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Introduction & Initial Question

I am a huge fan of the Star Wars saga. I found that my two favorite installments in the series, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Episode V: Empire Strikes Back, are the two darkest movies out of the saga. They both end with the so-called “bad guys” getting the edge. I’m interested in whether or not movie reviewers view one movie as being more dark than the other, and whether different emotions are evoked from the movies.

To tackle these questions, I went to IMDb to look at the reviews of each movie. I noticed that the reviews on IMDb are very lengthy and methodical. For each movie, I scraped one page worth of reviews, so 24 in-depth reviews for each movie. Once I have the text data in a data frame, I will be able to perform sentiment analysis on the reviews from each movie. First I will do a simple positive or negative analysis to score the valence of each movie. Then, I will dive deeper into which emotions appear in each set of reviews.

Simple Valence Analysis

## Joining with `by = join_by(word)`
## `summarise()` has grouped output by 'Movie'. You can override using the
## `.groups` argument.
## `summarise()` has grouped output by 'Movie'. You can override using the
## `.groups` argument.
## Joining with `by = join_by(word)`
## `summarise()` has grouped output by 'Movie'. You can override using the
## `.groups` argument.

As you can see with the bar graph presented above, Revenge of the Sith has more negatively scored words; about 56% of the scorable words in the reviews were negative. This is contrasted by Empire Strikes Back, whose scorable words were about 48.5% negative. The fact that Revenge of the Sith has nearly 8% more negative words doesn’t necessarily mean that the reviewers hold a more negative view of the movie, it just means that the words they used to describe movie were on average more negative. This could indicate that the reviewers of Revenge of the Sith view it as being more “dark” than the reviewers of Empire, but this isn’t a definitive proof.

Emotional Analysis

Instead of each words either being scored as positive or negative, I want to see the emotions of the words within the reviews to gain a deeper understanding of the content in each review.

## `summarise()` has grouped output by 'sentiment'. You can override using the
## `.groups` argument.

As you can see in the bar graph above, Revenge of the Sith has more words take evoke emotions such as anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and negative. On the other hand, Empire Strikes Back has more anticipation, joy, positive, and trust words. It makes sense that Empire Strikes back has more anticipation, as Revenge of the Sith is a prequel, so most fans watching it already know what will end up happening, they just don’t know how. Both sets of reviews have a lot of positive words that are used, and thats probably because these are two very good movies, and both sets of reviewers made sure to convey that. The words I’m really interested in here are those like fear, anger, disgust.

Fear and anger, especially, are big themes across the Star Wars prequels, as they sort of outline the devolution of Anakin into Darth Vader. There are many more fear, anger, and disgust words used in Revenge of the Sith’s reviews than the Empire Strikes Back’s.

Conclusions

Looking at the simple valence score, and the emotional analysis, I found that out of Revenge of the Sith and Empire Strikes Back, Revenge of the Sith is the darker movie. There is more fear and anger within the reviews, as if the people who watched it were captivated by the downfall of Anakin. There isn’t as much fear or anger in Empire, because the “bad guy” hass already been established and we accept him as the necessary evil for the plot. Darth Vader is still scary, but in the original trilogy we never see him as a little boy growing up on Tatooine as a slave, or being trained and becoming best friends with Obi-Wan Kenobi. There’s a certain attachment viewers have to Anakin and everyone knows how it will end, but they fear how it will begin.