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

“This story happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. It’s already over. And nothing can be done to change it.”

In one paragraph that precedes his discussion of events Revenge of the SithMatthew Stover got star wars. As it rings now – a week Revenge of the Sith The novel has launched its lavish and festive edition – just as it was when it was released 20 years ago, and Stover’s adaptation has maintained legendary status among critics. star wars Fans for good reason.

It goes beyond the typical film retelling (the book was released more than a month before the film’s release), fleshing out details from earlier screenplay drafts or leaving them up to interpretation by the finished film. Her increasingly internal character adds additional layers of depth to our main characters, amplifying the tragic misinterpretations and misunderstandings that drive… Revenge of the SithA broader story of betrayal and loss. And of course, Stover’s own knowledge of the Expanded Universe at the time put him in stark contrast to George Lucas’s belief that the Expanded Material and his own films were clearly separate things, allowing the writer to drop references and connections that were closely intertwined over a decade of comics and books at the peak of the previous saga.

This does not make it inherently better than the film itself, but simply an alternative point of view to its narrative, an enrichment rather than a replacement for a similar text. But this also ties into the actual thing that makes Stover’s novel so compelling and fun to read, even all these years after the film was made into the cinematic canon. star wars (Both what Stouffer was working with at the time and the rebooted interpretation of everything): Revenge of the SithNovel treatment star wars As a historical myth that has endured for generations, and more importantly, as a fictional myth that envisions its characters as larger-than-life archetypes of their kind—in this case, a tragedy.

From the moment the book begins, Stover plays with this idea that what you, the audience, are told is a piece of history, with a constant core at its core that makes the inevitability of its grief all the more urgent. However, beyond this essence, it embodies a mythical retelling of these events with an increasingly imaginative sense of the surreal. The interweaving of moments of third-person narration sometimes sounds like a Greek chorus and at other times like an intimate perception of the events being described to you. Stover’s work is at its best when it delves deep into the abstract: characters move away from simply being who they are and take on grand conceptual identities, embodiments of darkness, light, and emotion themselves, drawing on Expanded Universe stories to recast Palpatine’s machinations as the culmination of millennia of cyclical struggle between good and evil while making you feel like you’re reading the final chapter of a long, solemn saga.

Several times throughout the book you are told what it is feel You like to be one character or another, rather than having this information communicated to you through their actions or even through internal dialogues, widening and blurring the lines so that it’s not like you’re getting a direct interpretation of these supposedly ancient and immutable events, but more like an almost hazy retelling, made stately by the flowery prose and the feeling as if this story has been told and retold and condensed over time, transformed by history. To the legend itself.

star wars Since fantasy over sci-fi is an idea that has been built into the franchise’s story from the beginning of course. There are spaceships and blaster guns, but it’s the story of space wizards and their diametrically opposed magic of darkness and light – a story star wars It is one as much as it is the other. Stover’s legendary framing of Revenge of the Sith He plays into that fantasy by doing what he does best star wars The material does that: engaging with the franchise through the opening crawl of being so long ago, the piece of history that these stories document.

Lots of some of the best star wars Stories of the last few years have taken this idea in a more consistent sense. Brilliant The rise and fall of the Galactic Empire By Dr. Chris Kempshall Took last year star wars“The story is made into a literal historical text, an analysis of its world and its narration, as if it were viewed as a piece of real world history, and it preoccupies the audience with thinking about star wars The universe is like this. In the same way, Andor deal star wars“History in its examination of the rise of resistance against empire as a direct parallel to our past (and, more bleakly, the ways in which history can be repeated).

But it is most similar to Stover’s work Revenge of the Sith It may be another prior source in assistantWith her RashomonRetelling the events that separated young sisters Usha and Mai Anisya, it asks us as an audience not to implicitly trust everything we see, and that stories can actually take on a shifting and heightened emotionality rather than the realization of a final truth. All of these things still come down to the same idea from different perspectives: what does it actually mean star wars Was history set long ago in a galaxy far, far away? Does this mean that we treat him as we treat ourselves? Does that mean mythologizing it as a myth, a story of heroes and conceptual ideas that can be twisted and reinterpreted in retelling across generations?

What did he make? star wars Our entrenched modern cultural myth is that it can be done both ways, and more so, if we are willing to trust those interpretations beyond what is legal fact and what is not. This in turn is what makes Stover’s Revenge of the Sith Just as compelling now, as it was 20 years ago. Something Such events may have occurred a long time ago, but what we read now is just one explanation of many, and has transcended into a myth that has been decades in the making.

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