Rereleased to theatres worldwide in honour of its twentieth anniversary for one week only, the depressing finale to George Lucas’s prequel trilogy performed exceedingly well at the box office, outpacing most current releases and even topping the charts in Germany.
Industry news cited the film’s appeal to Millennials, especially those who were both indulging their own nostalgia and trying to pass the torch of fandom to their children.
While this generational aspect played an important role in Revenge of the Sith’s box office triumph, the intense focus on it overshadowed other factors.
Certainly, Disney’s willingness to keep churning out new content for the franchise is crucial. Even when a production has failed to generate much critical or commercial success, such as the film Solo or the animated series The Acolyte, the company has pressed on. And when it comes up with something that satisfies both diehard and casual fans, like The Mandalorian, interest increases in Star Wars material that predates Disney’s 2012 acquisition of the franchise.
But in the case of Revenge of the Sith, the power of the franchise is only part of the explanation. When I saw the film last week, the sold-out crowd responded vigorously to the film’s allegorical implications.
Despite the fact that Star Wars is a massive corporate franchise, inextricably bound up with the American culture industry, there is ample evidence that it promotes a critique of authoritarianism, militarism, and a liberal elite so enamoured of their code of behaviour that they failed to perceive its limitations.
This is particularly true for Revenge of the Sith.
The film relates the final days of the Republic, the destruction of the Jedi Order that served as its peacekeepers for millennia, and the beginning of the Empire. While Ancient Rome is the most obvious inspiration for this tale from “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” it now seems eerily similar to the sudden transformation of the United States since Donald Trump returned to the White House, a resemblance strengthened by references to “Congress,” a specifically American term.
When Senator Padmé Amidala responds to the Galactic Senate’s decision to give Chancellor Palpatine dictatorial powers with the statement, “So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause,” the audience at my screening groaned in recognition.
At a time when even the wealthy and powerful are reluctant to speak out against the Trump Administration’s version of Gleichschaltung (coordination), fearing retaliation, a fictional narrative beloved by people of all ideological persuasions felt like a safe way to respond collectively to the nation’s political crisis. And I imagine something similar happened in other nations where the film was rereleased since they are also feeling terrorised right now.
Nothing as popular as Star Wars can be reduced to a neat-and-tidy interpretation, no matter how hard its creators try to shape its reception.
When George Lucas conceived the original trilogy in the early 1970s, he wanted the Empire to be an implicit critique of the Nixon Administration and aligned Luke Skywalker’s Rebel cause with the Viet Cong. By the time the first film came out in 1977, however, an American populace exhausted from years of political and economic decline embraced it as a feel-good alternative to reality.
Although Lucas adamantly opposed Ronald Reagan’s efforts to heat up the Cold War in the early 1980s, the President’s SDI missile defence plan was mockingly labelled “Star Wars.” And at every juncture in the nearly half-century of the franchise’s existence, many of the people who root for the “good guys” in its stories—Luke, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, Ahsoka Tano, Rey—have also favoured real-world politicians that Lucas and his collaborators disliked.
Some people believe that it’s impossible for something as popular as Star Wars to inspire meaningful political resistance. Even if we rule out that portion of the audience that responds to stories “against the grain,” the fact remains that the collective experience of watching a film or television series cannot substitute for direct action. These sceptics claim that mainstream narratives of rebellion serve as a way to channel energy away from situations where it could make a difference.
Counter-arguments to this critique usually sound self-interested, a way for fans to justify their devotion. Certainly, I am guilty of wanting my favourite stories to be more than mere escapism.
But at a time when the sheer quantity of cultural content is making it hard even for politically like-minded individuals to have common reference points, there is something to be said for massive franchises like Star Wars, whose popularity is truly international. For better or worse, they take on a quasi-religious function, binding together heterogeneous groups of people with stories that matter precisely because they cannot be reduced to one interpretation.
Revenge of the Sith is a prime example.
It completes the narrative arc of Anakin Skywalker, who first appears in the 1999 film The Phantom Menace as a supremely talented boy with a troubled past, then learns to hone his craft as the apprentice to Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi in its 2002 sequel Attack of the Clones, then succumbs to the Dark Side of the Force in the finale, emerging at the end of the tale, after being horribly maimed by his former master, as the part-cyborg Darth Vader, a key figure in the original Star Wars trilogy from the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Although Vader is purely a villain for most of those three films, there are hints that he was a great hero first. The prequels flesh them out, conjuring a tragic figure like the Satan John Milton depicts in Paradise Lost.
