It’s some god awful time in the morning and I have to get up for work in a couple of hours. If it were any other weekday morning, I’d usually be asleep in bed or roaming around my room looking like a zombie and wondering why I’m not asleep already, but not this morning. If you could see me right now, you’d see the biggest damn smile you’d ever seen. After all, I just got back from the midnight show of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith.

Alright. Let’s get to it. Revenge Of The Sith completes the story of Anakin Skywalker’s tragic fall to the Dark Side. ROTS is also used to bridge the gap between the new trilogy and the holy trilogy. It’s the culmination of everything a Star Wars fan has wanted to see for years wrapped up into one big movie. There are no surprises here. You’re gonna see Anakin turn. You’re gonna see Jedi slaughtered. You’re gonna see Obi Wan and Anakin duel it out. All of the images I’ve only been able to imagine in my head are right there on screen. It’s simply breathtaking and, to a certain point, surreal.

First off, this flick is beautiful. Creativity oozes from every landscape, every spaceship, ever character in sight. None of it ever seems sloppy, out of place, or overlooked. The visual effects are plentiful and down right awesome. Environments portray the feeling of the scene perfectly. The movie starts off in brightly lit day time scenarios that just glow with life and action. Towards the middle we get brought into dark scenes that are uncomfortably calm. Drop in massive amounts of action and you got yourself a very good thing here. Lots of blasters. Lots of explosions. Oh yeah, and lots of lightsabers. In fact, these are the absolute best choreographed lightsaber fights ever. You don’t really expect anything less when you go into the flick, but it still knocks you on your ass when you do see it. The visuals are reason enough to see this movie. It’s not like wow. It’s like… whoa!

Not sold on visual alone? Ok. Let’s talk about the acting, a huge problem I had with Episode I and II, and how that problem is pretty much non-existent in ROTS. Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan steals the show, hands down. He is the Master Jedi we all expected him to be and that means you just don’t fuck with Obi Wan. You can forget about the laughable performance of Hayden Christensen as Anakin from Episode II. He erases most of the suckness from the last flick and turns in a performance that is scary and believable. Another notable favorite for me was Ian McDiarmid as Emperor Palpatine, evil and manipulative in only the purest of form. This film does something that no Star Wars film since Return Of The Jedi has done for me. I actually care about these characters. This is largely due to the acting issues being addressed in a major way. Someone definitely slapped Mr. Lucas over the head with complaints about the dry performances from the past films and it seems as though he’s done his best to clean and tighten it up. Everyone has. There is a definite sense of awared improvement. Anyone who was a little phased by the acting in Menace or Clones, I tell ya, give Sith a chance. You wont be disappointed.

This movie is great because of so many different aspects, but one resounding reason stood out before anything else. The story. It was so strange. I knew the story going into the movie. I knew it and I didn’t want it to happen! I knew that when Obi Wan and Anakin said their goodbyes, it would be the last time they see each other as friends, and I felt sad for them. I sat there physically hurting with Anakin as he struggled to hold onto the good in him. Padme’s ultimate fate was easily seen, yet I just sat there watching and hoping it would never come. I even found myself hoping that maybe everything I knew about the story would be wrong and the flick would end like every other Star Wars movie with everyone standing together as friends. I watched these terrible things happen to these characters I so deeply love and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it! The story wasn’t a surprise, yet the emotions it provoked in me were completely unexpected. I really threw aside Lucas’ comments about ROTS being a “heartbreaker”, but my god, it’s so beyond that. It takes you to places you don’t want to go. Very dark places that you would never expect to see in a Star Wars movie. I simply wasn’t prepared to feel the pain and suffering you aren’t use to feeling from a Star Wars flick. With my heart aching and my head hung low, this was just not a movie to cheer for in the end. It’s a complete tragedy through and through, and it comes together brilliantly!

I’m in awe. I’m absolutely speechless now. I don’t know whether to be extraordinarily happy or incredibly sad. On one hand, I just saw the holy grail of sci-fi fantasy stories. On the other, it is the last of the Star Wars movies. This is obviously not the end in any way, but I definitely feel like a large part of my Star Wars existence has found closure. I’m simply done. I could die now and it would be fine. Alright, let’s see if I can wrap this up.

Revenge Of The Sith is the pinnacle story in a very long Star Wars timeline that takes place over thousands of years. We’ve all roughly known about this tale for over 20 years and now we don’t need to visualize it in our heads any longer because it’s there. It’s right there! It’s on the screen, larger than life itself I tell you! It’s the perfect period to a chapter we’ve been dying to read all of our lives. All of the imperfections of the past, forgotten. Any little spat I had about something, pushed to the side. Redemption is found here! Revenge Of The Sith is not only a superb movie, it’s the greatest of all stories from the greatest of all sci-fi fantasies and that also makes it the absolute best Star Wars movie ever created.