A great Star Wars film at last

Rating: 10/10 (6 March 2015)

It's a big ask to sell people on a film series where the entire trajectory is a young man becoming increasingly corrupted and fall from grace, particularly when the fate of many of the characters you're depicting is a well known, and often celebrated fact of cinematic history, but on George Lucas plowed through two uneven prequel films to bring us here, the one where the bad guys win, and win emphatically.
The film opens with one of the best sequences in the entire 6 Lucas controlled films as Anakin and Obi-Wan rescue Palpatine from the evil Lord Greivious, a droid with a human heart. Anakin kills Count Dooku straight away and Palpatine sets apart convincing Anakin that Padme is going to die and it's only through learning the dark side of the force that he can save her. In the moment he does turn, it's both understandable and believable, though the speed at which he goes from "What have I done," to "You're my Master" doesn't quite ring true.
In the meantime Palpatine goes on manipulating everyone from the Senate to the Jedi in order to establish his Empire. We get the epic Light saber duel we've always wanted to see between Obi-Wan and Anakin at the height of their powers. We also get Yoda taking on Palpatine, which is something of a let down at the end, but Lucas' hands were tied by the fact that Yoda had to survive to be in the Original Trilogy films.
the film ends on a real note of hope that had me wanting to run out and watch the Original Trilogy again. As a perfect tie in to the original series this one does fall agonizingly short. You can't quite believe that Obi-wan and Yoda are where they are in the later films for the reasons Episode 3 gives us. And there are a few other points of difference too. Overall though the third film is both a great finale to the prequel trilogy and a decent lead in to the original trilogy.
This film really belongs to Christenson and your ability to enjoy it will depend greatly on whether you can sit through two hours of him carrying a film. I think he's terrific in this one having to play a young man with loyalties divided by genuine grievances, under the thrall of a charismatic mad man, needing to keep secrets from the ones he loves. The other key players Ewan McGregor and Ian McDiarmid are both excellent. They are the two actors who seem the most at home in these prequels, not weighed down by dialogue or acting in front of a blue screen. Natalie Portman is finally given something of substance to do, though admittedly not much, she at least gets to say one of the best lines in the whole series "So, this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause," and Jar Jar's presence is kept to a minimum.
Lucas received much attention for his writing of the disintegration of the Republic, with some saying he was having a veiled swipe at the US President George W Bush's reaction following 9/11. Lucas for his part, countered that he had based the disintegration on events from the lead up to the Vietnam war. I'll leave it to the discerning reader to decide which is more likely.
Revenge of the Sith is a winner from start to finish. The only great Star Wars movie made since 1980, and went some way to justifying the whole prequel trilogy. In the end the trilogy gave us Natalie Portman, gave great Australasian actors like Jack Thompson, Temuera Morrison, Joel Edgerton, Jay Laga'aia, and Claudia Karvan (along with many others) an opportunity to star in a big Hollywood blockbuster, and introduced a younger generation to the Star Wars films. Any success the series has going forward will be in some way due to the younger audience being engaged for the first time here. Thank you George Lucas for making this movie. Now it's over to JJ Abrams and frankly, I can't wait to see where he takes Star Wars.