- At the beginning, there's a long "dogfight" sequence, largely involving tiny attack robots squatting on Anakin and Obi-Wan's fighter ships and making like a gremlin on the ship structure. The two Jedis have great difficulty with this, relying on their R2 units to fend off the nasty little buggers. Somewhere along the line, the well-documented ability of these Jedi to fling objects away with their minds is completely forgotten.

- When Anakin trots into a theater to meet the Evil Emperor, there is a man standing by the door to the theater with blue skin and odd headgear. I'm told this is George Lucas.

- Most of Anakin's motivation for turning to the Dark Side is his attempt to save Padme from death. After he's committed endless vile atrocities, had his limbs chopped off and his skin burned off, and been entombed in a suit of machinery, he discovers Padme is dead anyway. A moment that could have been immortalized in thousands of ways besides him throwing his arms up and going, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Who writes this stuff? The scenes between Anakin and Padme are not, to say the least, memorable.

- At the end, as C3-PO and R2-D2 stand aboard the very Alderan vessel that is the first one seen in "A New Hope," the captain orders the crew to wipe the memory of the "protocol droid." Just the protocol droid. R2 beeps smugly.

The implication is that R2 has never had his memory wiped. This is a stunning concept that makes one think about the droid's behavior in the three later movies. Of course, it's difficult to believe that Lucas had in mind that R2 knew everybody's history at the beginning of "A New Hope," and I've heard more than one geek say Lucas insists that both droids were wiped, but it's fun to think about.

This would mean that R2 knew who Luke was, and who Luke's father was. He knew Obi-Wan (and Obi-Wan, that old liar, sure as hell knew who R2 and C3-PO were.) R2 knew who Yoda was when they landed on the swamp planet, and conversely, Yoda knew him. R2 knew Luke and Leia were siblings.

R2-D2. Knows much. Says damn little.

- What did Darth Vader think when he first saw the two droids? I'm not a big enough geek to remember which movie he first laid eyes on them. I don't know how many identical-appearing droids there are. The R2 units seem to have highly individual colors. C3-PO seems to be one of many, but has a distinctive speech pattern.

- The big fight scene at the end. Like noise in space, we are treated to another example of "movie lava." Movie lava is distinguished by only being hot if you actually touch it. It's seen in countless films. Real lava will cook you a long ways away. I watched a tiny lava flow outbreak at a distance of about fifty feet in Hawaii, and the radiated heat even at that range was oppressive. Nobody is going to stand four feet over a hundred-foot-wide lava flow and merely break a sweat.

Another movie tradition: movie peripheral vision. Have you ever noticed that if you can't see something offscreen, the character on screen can't see it either? This is how someone standing in the middle of a flat desert can have someone jump on him from offscreen without having been noticed sneaking up for the past thirty minutes.

Cool items:

- Scenery and effects. Goes without saying. However, it just impresses me all the more what they did without computers in earlier movies. Frank Oz's hand up Yoda's ass was pretty damn good even compared to massive computer animation.

- Some fairly funny bits here and there.

- RIDE THE LIZARD!!

- As always, Yoda kicking serious ass.

- PALPATINE kicking ass!

- General Grievous.

- Palpatine being whacked with what is apparently Ugly Lightning, an improvement over the famous Ugly Stick.

- The scene at the very end, with Owen, along with his wife and the infant Luke, striking the same pose in front of a double sunset as Luke in "A New Hope."