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crloken 's review for:
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
by Matthew Woodring Stover
I like Revenge of the Sith. I think it’s a flawed movie, but I like it. Its biggest flaw is that the tragedy of the fall of Anikan never feels as realized as it could, nor as understandable.This is frustrating because all the ingredients to make it work are there. Anikan was a slave, not until he was nine, but his whole life. He was not freed by the Jedi so much as purchased by him. They were unwilling to buy his mother, they were unsympathetic to his fear and loneliness, and they almost instantly conscripted him into the Jedi order. He never really knew freedom and he has been a victim of powerful forces using him as a tool his entire life.
The novelization of Revenge of the Sith far better succeeds at portraying Anikan’s fall than the movie did. Palpatine is one of the only people who actually talks to Anikan and listens to him. In the book he pretends to be researching the Sith rather than just having knowledge of them for no reason, and he is then able to perform apologetics for them without giving away his position too soon. Like the movie, his focus is on death and the power to prevent it because Anikan, the hero without fear is terrified.
When Anikan Skywalker was still very young he saw a dying star.. “Even stars die,” Obi Wan told him. Anikan was horrified. Usually he manages to push away the fear and ignore it, but every night he feels it. He becomes overwhelmed by his fear of entropy itself. Palpatine plays on that fear and on Anikan’s dreams of his wife’s death. The force as portrayed here is a power that the Jedi serve and the Sith seek to control. The difference between light and dark is how one uses the force. As soon as one attempts to control it and shift it to their own control they are beginning to use the dark side of the force.
Stover seems to understand what he’s working with here in a way that the movie never manages to realize. This is the tragedy of Anikan Skywalker, a former slave boy turned Jedi hero who was used and manipulated until there was barely anything left of his old life. The book is occasionally overly poetic and overwrought, but that seems appropriate as this is the epic tragedy of a space wizard as he finally falls into darkness. The book focuses far more on Anikan then the film does, even cutting out the battles on Kashyyyk and instead focusing on the characters, who they truly are and what led to their tragic loss. We have an Anikan who is terrified of his own lack of power, an Obi-Wan who doesn’t particularly like being a warrior and would far rather be a hermit studying texts in a cave, a Padme who is actually a formidable politician, and an enigmatic Palpatine who switches between a kindly mentor and a living shadow itself. The seeds of this are in the movies, but are often so badly executed that it’s hard to see it.
It’s easy to scoff at novelizations, their existence usually confuses me, but this is a novelisation done right. This is one that boils down the themes and ideas of the film and focuses them into a stronger work. This isn’t perfect either. The writing is overwrought, which is often good but occasionally a bit much and it has some very prequelish moments, but this is better than the film and far closer to what it should have been.
And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you that implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow.
In the end, you do not even want to.
In the end, the shadow is all you have left.
Because the shadow understands you, the shadow forgives you, the shadow gathers you unto itself—
And within your furnace heart, you burn in your own flame.
This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker.
Forever. . .
The novelization of Revenge of the Sith far better succeeds at portraying Anikan’s fall than the movie did. Palpatine is one of the only people who actually talks to Anikan and listens to him. In the book he pretends to be researching the Sith rather than just having knowledge of them for no reason, and he is then able to perform apologetics for them without giving away his position too soon. Like the movie, his focus is on death and the power to prevent it because Anikan, the hero without fear is terrified.
When Anikan Skywalker was still very young he saw a dying star.. “Even stars die,” Obi Wan told him. Anikan was horrified. Usually he manages to push away the fear and ignore it, but every night he feels it. He becomes overwhelmed by his fear of entropy itself. Palpatine plays on that fear and on Anikan’s dreams of his wife’s death. The force as portrayed here is a power that the Jedi serve and the Sith seek to control. The difference between light and dark is how one uses the force. As soon as one attempts to control it and shift it to their own control they are beginning to use the dark side of the force.
Stover seems to understand what he’s working with here in a way that the movie never manages to realize. This is the tragedy of Anikan Skywalker, a former slave boy turned Jedi hero who was used and manipulated until there was barely anything left of his old life. The book is occasionally overly poetic and overwrought, but that seems appropriate as this is the epic tragedy of a space wizard as he finally falls into darkness. The book focuses far more on Anikan then the film does, even cutting out the battles on Kashyyyk and instead focusing on the characters, who they truly are and what led to their tragic loss. We have an Anikan who is terrified of his own lack of power, an Obi-Wan who doesn’t particularly like being a warrior and would far rather be a hermit studying texts in a cave, a Padme who is actually a formidable politician, and an enigmatic Palpatine who switches between a kindly mentor and a living shadow itself. The seeds of this are in the movies, but are often so badly executed that it’s hard to see it.
It’s easy to scoff at novelizations, their existence usually confuses me, but this is a novelisation done right. This is one that boils down the themes and ideas of the film and focuses them into a stronger work. This isn’t perfect either. The writing is overwrought, which is often good but occasionally a bit much and it has some very prequelish moments, but this is better than the film and far closer to what it should have been.
And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you that implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow.
In the end, you do not even want to.
In the end, the shadow is all you have left.
Because the shadow understands you, the shadow forgives you, the shadow gathers you unto itself—
And within your furnace heart, you burn in your own flame.
This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker.
Forever. . .