The reason Revenge of the Sith resonates so strongly today is not simply that Anakin falls – that’s what happens in tragedies, after all – but how he falls, destroyed by his desire to protect the people he loves from harm. Although Anakin trains to become a Jedi, he never achieves the Zen-like detachment that his order cultivates.
The tragic irony is that this failure of character is simultaneously a strength.
While the three prequel films make this clear, it wasn’t until the animated Clone Wars film from 2008 and the multi-season television series that followed its release – the last Star Wars content that George Lucas presided over before selling the franchise – that Anakin’s character would be fully developed.
Clone Wars is a remarkable “ret con”—a term referring to new information added to a pre-existing narrative—that makes up for the abrupt and confusing transition between Attack of the Clones, when Anakin was still very much an apprentice, and Revenge of the Sith, when he is far more experienced and powerful, by showing what happened in between.
Initially, the blocky computer animation of Clone Wars and the nature of the storytelling led people to believe that Star Wars was returning to its kid-friendly roots. But by the time the series reached its third season, it had grown more sophisticated, developing a meta-narrative about a seemingly unwinnable war and the damage done to the Jedi by their decision to take a side.
While the Jedi believe that Count Dooku, a fallen member of their order, is leading the Separatists who are trying to break free of their great Republic, the audience for Clone Wars knows that he is taking orders from the leader of the Sith, the Jedi’s traditional rivals, who reject balance and detachment in favour of passionate intensity.
Eventually, it becomes clear that this Sith leader is none other than Chancellor Palpatine, the duly elected leader of the Republic, who has masterminded the entire war to destroy the Jedi and become a dictator. Recognising that young Anakin’s troubled past makes him vulnerable to manipulation, Palpatine makes sure that he keeps ending up in situations that will elicit his desire to protect loved ones.
Supplemented with the Clone Wars film and the 133 episodes of the series, Revenge of the Sith becomes a vastly more powerful film. Instead of getting the impression that Anakin turns to the Dark Side after only a few conversations with Palpatine, we understand that he suffers from the Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) that afflicts so many veterans of war. It also becomes clear that the Jedi badly mishandle Anakin’s training, repeatedly holding him back because he is too emotional instead of grasping that he has the potential to use his passion for good.
Although Revenge of the Sith never wavers from its depiction of Palpatine as a supreme villain, the more you know about Anakin’s story, the harder it becomes to reduce it to the black-and-white of a morality tale.
When we first encounter Anakin in The Phantom Menace, he is building a protocol droid, the robot that audiences first came to know and love as C3P0. Later, he takes on the droid R2D2, treating him like a living creature. And in the Clone Wars animated series, his willingness to delegate authority to the clone Captain Rex ends up proving instrumental in saving the life of his apprentice Ahsoka Tano when the Jedi are slaughtered by their own troops.
Anakin is undone because he cares too much. But he also does more for the same reason.
Watching Revenge of the Sith in 2025, I was initially drawn to the story’s allusions to fascism. The speed with which Palpatine transforms the state after years of patiently biding his time definitely calls to mind the pace with which the Trump Administration has been dismantling the United States government.
But then I began to focus on the parallels between the Jedi and the liberal opposition to Trump. When supplemented with all the content from Clone Wars, Revenge of the Sith also comes across as a cautionary tale about American hubris, the ironclad belief that we are out to make the world a better place, even if we have to wage war here and there to do so.
To choose a side yet continue believing that one is above such partisanship is the height of self-delusion. Even if Palpatine is evil through and through, the critique of the Jedi he painstakingly inculcates in Anakin remains valid.
I do not know whether George Lucas envisioned such a critique when he first started working on Star Wars. But it certainly would have been fitting for an era in which Democratic politicians were as hawkish as their Republican counterparts. As the franchise evolved, though, the story of the Jedi Order’s decline began to overlap more and more with that of postwar liberal hegemony.
Other Star Wars tales, such as Andor, Rogue One and the original 1977 Star Wars: A New Hope, can teach important lessons about sustaining political resistance against seemingly insurmountable odds. Revenge of the Sith and the Clone Wars content that supplements it, by contrast, provides an opportunity to recognise what led to such dire circumstances.
No film is going to start a revolution, especially not a mainstream blockbuster. But understanding must precede action. If sitting together in a theatre watching Revenge of the Sith made it a little easier for the millions who watched the picture last week to perceive their predicament, that’s a significant accomplishment.
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Photograph courtesy of Attila Siha. Published under a Creative Commons license.
