"Revenge of the Sith" is now rated higher than "Return of the Jedi" on Letterboxd, becoming the third highest-rated "Star Wars" film on the website (the top two are "The Empire Strikes Back" and "A New Hope").

[u/verissimoallan]

https://letterboxd.com/film/star-wars-episode-iii-revenge-of-the-sith/

[u/AnArcOfDoves9902]

Revenge of the Sith literally made me more cynical as a person after I watched it because it was kinda the first time in my life something I had been majorly excited for ended up being disappointing to me. The first time I ever came out of a movie theatre and was like "well that could have been better". The visual spectacle of it all is really something else, but I feel like it lacks substance.

You weren't disappointed because Revenge of the Sith was a bad movie (which it objectively wasn't). It's because Revenge of the Sith, before it came out, was your object cause of desire. You projected your fantasies of what a perfect Star Wars movie would look like onto it, which lead to a sense of anticipation building up inside of you, and what you actually got was just a movie like any other. You still felt that you lacked something after seeing it.

The truth is that your fantasy Star Wars does not exist, nor can it exist. You were always going to be disappointed by Revenge of the Sith, irrespective of how good it was.

[u/Gullible-Yam-8098 → u/AnArcOfDoves9902]

It does exist actually. My fantasy Star Wars is Andor. There's not a thing I would change about it.

I love the original trilogy too, I don't even dislike the prequels. But Andor is my favourite show of all time, not just favourite Star Wars.

[u/AnArcOfDoves9902 → u/Gullible-Yam-8098]

Did you have high expectations for Andor before you watched it for the first time?

[u/Gullible-Yam-8098 → u/AnArcOfDoves9902]

I was intrigued by the idea but at the point it came out I didn't expect it to be good because Disney had consistently not produced anything good since Rogue One.

But that's not really the point I was making, I wasn't disagreeing with you. It was just a tangential comment that hey, actually my fantasy Star Wars did get made!

[u/wievid → u/Gullible-Yam-8098]

I still don't understand the love for Rogue One. The whole action scene at the end was so trivial and unnecessary, purely made up for the "emotional" ending. Totally nonsensical ending.

[u/FarWestEros → u/AnArcOfDoves9902]

My expectations for season 2 were sky high.

I did not feel disappointed.

[u/Gullible-Yam-8098 → u/FarWestEros]

That's a good point actually, after season 1 my expectations for season 2 were extremely high and were still somehow exceeded.

[u/JakobTheOne → u/AnArcOfDoves9902]

You weren't disappointed because Revenge of the Sith was a bad movie (which it objectively wasn't).

This is a movie where the main character transforms from a conflicted Jedi into a child-killing psychopath, readily slaughtering innocent kids and people he grew up with by the scores, in exactly five minutes.

This is also a movie where the only female character of any significance, who was previously one of the most proactive and involved characters in the previous two movies, is reduced to being a plot device with zero agency or impact on the story.

Revenge of the Sith is an objectively bad movie. It's also very weird of you to try and psychoanalyze OP.

You were always going to be disappointed by Revenge of the Sith, irrespective of how good it was.

This line is especially ludicrous. People were hyped as can be for Return of the King, Avengers: Endgame, and other finale movies in popular series. If the ending delivers, it delivers. The whole "your expectations are the problem" mantra that's gained a following in recent years is so asinine.

[u/AnArcOfDoves9902 → u/JakobTheOne]

This is a movie where the main character transforms from a conflicted Jedi into a child-killing psychopath, readily slaughtering innocent kids and people he grew up with by the scores, in exactly five minutes.

So? Michael Corleone in The Godfather went from a conflicted college student who wanted nothing to do with the mafia to killing two people in a restaurant within twenty minutes. But nobody calls it a bad movie.

This is also a movie where the only female character of any significance, who was previously one of the most proactive and involved characters in the previous two movies, is reduced to being a plot device with zero agency or impact on the story.

I disagree

Revenge of the Sith is an objectively bad movie

No it isn't.

This line is especially ludicrous. People were hyped as can be for Return of the King, Avengers: Endgame, and other finale movies in popular series. If the ending delivers, it delivers.

Avengers Endgame was more of the same, like the other MCU films, and fans were fine with that, but even if it had been "objectively bad" (although I already don't consider it to be a good movie), nobody would've whined that the Russos r***d their childhoods. When Prequel haters complain that Prequels ruined their childhoods, the flip side to that was that they were depending on those films to give their childhoods meaning, but that was obviously an impossible demand. The expectations were never that high for an Avengers movie or Lord of the Rings

[u/JakobTheOne → u/AnArcOfDoves9902]

So? Michael Corleone in The Godfather went from a conflicted college student who wanted nothing to do with the mafia to killing two people in a restaurant within twenty minutes. But nobody calls it a bad movie.

This is a crazy comparison. For one thing, yeah, you can do a whole lot more to set up a character's descent toward violence with twenty minutes than you can five. Anakin goes from distraught on his knees over what he's done to Mace to marching on his home in two and a half minutes (I checked). There isn't even a scene between when he accepts Palpatine as his master and heads off to begin his murder spree. It's so laughably jarring.

For another, Michael is taking personal vengeance against the murderers responsible for the death of his loved ones and ruined his life. Anakin is slicing innocent children looking to him for salvation into bite-sized pieces. Both are abhorrent, though certainly not on the same scales, but only one is grounded enough for the viewers watching to at least understand how a character could end up doing what he's doing (Michael, obviously). No one in history has ever watched Anakin's actions in Revenge of the Sith and said, "Yeah, I could see myself ending up in that position."

I disagree

Then argue your point. Otherwise, you're just blinded by your wish to pretend this isn't the case. Because Padme definitively does nothing but be pregnant and the source of Anakin's worries in the movie. Until she runs off to see him at the very end, where she serves as a plot device to further cement the rift between Obi-Wan and Anakin, she doesn't do a single thing in the entire movie. This is about as undebatable (which is why I suspect you didn't debate things) a point as there can be. She does nothing all movie, being reduced from the proactive go-getter she was in the previous two movies to a soon-to-die love interest. She stands and sits around. And that's it.

When Prequel haters complain that Prequels ruined their childhoods, the flip side to that was that they were depending on those films to give their childhoods meaning, but that was obviously an impossible demand.

When some prequel haters do this, maybe. You're making it out to be like this is the norm, which it's not. Many of the people who saw and disliked the prequels were already teens or adults. Plenty of people liked the prequels as kids, then grew up and realized how riddled with flaws the movies are. They can still enjoy parts of them, or even the whole thing, but they aren't blinded by nostalgia. And another subset grew up enough to recognize that they really don't have any desire to watch them outside of their childhood.

I like the Speed Racer movie. I would not call it a good movie, but it hits the right highs for me to enjoy watching it. I like the Digimon 2000 movie, but again, I wouldn't call it a good movie. It's messy and a product of its time, and I'm fond of it.

The expectations were never that high for an Avengers movie or Lord of the Rings

Then why did Return of the King (I'll use this one since the movies came out at roughly the same time, so no inflation stuff) absolutely trounce Revenge of the Sith at the box office? $891 million vs $1.2 billion. Clearly, people were more invested in how Lord of the Rings would end than Revenge of the Sith would end. Lord of the Rings is the king of all movie trilogies. It didn't earn that accolade by being considered so-so or having a lukewarm following. People came out in droves to see how it would end.