The film
Supreme Chancellor Palpatine: Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?
Anakin Skywalker: No.
Palpatine: I thought not. It's not a story the Jedi would tell you - it's a Sith legend. Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith so powerful and so wise, he could use the Force to influence the midi-chlorians to create life. He had such a knowledge of the Dark Side, he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying.
Anakin: He could actually... save people from death?
Palpatine: The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.
Anakin: What happened to him?
Palpatine: He became so powerful... the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power - which, eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice killed him in his sleep. Ironic...he could save others from death...but not himself.
Anakin: Is it possible to learn this power?
Palpatine: Not from a Jedi.
Palpatine: Master Windu! I take it that General Grievous has been destroyed, then?
Palpatine: I must say you're here sooner than expected.
Mace Windu: In the name of the Galactic Senate of the Republic, you're under arrest, Chancellor.
Supreme Chancellor Palpatine: Are you threatening me, Master Jedi?
Windu: The Senate will decide your fate.
Palpatine: It's treason, then.
Anakin: What have I done?!
Darth Sidious: You are fulfilling your destiny, Anakin. Become my apprentice. Learn how to use the dark side of the Force.
Anakin: I will do whatever you a... ask.
Sidious: Good.
Anakin: Just help me save Padmé's life. I can't live without her.
Sidious: To cheat death is a power only one has achieved, but if we work together, I know we can discover the secret.
Anakin: I pledge myself to your teachings.
Sidious: Good. Good. The force is strong with you. A powerful Sith you shall become. Henceforth, you shall be known as Darth... Vader.
Darth Vader: Thank you... my master.
"Once more, the Sith shall rule the galaxy! And we shall have... peace."
— Darth Sidious
Darth Sidious: Commander Cody... the time has come. Execute Order 66.
Cdr. Cody: Yes, my Lord. BLAST 'EM!
Darth Vader: You've turned her against me!
Obi-Wan Kenobi: You have done that yourself!
Obi-Wan: Your anger and your lust for power have already done that. You have allowed this dark lord to twist your mind, until now... until now you have become the very thing you swore to destroy.
Vader: Don't lecture me, Obi-Wan. I see through the lies of the Jedi. I do not fear The Dark Side as you do! I have brought peace, freedom, justice and security to my new Empire!
Obi-Wan: Your new Empire?
Vader: Don't make me kill you.
Obi-Wan: Anakin, my allegiance is to the Republic! To democracy!
Obi-Wan: Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Vader: I should've known the Jedi were plotting to take over!
Obi-Wan: Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!
Vader: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!
Obi-Wan: Well, then, you are lost!
Obi-Wan: It's over, Anakin. I have the high ground!
Vader: You underestimate my power!
Obi-Wan: ...don't try it.
Obi-Wan: YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE! It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them! Bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness!
Vader: I HATE YOU!
"Padmé, help me..."
—Darth Vader, barely audible just as the mask is put on
(A horrifically injured Vader has just been put into the suit.)
Darth Sidious: Lord Vader. Can you hear me?
Vader: Yes, master... where is Padmé? Is she safe? Is she all right?
Sidious: It seems, in your anger... you killed her.
Vader: I... I couldn't have. She was alive! I felt it!
(Vader, through the Force, destroys the equipment of the laboratory he's in)
The novelization
"This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it. It is a story of love and loss, brotherhood and betrayal, courage and sacrifice and the death of dreams. It is a story of the blurred line between our best and our worst. It is the story of the end of an age. A strange thing about stories—though this all happened so long ago and so far away that words cannot describe the time or the distance, it is also happening right now. Right here. It is happening as you read these words. This is how twenty-five millennia come to a close."
— The introduction
"The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins—but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back. Love is more than a candle. Love can ignite the stars."
— The conclusion
General Grievous: You Fool! I have been trained in your Jedi arts by Lord Tyranus himself!
Obi-Wan Kenobi: Do you mean Count Dooku? What a curious coincidence. I trained the man who killed him.
— The pre-battle banter between Grievous and Obi-Wan
You can hear yourself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but you cannot stop it.
You can never stop it. You cannot even slow it down. You don't even have lungs anymore.
Mechanisms hardwired into your chest breathe for you. They will pump oxygen into your bloodstream, forever.
— On Anakin's rebuilding.
You remember the dragon that you brought Vader forth from your heart to slay. You remember the cold venom in Vader's blood. You remember the furnace of Vader's fury, and the black hatred of seizing her throat to silence her lying mouth—and there is one blazing moment in which you finally understand that there was no dragon. That there was no Vader. That there was only you. Only Anakin Skywalker.
That it was all you. Is you. Only you.
You did it. You killed her.
You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking about her, you were only thinking about yourself... it is in this blazing moment that you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith—because now your self is all you will ever have.
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 who has 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.
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 who has 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.
This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever.
— On Anakin's Heel Realization.
Meta
If I had seen “Revenge of the Sith” in real time, in a theatre upon its release, in 2005, I think that, at the moment when Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), sizzling in the blue lightning that Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) reflects back at him, cries out to Anakin (Hayden Christensen), "Power! Unlimited Power!", I would have leaped out of my seat yelling with excitement. The entire movie is filled with an absolute splendor of the pulp sublime, and that moment is its very apogee. Lucas reaches historic heights in the filming of action: the martial artistry of Anakin and Obi-Wan's double duel versus Dooku, the gaping maw of outer space and of the airshaft into which the heroic duo drops, Obi-Wan’s light-sabre fight with the four-armed Grievous, and, above all, the apocalyptic inferno of the confrontation of Obi-Wan and Anakin (which, regrettably, cuts back to Yoda and Emperor, a much duller battle). I watched these sequences over and over...and was repeatedly and unflaggingly amazed by Lucas’s precise, dynamic, wildly imaginative direction.
— Richard Brody, "What the Seven “Star Wars” Films Reveal About George Lucas", January 06, 2016. The New Yorker
