And it is gratifying to see that Ewan McGregor and especially Hayden Christensen, as the Jedi Knights Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker respectively, have turned in better, more interesting performances in this film than they did in its predecessors.

This is no small point, since it is in this film that Anakin turns against Obi-Wan and becomes the evil Darth Vader.

The film’s opening sequence, in which Obi-Wan and Anakin rescue Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) from his Separatist kidnappers—unaware that Palpatine is a sorcerer who has engineered the kidnapping as part of his plan to seize power over the galaxy—is also one of the most exciting, amusing and entertaining chapters in the entire series.

But there isn’t much else to praise here.

Natalie Portman, as Anakin’s secret and pregnant wife Padme Amidala, has little to do; and some scenes are so ripe for parody, they practically satirize themselves.

The earlier prequels were surprisingly dull exercises in teenage romance and hokey political conspiracies; obsessed with boring, mundane details like the taxation of trade routes, they had little in common with the grand, mythic archetypes of the original films.

To its credit, Revenge of the Sith finally pushes the story back in a more operatic direction; but old habits die hard, and the characters continue to pay lots of lip service to the need for “diplomacy” and “liberty” and so on. Even Obi-Wan declares, in what should have been one of the film’s most climactic moments, that he is fighting on behalf of “democracy.”

Sith proves once again that writer-director George Lucas has no idea, and little interest in, how real people relate to one another. This flaw is especially problematic here since, as Obi-Wan told us in the first film, “Vader was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force.” Alas, Lucas is as tin-eared and ham-fisted with spiritual seduction as he is with the romantic kind.

One of the prequels’ more regrettable aspects is that they have undermined the moral stature of characters we once thought were heroes, yet you suspect Lucas is oblivious to how he has compromised those characters.

For example, many people of my generation were introduced to relativistic thinking through Obi-Wan’s insistence, in Return of the Jedi, that many of the “truths” we believe depend on our “point of view.” But in Sith, this belief is expressed by Palpatine, who persuades Anakin that what is good or evil depends on one’s “point of view.”

Things are muddled even further when Anakin and Obi-Wan have their fateful duel. Obi-Wan seems to espouse a form of relativism when he tells Anakin, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!” But when Anakin declares, “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil,” Obi-Wan changes his tune and replies, “Well, then, you are lost.”

Does Obi-Wan mean this absolutely? Or would he concede that Anakin was only “lost” from a certain point of view?

Perhaps Lucas is trying to show that Obi-Wan’s contradictory thinking was part of the problem all along. After all, Yoda and Obi-Wan continue to think in absolutes right to the end of the story, and to seek Darth Vader’s obliteration, even after his son Luke has learned that Vader is his father and therefore capable of redemption. Then again, this may be just another example of muddled thinking on Lucas’s part.

Christians might be able to pull one good message out of this mess. It turns out Anakin turns to the Dark Side partly because Palpatine promises him the power to conquer death; it is thus somewhat ironic when both men are scarred for life and nearly killed in their battles with the Jedi. This may serve as a reminder of the biblical adage that those who try to save their life will lose it.

But our faith has never been as sanguine about death itself as the Jedi seem to be. The “immortality” portrayed in these films, in which some spirits linger on after bodies die, is, at best, a pale, ghostly substitute for the Jewish and Christian belief in resurrection.

The prequels have robbed the Star Wars universe of much of its mystique. It turns out the years of mystery and speculation around the events that transpired before the original films was much more interesting than the depiction of those events that finally came out. Let us hope that the franchise will finally be allowed to rest in peace.