I agree with almost all of your litany of "bad". The really unfortunate thing is that it is supposed to be a movie about the fall of Anakin, and, as such, should be about the person. And the fact that he was unable to really show us instead of telling us is embarassing. I think the one scene that most points out is inability to do that was the beginning of the final confrontation between Obi-Wan and Anakin, where they each restate the theme of the movie like three times. Lucas is so confused about how to show us what's going on that he feels it necessary to tell us three times in a row.

On the other hand, I disagree about the special effects to a certain extent. The opening battle scene was cool, and I know that battles are supposed to be chaotic, but they way it and many of the other battles in the movie were shown, it was very closely choreographed, but then there was so much going on that you couldn't make heads or tails of it. What I'm trying to say is that if everything was running around willy-nilly, and I didn't follow everything, that would have made sense, but in these battle scenes, there was little to no chaos, but the sheer amount of information on the screen was overwhelming, and not in a good way, I think. It was certainly technically impressive, but not really conducive to telling a story.

Also, many of the SFX shots in the less grandiose portions of the movie were really bad. Virtually every time you see C3PO walking, it's like he's floating, never quite putting his feet on something concrete. Every time you see the head clone take his helmet off, it's really stiff, like an in-engine video game cinematic with an actor's head pasted onto the body. Many scenes were obvious green screens; the one that pops to mind is Owen and Beru looking into the distance at the very end of the movie, though there were many others. At one point, I saw some stairstep aliasing on a live actor, one can only assume from poor use of a digital camera. (Though the digital camera mistakes rife in the last movie were largely not there in this one.)

Oh, and a lot of the dialogue was looped, and they obviously didn't work very hard to match the actors' mouths with the new dialogue.

Yoda felt less like a flea on crack in this movie, but his lightsaber battles still felt wrong. I finally figured out a way to put it: Yoda and the Emperor are both too powerful in the ways of the force to use something as gauche as a lightsaber. How much more interesting were the fight scenes featuring either of them when they put down their lightsabers? Or the way Yoda dealt with the guards?

The beginning of the movie, the infiltration after the space battle, I thought was the best part of the movie. It felt a lot like the old movies. Namely, it had some humor in it, and not fart jokes. Towards the end of that segment, they started going over the top a little, but it was nice to see someone having some fun in that universe again.

Another thing that made it feel like Star Wars again was the fact that so much of it took place in large spaceships. It didn't occur to me until I was watching this one that that was one of the elements missing from episodes I and II.

Now, my wife read the novelization and was disappointed that a lot of the political beginning of the Rebellion was cut out. And apparently the turn to the dark side was more well fleshed out in the book.

All that being said, though, I'm far from disappointed in the movie, and I was quite disappointed in the last two.
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Bitt Faulk