the film’s brutality as a betrayal by “Star Wars” overlord George Lucas. “Star Wars” was supposed to be a cavalcade of friendly Wookiees, bickering droids, and whiny kids whooping, “Now this is podracing!” “Star Wars” was supposed to be safe.
I wasn’t the only kid who felt that way. In 2005, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott wrote that his nine-year-old son and a friend were “disturbed as well as fascinated” by the film’s climatic lightsaber duel, which ends with Anakin being burned alive on the lava planet Mustafar.
“This was a more intimate kind of violence than they were used to encountering,” Scott wrote, “and they needed to make sense of its place in the movie’s narrative.” As did I.
For Scott, whether or not a movie was appropriate for children depended on questions each parent must answer about their individual child: “How easily are they scared or disturbed? Do they like being scared or disturbed?”
When I first saw “Revenge of the Sith,” my answers to those questions were, respectively, “very easily” and “no.” The movie wasn’t bad because of its atrocious acting and excruciating dialogue; it was bad because it made me feel bad. That was that.
Except it wasn’t. Not only did I see “Revenge of the Sith” thrice on the big screen, but I rewatched it countless times at home. Turns out that Scott’s son and I were alike in another way: We were both as fascinated as we were disturbed.
In his article, Scott described how seriously both his son and his son’s friend took Anakin’s mutilation, which he characterized as “a grisly confirmation of Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader and a punishment for his allegiance to the dark side.”
“In some ways I wish that George Lucas and I had spared them such a gruesome spectacle, but at the same time their reaction to it confirmed the integrity of Mr. Lucas’ story,” Scott wrote.
Playful sadism has its place in Lucas’ galaxy far, far away—lest we forget, the power of the Force just barely saved Luke Skywalker from an Ewok barbecue—but he’s no Tarantino, slicing and scalping with merciless euphoria.
“That’s what happens when you play with swords,” Lucas said when Vanity Fair quizzed him about the surfeit of amputations and decapitations in “Star Wars.” It was a glib response, belying his determination not only to chronicle violence, but its consequences.
“So this is how liberty dies…with thunderous applause,” Senator Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman) says bitterly as the tyrannical Palpatine takes power. In the end, the physical violence isn’t the point. It’s a side effect of freedom’s end and fascism’s rise.
While “Revenge of the Sith” is easily identifiable as post-9/11 pop art (an allegory for the Iraq War, the Clone Wars were), Lucas’ filmic myths have a way of transcending their political moment.
“I wanted to make a kids’ film that would strengthen contemporary mythology and introduce a kind of basic morality,” he told The New York Times in 1999, ruminating on the origins of “Star Wars.” “Everybody’s forgetting to tell the kids, ‘Hey, this is right and this is wrong.’”
True enough then; true enough now. “Revenge of the Sith” may have traumatized me, but it also taught me—about decency and democracy, and the costs of forsaking them.
“If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy!” Anakin roars at Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor). “Only a Sith deals in absolutes,” Obi-Wan replies resolutely. “I will do what I must.” So must we all.
