Revenge of the Sith source:tvtropes

Revenge Of The Sith

You were The Chosen One!

There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere.

The novelization was also considered superior to the film.

The plot is about the culmination of the Clone Wars, Anakin's turn to The Dark Side, the fall of the Jedi (the revenge part in the film's title), and the rise of the Empire. It also concludes with the longest lightsaber battle of the series.

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Tropes Mostly Particular To This Film:

• Anakin, you well-intentioned idiot!
• Amplified Animal Aptitude: You could say it's Obi-Wan guiding her through the Force, but Boga is very good at knowing where he wants her to take him, in three dimensions no less. Made more blatant in the novelization; he sees an almost Jedi-like calm dedication to service in her eyes, she follows spoken orders to go home and then comes back to be there when he needs another lift, and obeys more spoken orders to destroy a specific part of a parked ship with her tail. For his part, Obi-Wan banters as playfully with her as with Anakin or Commander Cody, and acts like she's an intelligent being who can understand him and his reasoning.
• An Arm And A Leg: Numerous people lose limbs. It is Star Wars, after all.
• Arc Words: In the novelization, variations on All things die and Even stars die, though it's not said by any of the actual characters.
• Are You Threatening Me: Palpatine to Windu. Leads into I Am The Noun.
• Artificial Limbs: Anakin has one. Later, he gains more.
• Ascended Extra: Well it's Star Wars, but a notable one is that of Zett Jukassa (played by George Lucas' son). In Attack Of The Clones he was the youngling who answered Yoda's question on what happened to the information on Kamino. In this movie he is the young Jedi who fought off a few troopers only to get shot down in front of Bail Organa, in one of the more memorable and shocking single moments of the movie.
• Babies Ever After: Subverted damn hard with Luke and Leia.
• Battle Amongst The Flames: On Mustafar, the Lethal Lava Land Single Biome Planet.
• Birth Death Juxtaposition: Padme dies on the table while giving birth to Luke and Leia - while on another operating table, Darth Vader takes his first breath.
• Bittersweet Ending: Palpatine rules supreme as Emperor, Anakin has long ago been corrupted into Darth Vader, Padme is dead and the Jedi have been systematically exterminated apart from Obi-Wan and Yoda. Yet, the Skywalker children are safe and we know that years later they both will become A New Hope to put the Galaxy right.
• Black Cloak: Palpatine wears one as Darth Sidious. Anakin also dresses in black for much of the movie.
• Body Motifs: The novelization does this with Anakin's mechanical hand. It aches when Count Dooku is near, crushes things when he's angry, and is mentioned often.
• Children Are Innocent: "Master Skywalker, there are too many of them. What are we going to do?"

• The Corrupter: Palpatine is a really dedicated Corrupter, who spares no effort and even risks his own life in order to bring Anakin to the Dark Side, even though he expects Anakin to eventually become more powerful than himself, and thus very unlikely to remain loyal.

• Cranial Processing Unit: Subverted. Within the span of a few seconds, Obi-Wan decapitates a Magna Guard, turns away from it, and is caught off guard when it keeps fighting anyway.
• Darker And Edgier: Easily the darkest of the prequel trilogy, and the novel is even darker. It has the highest age certificate rating out of all the films.
• The Dark Side Will Make You Forget
• Death By Childbirth: Anakin dreams this will happen to Padme. He immediately begins working to figure out a way to prevent it from happening. She does die in childbirth, but it's more accurately...
• Death By Despair: Padme. Inspired the page quote.
• Doesnt Like Guns: Obi-Wan of course, since he's a Jedi. But it turns out to be the only way he can kill General Grievous.
• Domestic Abuser: Anakin. But also hinted at more strongly in the novelization - Anakin loves Padmé and is loved in turn, but he's very suspicious of what she does when he's not there, jealous of who she's hanging around, hates her job, and doesn't think she can make her own choices. More than once he hurts her a little, or scares her, and is horrified and repentant afterward - but each time, he goes further.
• Doomed By Canon: Order 66 dooms a lot of people.
• The Dragon: Grievous turns out to be a considerably weaker one than expected, seeing how the movie set him up as a significant threat.
• Drunk On The Dark Side POWAAAAHH!!! UNLIMITED POWAAAAHHHHH!!!!''
• Dual Wielding: General Grievous takes this to the extreme with quad wielding. Anakin also takes Dooku's lightsaber after defeating him and uses it to kill him.
• Et Tu Anakin
• Evil Is Hammy: Once Darth Sidious drops his act as the Glorious Leader Palpatine, it's time to chew apart the scenery.
• Expecting Someone Taller: Grievious and Anakin do this back and forth.
• Face Heel Turn: Anakin.
• Fallen Hero: Pretty much the entire point of the movie.
• False Reassurance: Palpatine to Nute Gunray. "When my new apprentice, Darth Vader, arrives, he will...take care of you."
• Finish Him: Palpatine gets Anakin to execute Dooku.
• The Force: Stover's known for somewhat flowery philosophical prose, and this comes into play full force whenever Obi-Wan fights. By letting go of his self, he loses his sense of identity and allows the Force to move through him, allowing him to get through impossible odds. By contrast, The Dark Side requires users to make The Force to do their bidding.
• I Am The Noun

