The ‘Revenge of the Sith’ Novelization Is the Purest ‘Star Wars’ Fantasy

“This story occurred a very long time in the past, in a galaxy far, far-off. It’s already over. Nothing may be executed to alter it.”

In a single paragraph prefacing his tackle the occasions of Revenge of the Sith, Matthew Stover received Star Wars. As resonant now—within the week the Revenge of the Sith novelization launched its personal celebratory, deluxe edition—because it was upon launch 20 years in the past, Stover’s adaptation has maintained a legendary standing amongst Star Wars followers for good cause.

It goes past a typical film tie-in retelling (the guide got here out over a month earlier than the movie’s launch), fleshing out particulars from both earlier script drafts or left to interpretation by the ultimate movie. Its elevated interiority provides additional layers of depth to our major characters, amplifying the tragic misinterpretations and misunderstandings that propel Revenge of the Sith‘s broader story of betrayal and loss. And naturally, Stover’s personal data of the Expanded Universe on the time put him in stark distinction to George Lucas’ personal perception that the prolonged materials and his personal movies have been distinctly separated issues, letting the author drop in mentions and connections that extra carefully enmeshed over a decade of comics and books into the climax of the prequel saga.

This doesn’t make it inherently higher than the movie itself, however merely an alternate perspective of its narrative, an enrichment of an identical textual content reasonably than a supplanting of it. However that additionally ties into the precise factor that makes Stover’s novel so compelling and enjoyable to learn, even all these years after the movie has been burned into the canon of Star Wars (each what Stover was working with on the time and the rebooted interpretation of all of it): Revenge of the Sith‘s novelization treats Star Wars as a historic fable it has been for generations and, extra crucially, as a fantastical fable that envisions its characters as larger-than-life archetypes of their style—on this case, a tragedy.

From the very second the guide begins, Stover is enjoying with this concept that what’s being informed to you, the viewers, is a chunk of historical past, with an immutable essence at its core that makes the inevitability of its disappointment all of the extra compelling. And but past that core, it mythologizes its retelling of those occasions with a heightened, fantastical sense of the surreal. The interweaving between moments of second- and third-person narration feels at instances like a Greek refrain and at others like an intimate envisioning of the occasions being described to you. Stover’s work is at its greatest when it dives deep into the summary: characters fall away from merely being who they’re and tackle grand, conceptual identities, avatars of darkness and light and emotion itself, drawing upon the tales of the Expanded Universe to reframe Palpatine’s machinations because the culminations of 1000’s of years of cyclical battle between good and evil whereas making you’re feeling such as you’re studying the most recent chapter of some lengthy, majestic epic.

A number of instances all through the guide you might be informed what it feels wish to be one character or one other, reasonably than having that info communicated to you by their actions and even by the inside dialogues, broadening and blurring the strains in order that it’s much less like you might be getting a straight rationalization of those supposed historical, immutable occasions and extra like an nearly hazy retelling, made grandiose by each flowery prose and a sense as if this story has been informed and retold and heightened by the passage of time, remodeling from historical past into fable itself.

Star Wars as fantasy over science fiction is an concept that has been baked into the story of the franchise from the very starting, after all. There are spaceships and blaster rifles, nevertheless it’s a narrative of house wizards and their diametrically opposed magics of darkish and lightweight—the story of Star Wars is as a lot one as it’s the different. Stover’s mythopoetic framing of Revenge of the Sith performs into that fantasy by doing what the easiest Star Wars materials does: treating the franchise by its opening crawl of being a protracted, very long time in the past, a chunk of historical past that these tales are documentation of.

Quite a lot of a number of the greatest Star Wars tales of the previous few years have taken this concept in a extra grounded sense. The good Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire by Dr. Chris Kempshall final 12 months took Star Wars‘ story and made it a literal historic textual content, an evaluation of its world and narrative as if it as a chunk of real-world historical past, and engaged the viewers to consider the Star Wars universe as such. Likewise, Andor handled Star Wars‘ historical past in its examination of the rise of resistance to the Empire as a direct parallel commentary to our personal previous (and, extra grimly, the ways in which history can be repeated).

However probably the most related factor to Stover’s work on Revenge of the Sith is maybe one other prequel supply in The Acolyte, with its Rashomon-esque retelling of the occasions that drove aside younger sisters Osha and Mae Aniseya, asking us as an viewers to not implicitly trust all the pieces we’re seeing, that tales can in actual fact tackle a mutability and heightened emotionality reasonably than perceiving a definitive fact. These all nonetheless come on the similar concept from completely different views: what does it truly imply that Star Wars is a historical past determined a very long time in the past in a galaxy far, far-off? Does it imply treating it as we deal with our personal? Does it imply mythologizing it as a fable, a narrative of conceptual heroes and concepts that may be twisted and reinterpreted in retelling throughout generations?

What has made Star Wars so enduring as our personal trendy cultural fable is that it may be approached in each of those methods, and extra, if we’re keen to belief in these interpretations past what’s a canonical fact and what isn’t. And it’s in flip what makes Stover’s Revenge of the Sith so compelling now, because it was 20 years in the past. One thing like these occasions could have occurred a very long time in the past, however what we’re studying now is only one interpretation of many, transcended right into a fable many years within the making.

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