I want to tread cautiously here, because I know this is a moment of nerd triumph (Lucas actually made a good movie!) and also a time of deep nerd mourning (There may never be another Star Wars movie!) And it's not like I'm going to tell you not to see Revenge of the Sith, because of course you should see it. But if you're like me, you'll find that your most true, most basic emotional reaction to Episode III tonight is neither ecstasy nor sadness, but detachment and regret.

Supposedly we were going to see Episode III and suddenly understand why The Phantom Menance and Attack of the Clones *had* to be made. We were going to appreciate those movies in a new light as important, indispensable aspects of the Star Wars mythos.

Well, I don't. I hate those movies more than ever.

I've been opposed to the prequel concept from the start. We never needed to see what Anakin Skywalker was like before he became Darth Vader. We learned all we needed to know about that from Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. And having now seen the last of the prequels -- the "whole story," as it were -- we can now say fairly that these movies were little more than the rote, soulless recitation of exactly what we already knew. There were no surprises here. As with most prequels, there just wasn't any point to all this.

Sure, we got to see Yoda fight. Sure, we learned a few little wrinkles about stormtroopers and the twins' mother. But there was no story here that needed three movies to tell -- and while Revenge of the Sith is very fun and even (in parts) moving, I don't know that it needed to be told.

What's worse, all the prequel trilogy ultimately does is cheapen the original trilogy. Not by revealing all its twists three movies too soon, because no one will ever watch Star Wars in numerical order. Not by putting its special effects to shame, because I think most viewers will have the critical sophistication necessary to make the jump between III and IV without difficulty. And not by exposing the creative flaws of the original trilogy through repetition and unnecessary self-reference, although it's done that in spades.

No, the prequel trilogy's greatest sin is that it taints the original trilogy with what I can only call lameness. That it fails as a tragedy in its own right is self-evident; bad scripting, bad acting, and bad overall structure saw to it that these movies could never live up to the tragic promise of Anakin Skywalker, to the story each of us made up in our own head. Now this literary failure reverberates throughout the original trilogy; with every bit of foreshadowing and circularity, with every callback, with every narrative non sequitur and logical plothole, the massive, poisonous failure of the prequel trilogy infects the grandeur of the movies that helped define my childhood.

You see, the movies were never all that great to begin with; it was always only the magic surrounding them that made them seem that way. For me, and I suspect for a lot of us, that feeling's gone now. Six years after Jar Jar, even Empire doesn't feel all that magical anymore. What it feels like is the second-to-last episode in a middling science-fiction series that doesn't hold together very well at all, once you stop and think about it.

The prequels have taken a once-in-a-generation epic and turned it into just another franchise, just another dead ritual of nerd arcana. Watching the original trilogy now feels like an exercise in kitsch, not a sacrament, and that's a shame.

I'm fairly certain this will be an unpopular opinion, because Sith is hands-down the best Star Wars movie since Jedi, and maybe since Empire, and because no one likes a spoilsport who thinks too much about aesthetics when everyone is just trying to have a good time. Like everyone else, I liked the movie, I'll probably see it again, and I'll probably get the DVD. I'm glad that Star Wars fans have finally got the movie we've all been waiting for since 1983. But right now, I wish the prequels had been made wildly differently, or else not been made at all.

An amusement park at the Grand Canyon might be a whole lot of fun, but it'd ruin the view. For all their fun, for all their thrills, for all their technical wizardry and billions of dollars earned, the prequel trilogy has tarnished the luster on something that once seemed truly great -- and I think that's something to regret.