• Windu: The Senate will decide your fate.
  Palpatine: I am the Senate!
• In Medias Res: Similar to A New Hope, this film starts off with a spacebattle, where much has transpired before we catch up on the story. Only here, it's an endless andimplausible space battle in orbit above Coruscant with no real consequences for either the plot or the planet afterwards.
• Kill Em All: Pretty much everyone except the characters who showed up in the original trilogy.
• • Also all the Jedi (except a few) and all the Separatists.
• La Resistance: The Rebellion, but unfortunately most of the scenes depicting its formation were cut. Then again, it's fat too early for the Rebellion to be formed, since the movie ends shortly after the first "Empire Day".
• Lampshade Hanging: Padme: "Women on Coruscant don't die in childbirth!"
• Large Ham: Palpatine, who gave a rather subdued performance in the other prequels, apparently stops caring about self-restraint once he conquers the galaxy. Arguably one of the best things about the movie.
  • Grievous is pretty hammy too, spouting movie-villain cliches in a ridiculous faux-Russian accent.
• Love Makes You Evil: Anakin.
• Love Triangle: Anakin thought he, Padmé and Obi-Wan were in one of these. In reality, it was only his own paranoia that made him think Obi-Wan and Padmé weretogether, along with a few unhappy coincidences.
• Manipulative Bastard: Palpatine, to the entire galaxy.
• My God What Have I Done: Hand in hand with Heel Realization.    The novelization, when handling the scene where Vader's just been assembled on a slab, leaves out the Big No and adds a moment of Never My Fault before he realizes that it is his fault. Then he tries to call on the Force to kill Sidious - but he's lost so much of his power that he can only destroy droids and equipment, he can't even touch Sidious - and in the end he doesn't want to, because now this is all he has left. The same person who caused him to kill his wife and thoroughly alienateeveryone he ever thought of as a friend is now the only person who will understand, and forgive, and care.

