It’s nice to see George Lucas get a little love (as Bryan Curtis noted this week). Yet this retroactive recognition is nonetheless proof that a filmmaker can be both rich as Croesus and assured of a place in history while still remaining a misunderstood and unappreciated artist. Lucas’s great achievement isn’t the conception of the “Star Wars” saga, the inauguration of the franchise, or his consignment of it to Disney for cloning ad infinitum. Those are for the movie books, for the pundits who reduce movies to such sociological oxymorons as “collective imagination,” the cultural counterparts to industry analysts who talk only about box office. What endures for the critics and their lay associates, for aesthetes who live for the beauty and the pleasure of movies, is Lucas’s directing—of two films, “Attack of the Clones” and, especially, “Revenge of the Sith.” If Lucas had done nothing else in his life, he’d have an honored place in my personal pantheon for that work.

It’s easy for me to say so, because I only just saw those films now, after a few days of not-quite-binge-watching of the Blu-ray set of the series. I’m nearly a “Star Wars” newbie. Prior to viewing “The Force Awakens,” I had seen the first film in the series (the one belatedly renamed “A New Hope,” from 1977) some time in the nineteen-eighties, and none of the others. That’s because I was utterly underwhelmed by “A New Hope,” impressed solely by the world-making of the script—the delivery of a ready-made but minor mythology—but neither moved nor fascinated nor at all delighted by the filmmaking. Rather, I was shocked—that the director of “American Graffiti” could have constrained himself to create such a turgid, stilted, flat, and textureless movie. I wasn’t working as a film critic or journalist at the time (or when any of the subsequent five films came out). I went to the movies guided solely by pleasure, even curiosity, and nothing in the viewing of “A New Hope” induced me to catch up with the then-recent releases of “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi,” nor to follow along with the three prequels.

I was wrong not to watch. But it would have taken a couple of decades to find out how wrong I was, because the marathon watching of “The Empire Strikes Back,” “Return of the Jedi,” and “The Phantom Menace” was a chore (for the record, a self-imposed chore). “A New Hope” at least had the merit of coming first—it had the element of surprise—along with a comically flat direction that appeared to be a parody of the mediocre serials on which it was based. “Empire” and “Jedi” had nothing parodistic; their absurd earnestness and the bombastic banality of their direction (by Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand, respectively) are a perfect match for the oppressive, hectoring John Williams scores that accompanied them.

My colleague Alex Ross recently wrote in praise of Williams’s music for the “Star Wars” series. I defer to Alex regarding the details of musical knowledge and craft that Williams displays; I differ with him regarding the emotional and sonic affect of the music. Hearing Williams’s compositions for “Star Wars” is like being ordered, loudly and aggressively, to feel, and to feel one thing. It sounds calculated to bludgeon a viewer into submission, to create a cowed unanimity of simple and narrow emotions that are the antithesis of imagination and fantasy.

A scene from the original “Star Wars.” Photograph: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation/Everett

If there was nostalgic, faux-naïve whimsy in Lucas’s inaugural installment of “Star Wars,” it was gone from “Empire” and “Jedi,” replaced by a hegemonic bellow for devotion and belief. A friend—who happens to be one of the best critics around—says that the “Star Wars” saga has become the closest thing to shared religious belief among contemporary Americans. He told me this before I had seen “Empire” and “Jedi.” Now I believe him, but I’d add that it’s not a joyful religion, not a terrifying or awe-inspiring one, but a wet blanket of piety that replaces passions with palliatives, and mysteries with nostrums.

I watched the series in the order of release—4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3—because it makes no less narrative sense to do so. It’s the age of Christopher Nolan, not to mention the two “Godfather” films, so it shouldn’t take a Ph.D. in Alain Resnais to make sense of a series in flashback, especially because the series superimposes two time frames on each other—the characters’ evolution, and the evolution of the series itself. I’m much more interested in the latter, and that interest brought rewards that far exceeded that of the ostensibly grand narrative revelation at the end of “Jedi.”

“The Phantom Menace” was depressing, perhaps because of the centrality of the child Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), whose perky earnestness in a holy cause makes the movie feel like a homiletic children’s broadcast. The actual emotional peak of the film—the “Ben-Hur” parody of the space-chariot race, which Lucas realized with obvious verve and delight—occurred early on, while the huge quantities of exposition and lengthy establishment of the conflicts underlying the episode and the series turned the film into a slog. Nonetheless, the sheer volume of that exposition, the invention of an intergalactic politics to counterbalance the quasi-religious story, impressed me even more than the mythology of “A New Hope”—even if Lucas here relied on even duller methods to deliver it. What’s more, one visual device—the red zone of the shield generator, which filled the screen to look like a faded and scratched color print running sideways—was utterly arresting (I watched it three or four times in a row) and it suggested realms of invention that Lucas was barely ready to tap.

A scene from “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.” Photograph: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation/Everett

This peculiar contradiction began to resolve itself with the pleasures of “Attack of the Clones.” There, Lucas’s force awakens. The movie’s rich-hued palette alone is a jolt from the start, and the movie’s action scenes have an alluring, entrancing kinetic vigor and texture. The speeder chase with the paid assassin, with its swoops and spins and drops; Obi-Wan’s fight with Jango Fett; and the serial duels with Count Dooku—all of these display balletic gracefulness and dazzling rapidity along with closely-textured compositions in depth, surprising pictorial imbalances, and angles that are as expressive as they are surprising. The colossal scale of the assembled clones toward the end of the film has an awe-inspiring power greater than anything in any of the four films that preceded it. My hypothesis is that digital technology caught up to Lucas’s imagination. Finally, by 2002, digital technology, which he had begun to use in “The Phantom Menace,” liberated him from the limits of optical effects and, by means of C.G.I., could create the fusion of live action and animation that was implicit in the project, and in his vision, from the start.

The labyrinthine opening shot of “Revenge of the Sith”— of Anakin and Obi-Wan giving chase to Dooku through the space vehicles on the planet of Coruscant—is a mighty and audacious gauntlet-throw, the digital equivalent of the opening shot of Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil.” It wheels and gyrates and zips and pivots with a vertiginous wonder that declares, from the beginning, that Lucas had big visual ideas and was about to realize them with a heroically inventive virtuosity. And the rest of the movie follows through on that self-dare.