A lot of the trouble George Lucas has faced since going down the long slide into bathos and shattered expectation stems from the very phenomenon he helped create: the Movie Event. I'm probably wrong about this (it's my lede, bite me), but before Star Wars I don't think American cinema had quite attained the degree of cultural inescapability it has now -- what Don DeLillo in another context calls the 'world-hum.' (Where were you standing when Alec Guinness phoned it in?) Radio peaked with Orson Wells' Martian invasion hoax; television inaugurated the age of historical simultaneity via the live broadcast; but Star Wars alerted everyone to the news that from now on, going to the movies was no longer just a mode of "passive entertainment." No. It was democratic mythmaking in progress.

So it's ironic that Lucas's long-awaited return to the franchise that invented the modern consensus fable was met, in 1998, with almost unanimous hostility. Let's see, the first installment: a disposable children's cartoon best remembered for a talking upright fish for whom the seemingly inevitable line, "No woman no cry," was just an anti-defamation lawsuit away. Round two: a saccharine love story sprinkled liberally over a bland admixture of human cloning and "separatist" rebellion. Let simmer until plot thickens.

The good news is Revenge of the Sith -- or Episode III, or Bush in Space, or whatever the fuck it's called -- does pay down some of the deficit amassed by Lucas's latter-day gambles. No, it's not better than the original Star Wars, but it is well-paced, well-acted -- especially given the moody, brooding circumstances of the western/samurai trope -- and far more attentive to the unities of dramatic storytelling; it actually draws you in this time. Like the last scene in the final episode of Seinfeld, a giddy nostalgia is generated by the distinct impression of having "been here before," except that in this case we know exactly where we're going: back to the future of 1977. Oh, and a Promethean fall from grace, a prophecy betrayed, and something about the struggle for the fate of the universe -- all that shuffles things along, too.

To bring us up to speed, then: Anakin Skywalker is now secretly married to Padme, much to the contravention of an austere (and vaguely homoerotic) honor code for Jedi journeymen. Yet domestic life in an Ikea-furnished apartment seems to have only heightened his abilities as a fighter pilot and lightsaber swashbuckler. As a result, Anakin is now the Page Six apprentice of the galaxy, best known for saving the lives of other heroes and plenipotentiaries, not least of which belongs to Obi-Wan Kenobi, his (ahem) "master." The film opens with dizzying space battle that is shot and edited by someone who's been begging us to hear him out on the glories of CGI and has finally provided the key evidence for his case. Skywalker and Kenobi are on a mission to rescue Chancellor Palpatine, believed to have been kidnapped by the nasty Count Dooku, played by Christopher Lee who looks like an advertisement for the undead he once was. But of course the droll, froggy-voiced chancellor -- imagine Gore Vidal, only funnier and with better politics -- moonlights as the "Dark Lord of the Sith," prime mover of cosmic misfortune and chief villain of all six films. He's orchestrated a phony civil war, with nary a Jabba the Moore having hipped to him, the better to facilitate the transformation of the republic into his very own totalitarian empire. This is a project in which Anakin will, unwittingly at first, serve as helpmeet.

Now the Sith is either a schismatic sect of the Jedi order founded on a kind of alchemical interpretation of The Force, or else it's Douglas Feith's old department at the Pentagon. I'm really not so sure since the macedoine of ancient and contemporary histories and contradictory philosophies makes for a befuddled morality play indeed. Leaving aside the idea of a chancellor winding up a genocidal baddie dressed in black (forget ham, that's just spam-fisted), at one point a Dark Side-lured Anakin remarks to Obi-Wan: "Either you're with me, or you're my enemy." To this comes the sententious reply that "only a Sith thinks in absolutes." Yet Obi-Wan will soon thereafter invoke the giveaway Manichean term "evil," against which Anakin submits a claim to relative "points of view"! "Fanatical obscurantism" is something that even the arcane Leo Strauss deplored. I've got to wonder what the hell the "noble Wookie lie" must sound like.

I'd also like to take a moment and give credit to the wrongfully defamed Hayden Christensen. He learned from Shattered Glass that overwrought post-adolescence needn't package itself as a cardboard cutout set to bleat every five minutes, and he's proven under more demanding conditions that this is a knowledge he intends to keep. Good for him. His pissiness has matured into a respectable angry young man's grumble (that bulge in the forehead is genetic -- have you no heart, A.O. Scott?) which leaves you half sorry for the chap as he suppurates and smolders on the volcanic shore where Darth Vader is satanically born.

Despite what you've read, the dialogue in this installment isn't nearly as face-coveringly embarrassing as it was in the other go-rounds. Some of Yoda's Yiddish left-dislocational syntax would trip up Noam Chomsky on a good day, but otherwise the signs are all there of Tom Stoppard's cautious, and no doubt gleefully self-contained, script-doctoring. (C-3PO and R2-D2 Are Dead might have made for an interesting failure in its own right.) When Natalie Portman says, "Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo," I winced more out of memory of her having opened her mouth at all in Closer. And the other critically celebrated clunker, "She's lost the will to live," is delivered by a medical droid who couldn't order 300 cc's of Penzoil Plus without sounding ridiculous. So no harm there, either.

But would it have killed Lucas to give Samuel L. Jackson the adieu his being zapped out the window of a multi-storied government building requires? "You God damn right I sense a disturbance in the Force!"