Sith

In the book’s reading of Revenge of the Sith, the Sith are the evil political and spiritual force that draws Anakin toward the Dark Side and the Empire. Their decisive representative is Palpatine, who reveals himself as a Sith Master and exploits Anakin’s vulnerabilities. The book’s criticism is that the film does not make Anakin’s fall a tragedy of attachment to the Good: it presents him instead as a wavering warrior tempted by power, diminishing the significance of his transformation into Darth Vader.

Identity and Dramatic Function

The Sith enter the account through Palpatine’s revelation to Anakin that he is the evil Sith Master. He also discloses his intention to establish an empire, connecting the Sith threat to the political transformation of the Republic. In the film’s final sequence, Anakin, remade as Darth Vader, joins his new master, Darth Sidious, aboard a Star Destroyer as construction begins on the Death Star. The Sith thus stand at the hinge between Anakin’s personal ruin and the Empire’s emergence.

Palpatine’s Recruitment of Anakin

Palpatine makes his appeal by turning Anakin’s fears and weaknesses to his advantage. He stokes the young Jedi’s ego and arrogance, portrays the Jedi as corrupt and ineffective, and casts them as responsible for Anakin’s suffering. The resulting seduction is political as well as personal: Palpatine offers the prospect of power while directing Anakin’s grievances against the order to which he belongs. The book describes this as a gradual slide into evil, but argues that this emphasis on temptation leaves the fall dramatically inadequate.

The Fall the Film Does Not Fully Realize

The book proposes a more consequential logic for Anakin’s turn: he should become evil through an excessive attachment to the Good, driven by the desire to intervene, do good, and go to any length for those he loves, especially Padmé. On this reading, his mistake would not be simply to exchange one side for another, but to pursue the Good in a destructive form—seeing evil everywhere and becoming a monster in the effort to fight it. The author argues that the film fails to realize this possibility, and therefore does not fully sustain its own parallel between the Republic’s conversion into Empire and Anakin’s conversion into Darth Vader.

Anakin’s Transformation and the Sith Order

After Anakin learns that Padmé has helped Obi-Wan find him, he attacks her with the Force, lifting her from the ground and throwing her against a wall. Later, after his duel with Obi-Wan, he learns from Palpatine that Padmé is dead and unleashes another outburst of destructive rage. The book treats these episodes as parallel expressions of uncontrolled anger: first directed at Padmé, then accompanying remorse for what he has done to her. Rather than showing love itself becoming the path to evil, the film seems to move Anakin between opposing positions of rage and remorse.

The duel leaves Anakin badly burned and scarred after he falls into a molten pit. Palpatine’s henchmen rescue him and bring him to a medical facility, where he is kept alive in healing liquid, limbless and horribly deformed. Imperial medical droids build him into the armored figure of Darth Vader. When he leaves the facility, he joins Darth Sidious aboard the Star Destroyer and looks out at the Death Star under construction. The transformation makes the Sith victory visible in Anakin’s altered body: he is now more machine than man.

Ethical Defiance and Narrative Criticism

The book also singles out Anakin’s rejection of Obi-Wan’s final appeal to return to goodness. Though already gravely wounded, Anakin gathers his remaining strength in an attempt to strike back. The author interprets this persistence as an ethically charged refusal to abandon a choice, comparing it to Don Giovanni’s rejection of the Stone Guest’s last offer of salvation. At the level of plot, Anakin chooses evil; at the level of form, the book sees a defiant consistency, maintained without expectation of practical or spiritual gain.

That moment, the author suggests, points toward a tragic grandeur the film does not otherwise earn. Because the Sith temptation is framed chiefly as the lure of power and the exploitation of weakness, Anakin’s fall lacks the force it might have had as the consequence of love distorted into an uncompromising campaign against evil. The Sith remain central to the political outcome, but the book’s criticism is that the film’s account of their victory does not adequately dramatize the inner logic of the man they convert.