But can we even say film? Lucas seems to want to make that word obsolete: Clones is by far the most ambitious movie to be shot and, in certain theaters, exhibited with digital technology. For a movie industry that has been slow to embrace digital filmmaking, Clones heralds a breakthrough that Lucas compares with the advent of sound and the arrival of color. The whizzes at Lucasfilm, Panavision and Sony blended their expertise to devise sophisticated lenses and cameras that enable digital images to replace traditional 35-mm film. The result is an astoundingly clear image that lends a hyperreal glamour to the gritty city of Coruscant and the pastoral reaches of Padme's home planet, Naboo.

Lucas may be obsessed with all things digital, but in this film he and co-writer Jonathan Hales also appear fully engaged with his flesh-and-blood characters. Obi-Wan, in the form of McGregor's bearded visage, is growing into the moral authority and gruff wit exuded by Alec Guinness as the fogie Kenobi in Star Wars. His exasperation with Anakin has a paternal tint. In that Coruscant night chase, Anakin is the car-crazy teenager of many Lucas films, and Obi-wan is the speed demon's nervous dad who regrets giving his son the keys to the family sedan.

As for Padme and Anakin, they could be the first plausible love duo in the Lucas oeuvre. Theirs is a coming-of-age story: Padme's slow realization that the 9-year-old she left behind has grown up. At first she deflects his ardor by calling him by his old diminutive, Annie—a girl's nickname, a gentle emasculator—and telling him, "You'll always be that little boy I knew on Tatooine." He doesn't help his case by plighting his troth at every opportunity. (Is there anything less sexy than declared devotion?) But gradually, Padme, beguiled by Anakin's quick wit and impressed by his martial skills, comes to realize that they are destined to be together. And not just because the audience knows they will be the parents of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. As the galaxy careers toward catastrophe, the imminence of total war unites them, gives emotional weight to their puppy love, makes their romance more urgent.

The Anakin of Clones is an attractive fellow, full of a young man's roiling contradictions. He respects the Jedi ethic while squirming to elude its strictures; he loves both his faraway mother and the royal temptation at his side; he does engage in a revenge massacre but feels remorse for it; he is disarming and, finally, literally disarmed. By the end of Clones, Anakin is still a decent, stalwart gent, light-years removed from the malefic Vader.

So how will Lucas, who once created an angelic Luke, morph his new hero into Lucifer? "He turns into Darth Vader because he gets attached to things," says Lucas. "He can't let go of his mother; he can't let go of his girlfriend. He can't let go of things. It makes you greedy. And when you're greedy, you are on the path to the dark side, because you fear you're going to lose things, that you're not going to have the power you need."

Underlying the three strains of action, romance and character is a sense of political drama, prefigured in Phantom Menace. If that movie had a message, it was: Take a meeting. The film often went logy from all its earnest senatorial harrumphing, which was every bit as compelling as a lazy committee hearing on C-SPAN. Politics is important in Clones too, but as a running three-cornered debate: Padme's idealism colliding with Obi-Wan's cynicism and Anakin's budding realpolitik.

Obi-Wan echoes John McCain on campaign-finance reform: "It is my experience that Senators focus only on pleasing those who fund their campaigns ... and they are by no means scared of forgetting the niceties of democracies in order to get those funds." Padme, in a scene cut from the film, sounds like Kofi Annan pleading for Palestinians when she tells the Senate, "If you offer the separatists violence, they can only show us violence in return! Many will lose their lives. All will lose their freedom." Anakin, like Brutus just before the Ides of March, says if the Senate cannot resolve its differences, "then they should be made to." By whom? "Someone wise," he says. Padme muses, "That sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me."

So where does Lucas stand in this political polemic? "I'm more on the liberal side of things," he says. "I grew up in San Francisco in the '60s, and my positions are sort of shaped by that ... If you look back 30 years ago, there were certain issues with the Kennedys, with Richard Nixon, that focused my interest." Lucas' own geopolitics can sound pretty bleak: "All democracies turn into dictatorships—but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it's Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea ... What kinds of things push people and institutions into this direction?"

In Clones, Lucas goes a way toward answering that question. "That's the issue that I've been exploring: How did the Republic turn into the Empire? That's paralleled with: How did Anakin turn into Darth Vader? How does a good person go bad, and how does a democracy become a dictatorship? It isn't that the Empire conquered the Republic, it's that the Empire is the Republic." Lucas' comments clarify the connection between the Anakin trilogy and the Luke trilogy: that the Empire was created out of the corruption of the Republic, and that somebody had to fight it. "One day Princess Leia and her friends woke up and said, 'This isn't the Republic anymore, it's the Empire. We are the bad guys. Well, we don't agree with this. This democracy is a sham, it's all wrong.'"

Lucas describes the Empire as if it were the oppressive, white-on-white Formica fascism of his first feature, the boldly bleak THX 1138. Back in 1970, Lucas and his mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, were in the vanguard of the Film Generation. They were film-school grads who hoped to remake the movie business into the art of film. Surely these kid revolutionaries would create an adult, audacious post-Hollywood cinema.

Yet it is a truism about American directors: you become who you were. Coppola, the former theater director and son of a classical musician, took the arty road, making operatic, actor-centric films that sometimes (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) found large audiences. Lucas, who had written a third-grade theme that began, "Once upon a time in the land of Zoom ..." and loved to tinker with cars, replayed his Modesto, Calif., adolescence in American Graffiti. Then he reworked the beloved comic books and B-movie serials of his youth into Star Wars, a film as stylized and sterile as a piece of abstract animation, yet an adventure potent enough to please mass audiences.

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