By Patrick Macias

MAYBE YOU LIKE Star Wars. Maybe you used to before the dark times known as "The Prequels." Possibly you can't even bear to stomach the whole silly lot. And after two previous Star Wars prequels, which can only be described charitably as "problematic" (read: "Bantha fodder"), that's understandable.

But writer-director George Lucas has commanded you back into a THX-certified theater seat one more time, and no bet has been hedged to ensure you obey the call. He's promised a dark Star Wars flick that will finally show just about the only thing folks wanted to see in a prequel in the first place: the light saber duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi and bad seed Anakin Skywalker, a.k.a. Darth Vader, a.k.a. the guy from the Burger King ads.

Rest assured, general audiences and members of the Rebel Alliance, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith does make for a better time at the movies than 1999's Phantom Menace and 2002's Attack of the Clones. Partially, that's because things could not get any worse, but it's also because, after two movies of setting up meaningless characters and subplots, there's nothing left to do but finally get to the meat of the story. Yet the dark side of Lucas's digital-era filmmaking still looms large throughout.

By now, anyone who's suffered through the first two prequels knows what to expect. Like its kin, Sith unfolds in video game-ready action sequences married to abominable dialogue and sub-Max Fischer Players acting, with every frame filled with as many childish and distracting CGI creatures as possible.

But after two movies full of leaden court intrigue and perverse treatises on intergalactic trade, the first word contained in the opening crawl of Sith is sure to elicit a smile. "War!" it screams, and we're right where we should have been at the beginning of Phantom Menace. Obi-Wan and Anakin are in search of the captured Chancellor Palpatine, and they have to hot-rod their way at blinding speeds through a very expensive fireworks display to find him. It's this sort of thing that endeared Star Wars to millions of people in the first place. And while recent fan films like Revelations have made inroads into ILM-quality special effects work, nobody does "World War II in outer space" better than this. Which is why Sith is a fundamental improvement. It's a Star Wars film that actually remembers to depict star wars.

But soon we're thrust back into prequel hell, where the forbidden union between Anakin and Padmé (Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman, respectively) continues to be about as dramatically convincing as those statues of Titanic's Jack and Rose at the wax museum. With Obi-Wan off to a different part of the galaxy, Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid, who, along with Ewan McGregor, serves as the film's sturdiest human presence) moves in to become the father figure-preacher teacher to a petulant Anakin. As Palpatine rises to power on the back of a false war, politics go back on the table and we're reminded of how exactly Lucas lost the plot. The prequels were designed as a soapbox for him to pontificate on, as he once put it, "how a democracy becomes a dictatorship." Sadly, you don't have to go to the movies to find out about that sort of thing these days, and when Star Wars ceases to dole out popcorn-and-Coke escapism, it's time to reach for some Flash Gordon serials.

Happily, Sith does the trick for you. As the final pieces of Palpatine's master plan fit into place, and countless light sabers are fired up, the movie's pace kicks up something fierce. It begins to resemble the Star Wars films of old, when all Lucas demanded of his actors was "faster, more intense." How dark does it get? Only on par with the original from '77, in which Alec Guinness casually hacked off arms during a bar fight, Jawa bodies were strewn about the Dune Sea like rag dolls, and Mark Hamill stumbled across the barbecued remains of his foster parents.

By the time the much-anticipated light saber duel erupts, Sith has managed to conjure up an air of credible space opera. But what the film totally lacks from frame one is suspense. In reverse-engineering the Star Wars universe, Lucas has turned it into an itemized grocery list of events to be checked off. Anyone who's read the back of a spoiler-ridden box of Cheez-Its will simply be waiting for the blanks to be filled in.

By the time we see the revealed emperor and his new apprentice gazing out into space, simultaneously peering into the past and future of the Star Wars chronology, it's tempting to imagine that their evil Empire will mirror Lucas's own: the rise of the soulless blockbuster, the digital actor, and the move to turn cinema into a home theater demo. For those who still hold a candle for science fiction, fantasy, and brain-out-your-head thrill rides, a very wobbly circle will be complete. Maybe that stormtrooper, under the influence of a Jedi mind trick, said it best: "Move along. Move along."

'Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith' opens Thurs/19 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.