Which is not to say that it doesn’t suffer from all the hideous problems that the previous two prequels (The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones) inflicted upon us. Much of the dialogue remains absolutely atrocious, particularly in the various love scenes. LOTR’s Treebeard may have been wooden, but he still conveyed more emotion than Anakin and Padme do, and this is entirely the fault of the script. Natalie Portman, in particular, has been a thoroughly convincing and potent actress in films ranging from Leon to Garden State, and she struggles determinedly to inject a level of tragic gravitas to her character, but you can’t have tragic gravitas when you’re speaking dialogue that a twelve-year-old would reject as too cheesy.

In case there’s anyone left on the planet who still doesn’t know the story, the Galactic Republic is crumbling under attacks from separatist rebels. The Chancellor, who unbeknownst to our heroes is actually a Sith Lord in disguise, has orchestrated the war and uses it as an excuse to give himself ever more dictatorial powers. Meanwhile our hero, Anakin Skywalker, is corrupted by the Dark Side of the Force and ultimately becomes the iconic villain Darth Vader. Everything ends hideously, with the majority of the characters being slaughtered and the galaxy falling under the rule of the new Empire.

Essentially the film’s major challenge is to spell out precisely how Anakin, previously seen as a fresh-faced 9-year-old in the first film and subsequently as a petulant, lovestruck teenage twerp in the follow-up, could end up as the Dark Lord. I won’t give it away, but I found the logic of his fall remorselessly plausible, while simultaneously being rather unconvinced by how it was presented. If one spells out the factors influencing him, it all looks very compelling and indeed it is, but something in the script and the delivery fails to convince. However, once Anakin has fallen, all doubts are extinguished. He massacres the other Jedi, attacks his wife and finally duels to the death with Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor making a very decent fist of things, when you can see him for the special effects), and there is no disbelief. I watched those scenes and was gripped. Hayden Christensen was genuinely malevolent, almost making up for his stilted performance in the first half of the film.

The supporting characters remain a mixed bag. Jar-Jar Binks is present but entirely silent, which is a major point in the film’s favour. Yoda is his usual language-mangling self and is probably the most ‘real’ of the CGI characters (though still nothing on Gollum, mostly because he doesn’t display a suitable level of despair as his world crumbles around him). Senator Organa is a crucial character to the continuity of the story, and it’s therefore rather unfortunate that he was introduced so carelessly that I thought he was a Jedi, and has virtually no identifiable personality. Samuel L. Jackson’s Mace Windu displays some moral ambiguity, which at least plays to Jackson’s strengths, but he’s still rather too restrained. However, full kudos to Ian McDiarmid as the villainous Chancellor Palpatine. He conveys the reasonable manner of the career politician, while subtly revealing the lust for power that drives the Chancellor. He spends much of the film manipulating Anakin, and it’s here that the film’s dialogue unexpectedly improves drastically; the weasel words and promises he uses to corrupt the young Jedi are delivered with a calculating insidiousness.

I suppose I have to mention the special effects. They are, of course, spectacular. Teeming futuristic cityscapes, elaborate battles, robots (lots of these), various bizarre creatures, possibly the largest space battle ever committed to celluloid, and no less than five lightsabre duels. It’s all very detailed and fluid, and yet strangely unconvincing. The climactic lightsabre duel takes place on a volcanic moon and involves huge lava flows, eruptions, collapsing gantries and various other amazing creations. It’s all done flawlessly, without visible artifice, and yet feels unreal, almost like a cartoon. To me it seems that nothing actually has weight, in the most literal sense, and that therefore something has gone wrong somewhere in the modelling. Objects collapse at the wrong speeds and lighting effects sometimes seem incorrect. I now subconsciously compare all CGI sequences to several crucial ones from The Lord of the Rings, which were incredibly elaborate and detailed but also felt very very real in a way that this doesn’t, for all the care that has gone into it. Partly, it’s because the film gets so caught up in the spectacle that it loses track of the characters; as Anakin and Obi-Wan continue their duel, they are typically shot from a distance and one has no idea what they are feeling at that moment.

The last thing I want to discuss is the political element of the film. The original Star Wars was released during one of the most thoroughly anti-war periods in history, and snuck through to become spectacularly popular by giving the impression of being a science fiction film. In later years there was a backlash against its apparent ‘force solves everything’ ethos, and as a result the first two prequels bogged themselves down in a ridiculous amount of earnest discussion of democracy (which could have been interesting, but George Lucas wrote the dialogue), apparently in an attempt to persuade critics that actually George Lucas did care about freedom and justice and stuff. This film reduces its political content to a few lines, but they are some of its most resonant and powerful. In particular, one can’t help but hear echoes of George W. Bush in one of Anakin’s most crucial remarks, and apparently this was entirely intentional.

The circle, as Vader puts it in the original film, is now complete, so does the final film work? And, for that matter, does the series? Well, yes and no. The film is, for the most part, overwhelmingly entertaining but falls down on its dialogue and some of its characterisation. It’s my opinion that George Lucas has created a genuinely excellent storyline and several fantastic characters; however, he should have allowed other people to write the scripts and to direct the films. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were both written and directed by people other than Lucas, and it’s no coincidence that (Empire especially) they are probably the best of the series. I heartily recommend this film, and indeed much of the rest of the series, but given the material and underlying concepts, it’s not as good as it could have been.

[You can pre-order the Sith on DVD through amazon.com, Ed.]