What is the true identity of the 'Force ghost' that appears briefly behind Anakin Skywalker in the final battle of 'Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith'?


By

David

Todd Vasili, who worked on visual effects for films such as Dungeons & Dragons and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story , has reported on his blog that he has uncovered a 'small mistake' in Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith .

FXRant: The Movie Mistake Mystery from 'Revenge of the Sith'
https://fxrant.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-movie-mistake-mystery-from-revenge.html

'I'm particularly fascinated by those moments of cinematography and artistry that reveal a little bit of magic or sleight of hand that destroys the illusion of cinema,' says Vaziri. 'These moments have been in cinema since the beginning and are everywhere if you know exactly where to look.'

For example, in one scene in Martin Scorsese's film ' Goodfellas ,' the license plate of a car parked on the road is filmed falling off.



Also, if you look closely at the final scene of James Cameron's film

Alien Rebellion , in which the android Bishop is cut in half and about to be thrown into space, you can see a hole through which Lance Henriksen, who plays Bishop, is hiding the lower half of his body.



However, these two mistakes have already been corrected in the current version. In response, Vasili said, 'It is a mistake to dismiss these changes as part of the revisions. What is in the film is what is in the film, and revising history to this extent is a form of historical revisionism. When excessive revisions alter the action in the frame, the film becomes worse. To me, this is the equivalent of replacing an actor's performance with a different take, or changing the music in an action scene, or replacing a puppet show with a CG model of the same creature decades later. The film happens in an instant.'

At the end of the controversial Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker and his master Obi-Wan Kenobi fight a deadly battle on the lava flowing on the volcanic planet Mustafar. This is one of the most famous scenes in Star Wars, and it is the trigger for Anakin Skywalker to wear a life support machine as Darth Vader.

The scene was created by

ILM 's visual effects team, led by visual effects supervisor Patrick Tabak and sequence supervisor Michael Conte, but about two hours into the film, there was a small mistake.

The moment in question can be seen in the GIF animation below. Just as Anakin is about to jump up, something resembling a man's face appears to float behind him. Since it only appears in a few frames, it is difficult to notice unless you play the video frame by frame, but this face is called a 'Force ghost' and has been a hot topic in the fan community since around 2015, with people wondering if it was a mistake or a prank by the staff.



To solve this mystery, Vaziri unearthed pre-composited footage from ILM's digital archives, which store past footage offline. As a result, a staff member was seen moving Hayden Christensen's scaffolding, who plays Anakin, by hand, and the staff member's face matched exactly with the Force ghost frame by frame, revealing that the Force ghost was the staff member's face.



When keying a green screen for a scene with a lot of action, a garbage matte is created that is applied to the video layer, and the process is fine-tuned by hand, frame by frame. However, a mistake was made during this process, leaving the staff member's face in the footage. Because only a few frames are visible and it is a scene with a lot of action, the staff, Tabak, storyboard, editors, and director George Lucas himself were unable to spot the mistake, so it was released as is.

'There's a saying that perfect is the enemy of good , and while we want filmmaking to be as perfect as possible, we can't make everything perfect,' said Vasili. 'Over the last 20 years, we've evolved a process that we call the 'final check,' which is an extra step of quality control. What this means is that every single one of the thousands of shots that appear in Star Wars is touched by a human touch. This world is handmade, and it's little things like this that become part of ILM's history.'

The details of the discovery made by Vasili were also introduced by film director and producer Ian Kinzle in a pamphlet for the Star Wars Celebration event held in Japan from April 18 to 20, 2025.

Related Posts:

in Movie, Posted by log1i_yk