I am pleased to report that George Lucas has found his way back from the Dark Side. Well, he wasn't on the Dark Side, but he was on the clunky and boring and bloated side, which looks the same from where I'm sitting. In the first two films of this trilogy of prequels, he let just about everyone down. Episode I - The Phantom Menace was an almost total loss; Episode II - Attack of the Clones was a load of nonsense with a great ending. Would he, could he let us down again? Could the most important film of the trilogy, the one that explains how Anakin became Darth Vader, be a bust?

It could have been, but it isn't. It is, in fact, a really good movie, the kind of memorable summer blockbuster that will be remembered past Labor Day. The film is an almost perfect meshing of special effects and human action (aside from a few effects that didn't work), and it is also a gripping adventure and an epic tragedy. It's the story of how one of cinema's most famous villains (#1 on my list) came to be, and that transformation, both figuratively and literally, is the highlight of the film and the trilogy.

This film details how Anakin (the still-wooden Hayden Christensen) falls further under the control of Chancellor Palpatine (a perfectly smarmy Ian McDiarmid), and how he turns from his Jedi buddies toward the Dark Side and the Sith. Anakin's friend and mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan MacGregor, the only consistently convincing actor in the entire trilogy) struggles, but fails, to convince Anakin to stay with the good guys, as other Jedi, including Yoda (voiced in that charmingly fractured syntax by Frank Oz) and Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson, who looks like he doesn't give a crap about trying to act anymore) try to fight off the rebel clone army and stymie Palpatine's efforts to take over the Galactic Senate. Meanwhile, Anakin's wife Padme (Natalie Portman, looking desperate) is pregnant. And that's all the plot you're getting from me.

The action scenes are simply stunning, or at least most of them are. After the expected slow crawl of synopsis, we're whisked into the heat of an awe-inspiring battle scene, as the clone armies and the Senate's forces fight it out in space with enormous ships and buzzing, mosquito-like fighters. It's a dizzying thrill ride that sweeps you along breathlessly. It's easily the greatest large-scale battle scene in the trilogy, and it rivals many of the battles from the older trilogy. Not all of the fight scenes work; I don't know what made Lucas cast the elderly Christopher Lee in an action role, but his fight scenes are completely unconvincing, the special effects noticeably fake. But there's plenty to make up for it, including some with Lucas's patented oddball vehicles (my favorite was one that looks like nothing more than an angry table saw), the emotionally devastating betrayal of the Jedi, and the treat of watching Yoda, a green, wrinkled whirling dervish, fight. And then there's the final one-on-one fight (not telling who's involved) that is, hands down, the best action scene in any of the Star Wars films, old or new.

Lucas has attempted a sort of political meaning for this film, and while I suppose it is somewhat successful, it is also typically hamfisted. I think Chancellor Palpatine is supposed to be George Bush; his seizing of power in the Senate in reaction to a "crisis" that he has, in fact, set in motion is supposed to be Bush taking advantage of the Iraq war to seize more power for the executive branch. Etc. I suppose, on a very basic level, the comparison is accurate, but I don't want to give too much credence to Lucas for his penetrating political insight, because, for the most part, he lacks it. This film is a reflection of early 21st century America only in the most basic, instinctive, black-or-white way—in fact, in the same kind of us-or-them politics that Anakin and company spout when they've turned to grim evil. I'm not attempting to criticize Lucas's attempts to create parallels between his world and ours, but I find myself resisting the throngs of fans who are so eager to read Meaning and Importance into every frame of the film.

What Lucas is good at, and has always been good at—except, I suppose, for the previous two films of this trilogy—is sweeping us along in his elemental morality plays. He does it by making the bad guys obvious, giving them names like Darth Sidious and Grievous and Dooku and Palpatine (which makes me think of anxiety attacks), and dressing them up in tentacles and goo. But there's more to it than that—although I would hesitate to call it subtlety, Lucas has a knack for easing his messages through, and for every Important Point that comes crashing down on us with all the subtlety of a Wookiee stomping on your foot, there's a bit of insight into the characters that surprises you.

This is not a perfect film; after a great opening, it slows down considerably for a while; Lucas still can't write dialog to save his life, and when characters exchanged more than one or two lines I found myself groaning at the clunky expository lines; and I am still almost utterly unimpressed with most of the acting aside from Ewan McGregor. But it is a good film, an exciting one, and just the sort of rousing adventure, complete with a perfect ending, that Lucas needed to deliver to come full circle and to avoid going out like a chump.