There's only one way of ranking the new Star Wars film that matters, so let's get to it:

#1: Star Wars
#2: Empire Strikes Back (but damn, this is close)
#3: Revenge of the Sith
#4: Return of the Jedi
#5: Attack of the Clones
#6: The Phantom Menace
#999,999,999: The Holiday Special

To rank Revenge at #3 is a bit of a misnomer, because frankly, the best parts of Return of the Jedi still outstrip anything Revenge has to offer. Lucas has never - and probably will never - hit his pre-prequel stride. But people who haven't seen Return recently tend to forget what a fast-forward movie it is: Duel on the sailbarge SKIP race through the forest SKIP final showdown and battle. Fail to SKIP, and you slog your way frame-by-frame through some terribly boring interludes. Jedi's a terribly uneven movie, and Revenge gets the nod simply because it's more consistently good all the way through.

George Lucas has said that Sith was about 60% of his original plot for the prequels, meaning that his other two movies were 20% plot and 80% filler. It shows here; there's a lotta movie in this movie. But the big surprise about Revenge is what a psychological film it is.

Lucas has never been famed for his tight plotting or his attention to character, but the whole shebang rests or falls on what happens to Anakin... and surprisingly, he delivers the goods. When Lucas started the prequels, he said that his goal was to make it so when old fans watched the original Star Wars: A New Hope, you would feel sorry for Anakin when Darth Vader stormed through that door and started crushing tracheae. At the time, I thought it was an impossible task - but actually, I kinda get it now.

Without giving anything away beyond the obvious, the methods the Emperor uses to ensnare Anakin are subtle enough that Anakin can't really be faulted for falling for them. What the Emperor says is always true to a point, and the Jedi Council's flaws are actually what undoes them. And the psychological development of Anakin-to-Darth is pitch-perfect, right from uncertainty to numbness to grasping justification. The triumph of Revenge of the Sith is that when Obi-Wan and Anakin eventually face off, nothing they say to each other is a lie.

That's not to say the movie is perfect. I wrote about the need for narrative conservation a while back, and this is a perfect example of it because every conversation is about two sentences too long. When you have dialogue as terrible as Lucas's, you want the bare minimum, but Lucas seems terrified that the audience isn't going to get the point - so we get excruciatingly-extended scenes where Anakin and Padme look at each other lovingly and go, "You're schmoopie." "No, you're schmoopie" just so we get the point. And when the Emperor finally takes Darth Annie on as his apprentice, his orders take about twice as long as they should.

Plus, the final lightsaber battle is still not a patch on the Darth Maul/Obi-Wan battle at the end of Phantom Menace, and it takes about seven times as long.

Which is the other problem with Revenge of the Sith; as my friend Kat said, "Was there anything new there?" Not really. Despite the fact that we have the climactic big-ass duel between two Jedi masters, the Jedi have apparently not developed any duelling powers beyond "Force Push vs. Electrocution + Superleap." (Shit, I get more than that in my Jedi videogames, Lucas.) There's a lot of recycling of the original trilogy here, which depending on your point of view either means Lucas is "expanding upon a theme" or "is too lazy to come up with new ones." Take yer pick. Me? It didn't bother me that much, but aside from the Fall of Anakin you won't see anything you haven't seen in a Star Wars movie before. And the Wookiies are completely gratuitous.

(One problem I do not have with it, even though I do, is that spunky little Padme essentially becomes a passive participant. The reason I can forgive this is because I know there were extra scenes filmed showing Padme doing stuff that got trimmed because the movie was too long.)

But that's all carping. The movie was good, and there are scenes from it that are gonna burn themselves into the Star Wars canon in a way that Attack of the Clones did not.

In the end, it doesn't redeem Lucas for the other two movies in the trilogy. I'll just sort of forget about them, the way that I ignore Highlander II whenever we meet at parties. But Revenge of the Sith will have a place on my shelf next to the real three Star Wars movies, even if I'll watch it after Return of the Jedi is done.

(Tell me I'm full of it)