We went to see “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith” on Friday night, and I have to say that, given how good the advance word on the film had been, at least in the American press, I found it disappointing. Sure, the special effects were great — if sometimes almost a little too much to watch — and there were great spaceship and swordplay tableaux. But where was the humor and sheer joie de vivre of the original trilogy? Like its two predecessors, “Revenge of the Sith” seemed comparatively leaden — even lifeless. I wasn’t particularly tired the day we saw it, but I found myself dozing at various points, in spite of the brilliance of the special effects.(We saw the film at the not particularly late showtime of 9:30 p.m.)

As a kind of tonic, I watched the VHS version of the very first Star Wars film (now sometimes known as “Star Wars IV: A New Hope”) on Saturday. This was, I think, the relatively unmodified original version, without George Lucas’s subsequent digital revision; among other things, it seems to have Han Solo firing first at Greedo in the Mos Eisley cantina scene, giving us the real scoundrel smuggler we loved back in 1977. What struck me about the first film was that, even though the dialog was as flat and uninspired as that of the more recent Star Wars “episodes,” Mark Hamill is an order of magnitude more fun to watch than his nominal dad, Hayden Christensen. Similarly, Natalie Portman, who has been great to watch in films ranging from “The Professional” to “Garden State,” can’t seem to rise above her dialog in “Sith,” and so she makes Carrie Fisher look pretty good in retrospect.

Because we had already paid to see the movie, and because I have a professional interest in the question of how much a threat Internet piracy poses to the film industry, I went ahead and downloaded the purported “work print” of “Revenge of the Sith” via BitTorrent. This is a non-trivial download — the file is one and a half gigabytes in size — but the results are, to put it mildly, not the sort of thing that would please any fan of the film. The video is marred by a huge running timecode display, the resolution is extremely low, and the 16-by-9 aspect ratio is squeezed into a 4-by-3 frame. Given that just about the only virtue of “Revenge of the Sith” is its beautiful digital imagery, which can only be fully appreciated at full resolution in a theater, I doubt George Lucas has lost a dime as a result of Internet file trading of this movie. And given that the movie has broken most box-office records for an opening weekend, I’m sure Lucas is crying about Internet piracy all the way to the bank.

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