Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
I was fond of Revenge of the Sith when I saw it in theaters, and I feel no differently about it now that it’s on DVD. George Lucas apparently feels the same, as it’s the only one of the six movies to have no alterations made for the DVD release. While this 2-disc edition is not quite as loaded with features as the DVD for Attack of the Clones, it still provides a fairly extensive look at the filmmaking process.
The centerpiece of that look is the documentary “Within a Minute,” which takes a 49-second action sequence from the Mustafar duel and tries to show how every department of the filmmaking team contributed to it, right down to the caterers. The documentary is narrated by producer Rick McCallum and features a lot of interviews with cast and crew, so it does not have nearly the fly-on-the-wall aspect that The Beginning and From Puppets to Pixels did on the previous two prequel DVDs. As should be no surprise with Lucas, the pre-visualization, editing, and music/mixing processes get substantial chunks of time where we do get a chance to see some of the decision-making process, including some of the different rough cuts the editors came up with before the effects people finished their work. It’s an interesting documentary, but unlike the other Star Wars DVD documentaries, it seems more like a set of disconnected reports than a story about the story.
Two other featurettes focus on the stunts and the transformation of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader. They’re fun, but between them and the 15 web documentaries, after a while I felt like I had seen a lot of the same footage over and over again. (Although, in the Chosen One featurette, we see the CG replacement of Yoda in Phantom Menace’s “Fear leads to anger” speech. Gotta say, I like it.) The web documentaries are not to be missed, though, as they provide looks at many different aspects of the process from writing through post-production. (3 of the webdocs remain exclusive to the official site.) I especially liked the short film about Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan; I enjoyed his performance in Clones and Sith, and the webdoc brings home how well his portrayal dovetails into Alec Guinness’s. There’s also footage of John Williams conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in the recording of “Battle of the Heroes”. This duplicates the “A Hero Falls” music video a bit, but I really love that theme, so no complaints.
In fact, “Battle of the Heroes” makes me wish that a music-only track had been included on this DVD. Normally I’m not a huge fan of such tracks; if I want to listen to the music I’ll go buy the soundtrack. But after the fifteenth time that Lucas or McCallum describes Star Wars as a silent movie where the visuals and the music convey much of the story, I’d like to see them put up or shut up and show us what the silent movie version looks like.
There are six deleted scenes which, along with their introductions by Lucas and McCallum, illustrate a couple of points that have been made about the prequels. The opening scene, in which Grievous kills Shaak Ti and then Obi-Wan and Anakin escape through the fuel tanks, reinforces the well-oiled machine of the two Jedis’ relationship early going, with baseball-esque hand signals between the two and some banter where Obi-Wan acknowledges his pupil’s skill. Lucas says that the rescue of Palpatine originally lasted an hour in the film, and had to be cut at least in half. I can’t help but wonder, as I have before, if Lucas couldn’t have found a way to get Anakin to this point earlier in the trilogy, and have his fall take place much earlier in this movie. That might have upped the fun-adventure quotient of the prequel trilogy while also allowing more room to explore the consequences of Anakin’s fall.
It might have also let Lucas devote more attention to the formation of the Rebel Alliance. The three scenes included here are very talky and a bit repetitive, and they certainly slow the movie down. I can see why they were cut. But the consequence is that Padme’s character is very weakened in Sith - she does nothing but play off Anakin, and the subtext that she is forced to hide something from him has been lost from their scenes. Maybe if there had been more time for this, the Alliance subplot could have been rethought to allow for some action elements. Padme might even have gotten a fitting death. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?
The fifth deleted scene, in which Mace feels there is a plot to destroy the Jedi, will no doubt seem familiar, since it was reworked into a different context in the movie. That fluidity of the process is one of the things I find most fascinating about Lucas’s method, although the book on the making of the movie probably provides a lot more useful detail there. (Lucas’s commentary also helps on this score, especially regarding Anakin’s fall and the Sidious-Mace duel, which went through some heavy reworking.) And finally, there’s a very brief clip of Yoda arriving on Dagobah, whose sole purpose is to provide a ‘Hey, I recognize that!’ moment for folks who have seen the original trilogy first.
The disc of bonus features also includes both theatrical trailers, fifteen TV commercials, a still image gallery, and various video game trailers and previews. The DVD also unlocks extra content on the official site; a script-to-screen feature and a detailed text commentary (which includes references to material established in the Expanded Universe) are already available for viewing with the Shockwave player.
And with that, the entire Star Wars saga is now available on DVD. Join us again in a few years when we go through the whole thing again on Blu-Ray disc.