I found it underwhelming. I remember before watching Revenge Of The Sith I reminded myself to go in with an open mind, not to anticipate anything, or have high expectations based on my disappointment with the previous two Prequel Trilogy films.
It still underwhelmed. Order 66 seemed an easy option to take to show the majority of Jedi falling, but the way it was done just left me cold. Seeing a number of Jedi I hadn’t seen much of before or really cared about, be cut down, didn’t click with me. The Jedi Temple scenes made little impact too (poor younglings! like the poor Tusken women and children in AOTC). It also seemed rushed and impactless, like ticking off boxes on a list to get through to the end the movie where they thought they needed to be, to somehow line things up with the Original Trilogy.
When I see clips of the Jedi Purge I just shrug. It doesn’t mean much. A bit like how I feel in much of modern Star Wars when I see many dead characters return to the screen, or people surviving lightsaber impalements, or the poor writing in making vague references but with no build up or pay off, or use of memberberries in place of a good story or plot arc.
The Purge should have been memorable. It should have had a deep emotional connection or feeling. But it felt as disappointing as many of the other aspects on the prequels. In my head canon, ROTS never happened. I fill in the blanks with my own beat on the the original ‘Vader has been luring and tricked the Jedi to their deaths while he pretended to still be one of them over a long time’ story, to the point where he and Kenobi fight at the volcano pit:
This feels kind of right:
