I know a lot of people don’t really like Hayden christenssen’s acting but tbh I thought it was masterful, the script just could’ve been better. But in terms of the film, it’s honestly poetic and beautiful with the best duels in the entire series. The infamous mustafar battle is truly the best scene in the franchise in my opinion. The pain in Obi-Wan’s voice as he realises he’s truly lost his best friend and brother to darkness, gets me every time. I think anyone who’s had a friend or ex lover truly change on them at the end, you know what I’m talking about. You just feel so hurt because they’re acting completely different from the person you know and loved.

Then Anakin’s “I hate you” scream at the end, it truly breaks me because although he really shouldn’t hate obi wan, you know that deep down he truly meant it. Again, similarly if you’ve had a bad falling out with a friend or lover, you know what I mean. You’ve done nothing but good to them, but they still have that hate.

Another philosophical thing I noticed was many people like to point out how Obi Wan’s phrase “ONLY a Sith deals in absolutes” is itself an absolute. Which is true. But there’s more. Later on in their duel, Obi Wan says “Anakin, the
Chancellor/Emperor is evil” and Anakin replies “Well, from my point of view the Jedi are evil”.
Here you have Anakin acknowledging that he doesn’t own the one and only truth, that his is merely a point of view, that there are different points of view which can all be relatively valid, and that if his former master and friend were to make an effort to see things from his perspective, from his circumstances, from his situation, from his particular worldview, then he would have to accept that Anakin’s position has at least some validity. But what does Obi Wan answer? “Then you are lost!”

This seems to be very much alike what Anakin said at the beginning: “If you aren’t with me, then you’re my enemy”, to which Obi Wan answered with the absolutes thing. But now you have Obi Wan pretty much saying “either you believe what the Jedi believe, or you are lost. There is only one truth (ours), and if you don’t accept it, you are lost and should be stopped”, which is…dealing in absolutes. Black and white thinking. Either you are saved by the light of the one true Jedi religion, or you are lost; there is no third option. Basically, if we applied Obi Wan’s meter of judgement to Obi Wan’s own words and actions, we would have to conclude that he’s a Sith.It’s as if Anakin and Obi Wan exchanged roles and mirrored each other. I believe Lucas did this deliberately to show the Jedi’s incoherence and arrogance, that were one of the main factors in Anakin’s gradual fall to the dark side (another important example of this in ROTS would be Mace Windu justifying his wanting to kill Sidious by saying “He’s too dangerous to be kept alive”, using the exact same words that the Sith Lord himself used to justify Anakin’s execution of Dooku).


Revenge of the Sith is the episode that has the most in terms of moral ambiguity and gray areas, compared to the usual, simplistic good vs evil formula used in the other episodes, 4, 5 and 6 especially. It’s also interesting how old Ben Kenobi says to Luke, in Return of the Jedi, that what he told him about his father was true “from a certain point of view”, echoing Anakin’s words, as if to show that Obi Wan had spent some time thinking about the matter and had abandoned his previous rigid ideas to accept a more complex view of things, maybe even coming to believe that the Jedi had, indeed, failed and alienated Anakin.

Masterpiece in my opinion. One of the reasons I wanted to go into filmmaking/film school.