• New Era Speech: Palpatine gets an especially juicy one as he declares the birth of ''The First! GALACTIC!'' '''EMPIRE!!!'''
• Paradise Lost: Anakin, the Jedi's Morning Star, standing against the fire and brimstone backdrop of Mustafar.
• • Obi-Wan is St. Michael, then, sent to defeat him and cast him into the fiery pit.
• Peoples Republic Of Tyranny: The Galactic Republic, when the story takes place three years into the Clone Wars. It's now a military dictatorship in all but name, where every single decision is made by Palpatine, and each star system is overseen by a regiment of clone troopers. All in the name of safety and defense, of course.
• • By the time the Empire is declared, Palpatine even points out that they are an Empire already, and it's just a change in name.
• The Power Of Love: In the book, an invocation of this is what steers it into the more positive kind of Bittersweet Ending. After numerous notes about the omnipresence of darkness and its assured victory, about how even stars die, this is the last page.
• The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins - but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.
  Love is more than a candle.
  Love can ignite the stars.
• Punch Clock Villain: The clone troopers, almost to the point of being Affably Evil, though we don't get to know any one of them well enough for that. The friendship between Obi-Wan and Cody, their utter lack of enjoyment from executing Order 66, their sincere-sounding apology when they tell Bail Organa to turn around and walk away from the burning temple...plus their suffering from the Cloning Blues.
• The Purge: Order 66.
• Putting On The Reich: The allusions to Adolf Hitler's rise to power are plenty.
• Self Fulfilling Prophecy: Anakin, trying to stop Padmé from dying in childbirth, ends up killing her. Sure, the incompetent docbots say she lost her will to live, but she does so while giving birth, not because of. And in the Coruscant Nights Trilogy her bodyguard, looking over the autopsy report, concludes that she was strangled in a way that didn't bruise, and that was how she died - choked with the Force. Prophecies are tricky things..
• Separated At Birth: The twins.
• Shout Out: The scene where the 501st Legion march up the stairs into the Jedi Temple is a direct allusion to The BattleShip Potemkin.
• Single Tear: Anakin on Mustafar.
• Tear Jerker: Order 66, especially when you see Yoda's anguish at feeling the death of nearly every Jedi in the galaxy.
• They Were Holding You Back: Obi-Wan and Padme for Anakin. Sidious manipulates Anakin into killing/driving them away himself.
• Tragic Mistake: Anakin breaks with the Jedi by killing Mace Windu. "What have I done?" indeed. Mace also makes the fatal mistake to focus on Palpatine's "shatterpoint", which was Anakin, while completely ignoring Anakin's "shatterpoint", Padme.
  • Word Of God suggests that the real tragic mistake was Mace Windu taking that dramatic killing swing at Palpatine, instead of just finishing him off instantly. It gave Anakin time to intervene.
• Unstoppable Rage: Anakin defeats Dooku this way.
• Unto Us A Son And Daughter Are Born: Luke and Leia
• Uriah Gambit: Palpatine does this to Dooku. It works.
  • And more subtly to Grievous, in a way that would have been win-win regardless of who survived the duel with Obi-Wan. The Chessmaster, indeed.
• Villain Protagonist: Anakin.
• Watching The Sunset: A nice Continuity Nod.
• Well Intentioned Extremist: Anakin probably thought he was this.
• What Could Have Been: Anakin was originally supposed to be watching the entirety of the duel between Palpatine and Mace Windu, but they realized that the implications were too subtle and somewhat confusing. This lead to reshoots that has the moment where Anakin and Padme "watch" each other across Coruscant and the duel had to be redone because Palpatine was using Anakin's lightsaber. As mentioned by a Lucasfilm executive, the original cut made it fairly clear Palpatine was playing up being helpless to get Anakin to side with him, while the reshot version made it seem that Mace Windu could have legitimately killed him.
  • A glimpse at the original backstory as seen in the novelization of Return Of The Jedi (as well as strongly implied by Leia's lines in said film) shows us that who is now known as Padme was originally meant to survive Anakin's turn. Imagine the Drama that could have come out of that, as opposed to what many people viewed to be a cheap cop-out as well as a severe butchering of a character who fights a droid army alongside overwhelmed Jedi with her "losing the will to live".
  • Star Wars Clone Wars ended up showing the actual kidnapping of Palpatine, which was present in the early drafts of this movie but then passed over to be depicted in that series. The opening battle was originally over 45 minutes in length even after they cut out that part, including one scene having Grievous execute Shaak-Ti in front of Anakin and Obi-Wan.
  • Earlier scripts had Boba Fett present and playing a significant role, Anakin turning into the black-clad cyborg we all love much earlier and not at the end, and a scene everyone would have loved: Jar-Jar contacting Padme... before being blown up.
• With Us Or Against Us: Darth Vader shouts, "If you're not with me, you're my enemy!" Also, Obi Wan says right back at him, "Only a Sith deals in absolutes."
• Xanatos Gambit: The novelization's chapter The Jedi Trap lovingly details the things that must be part of such a trap before Obi-Wan goes to confront Grievous. After he wins, the narration explains how it was still a perfect trap, since the bait and the killer - Grievous - was going to need disposing of soon and the true purpose of this trap, the one that made the Jedi lose the moment he stepped in, was having him not be on Coruscant at a pivotal moment.
• You Could Have Used Your Powers For Good: Obi Wan to Anakin.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Palpatine to the separatists and the Jedi.
  • Also the reason he lets Anakin kill Dooku.