Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith Review

This is the one that works, because for the first time the trilogy has a story only tragedy can end. The opera house scene is the best writing in the prequels: Palpatine tells a bedtime story about a Sith who could stop people dying, and the entire seduction plays out on one man's face while a performance continues behind him.

Ian McDiarmid is working four registers at once and enjoying every one of them. Order 66 remains genuinely upsetting, John Williams laying a choral lament over executions in six locations at once, and the moment the clone troopers stop being background is the emotional spine of the film. The dialogue is still poor and the Padme material is worse than poor, reducing a former queen to a woman waiting at a window for news.

Hayden Christensen has the physical presence but not the range for the pivot, so Anakin's turn reads as a switch thrown rather than a slide. Mustafar looks like a lava screensaver in places, and the birth of the suit is staged one beat too broadly. But the shape is right, the ending is properly bleak, and for once the digital scale is serving a plot instead of replacing one.