On May 19, 2005, George Lucas released Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Accompanied by a marketing campaign triumphantly declaring it the final Star Wars film, ROTS was one of the big event movies of the 2000s.
Although the first two prequels had received a decidedly...mixed reception, ROTS was initially quite well-received. It had a Rotten Tomatoes score in the 80s, critics insisted it was the "Best One Since Empire," and fans were generally quite receptive to the movie's darker tone and resolution to the various lingering plot threads between the prequel and original trilogies.
In the following years, the film's reception became more muddled, especially following the now-famous series of RedLetterMedia reviews that insisted Episode III suffered from the same terrible writing and flat acting and directing that plagued the previous films. However, despite the continued negativity around the first two prequels, ROTS continued to have a somewhat warmer reception.
Within the last five or six years, other developments have improved ROTS in the public eye and among the fandom. People began to recognize ROTS -- and to a lesser extent, the other prequels -- as something of a modern camp classic, viewing the stilted or exaggerated dialogue as something amusing, helped in no small part by a scenery-devouring performance by Ian McDiarmid.
As part of the burgeoning "Prequel Memes" community, nearly every line of dialogue in the film has become memetically mocked and embraced by the wider internet. Additionally, the highly acclaimed TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars worked overtime to rehabilitate the prequels, and especially Episode III, providing much-needed characterization and background to Anakin's story that has helped improve the movie by association. And finally, the somewhat........polarized........response to the Disney-era films has resulted in a re-assessment of the prequels at large, with some coming to view them as having a quaint charm and a better appreciation for the worldbuilding and unique characters and designs that are absent from much of Disney's more sterile output.
So ERA...fifteen years later, what do we think of this masterpiece?
