Revenge of the Sith

OK, I’ll admit it. When I was in middle school, I craved Star Wars. I bought all of the books that were out at that time and read them (most of them twice). I made my own legos into characters before Lego actually came out with the Star Wars themed ones. One summer I watched the first trilogy at least once a week. I was hooked.
Now that I’ve “matured” (catch the tongue-in-cheek I’m doing), I thought that I wouldn’t be able to fall into such a deep obsession as that one. I thought I’d be able to enjoy the prequel trilogy as movies and not be obsessed with the deeper meaning some of the characters try to convey. I should have known better. With the first movie, The Phantom Menace, I was able to dismiss a bunch of it because of one character who annoyed me: Jar Jar. It was a movie I thought was more for kids than adults. The second movie gave some great insight into the roles of mentorship and had some great fight scenes, but other than that, it didn’t have a deep insight that left me saying, “yes, totally right” or “no, they missed it there.” The Attack of the Clones was a transition movie that was about filling the necessary elements of the plot.
I expected Revenge of the Sith to be exactly another version of that. It had to show the evolution of Anakin to Vader and tie up a lot of different loose-ends such as Luke and Leia (yeah, I know, it’s almost a travesty to call two of the heros in the original trilogy loose-ends). It did that and more. Wow, I’m still realing (or I guess reeling) from all of the content it got through. More than any of the other prequels, however, this movie had the richest plot. It was full of material!
So what deep meaning did you all find in it (if you’ve seen it)? Part of me loved that they showed all of the paths to the dark side. They showed why Anakin was attracted to it and why it was tempting. A couple of things bugged me about it, though. The “good” position portrayed was the light side of the force, which maintained a close-minded perspective to learning. Anakin was discouraged from learning about the dark side because it would cloud his ability to discern. This position made sense; I’m hoping that others don’t take it in respect to real-life learning. As a Religion major I’ve known several people who are convinced that learning about other religions or even other perspectives within their own religion brings as much of a danger as the movie posed with Anakin. Learning about these things and even going through the process of discerning is, for them, evil. How am I supposed to appreciate this attitude since it’s so contrary to what I think?
Even more than appreciating the Jedi’s attitude, I have to reconcile that with one of the comments they said: “Only the Sith make absolutes.” The comment struck me because their attitude seems like the one full of the most absolutes. The dark side is “bad.” Don’t venture into any of the things that lead to it. Palpatine was the relativist if anyone was. He was the one who appealed to Anakin by arguing that everyone tries to keep power once they have it, both himself and the Jedi. The thing that bothers me the most, which means George Lucas and the others have done their job well, is that I could see myself being convinced by Palpatine’s arguments. His argument was persuasive and it made sense to me why Anakin chose it. Is that the final revenge? Besides almost annihilating the Jedi is the real revenge that the Sith argument fools the senators and the audience as well?
I absolutely loved this movie. The plot development was great. The characters were great. The connections were phenomenal (when you have five other movies to link, though, it doesn’t take a miracle to link them somehow). If I would watch the entire six-part series in a weekend, this movie would be my favorite. Am I going to see it again in theaters? Probably not. I’m going to wait for it to come out on DVD. Wow … what a movie!