Go see it. I think I can forgive Lucas for the first two episodes after this one. Spoilers start here, ’nuff said.

I was worried about how they were going to morph the look of the ships through this movie to be more like the ones in the original trilogy. You notice the transition throughout the movie, ships and fighters get more square. There are proto X Wings and A Wings with S-foils. If I had to use my imagination I would say there was a war on so ship design was more about function than form. you can take issue with that if you like.

R2 hops around and is much more sprightly than in the later films. He got the ‘Yoda’ treatment. I think its fun but it is going to jump out at you.

I can still spot the CGI characters. Its easy, just look at the feet of the character and see how they move across the ground. It never looks natural unless the feet are points. C3PO looks like he’s floating. The shadows he casts have a constant fuzzy penumbra, they don’t sharpen as the shadow gets closer to him. Don’t tell me the screen was fuzzy either, I saw it in DLP.

I thought the scene where Anakin pledges his allegiance to the emperor was weak. to me it feels as though he accepted the emperor far too easily. I expected him to make some sort of deal and perhaps threaten the emperor, i.e. help me save Padme or your in for it. I think there should have been much more of a sense of foreboding in the previous film that Anakin had tendencies towards the dark side of the force.

I was looking forward to the Yoda fight. I mean, Yoda is THE MAN and had to lay the smack down. Its fun to watch him drop weak minded minions like Mr. T on a bad day. The lightsaber duels and fight scenes rocked in general.

All in all its two thumbs up and I’ll be looking forward to the DVD.

You may notice some subtle changes on this site. I have made the switch from Moveable Type to Word Press. I had outgrown Moveable Type as a platform and found that it was just too hard to hack together the things that I wanted it to do. Upgrading to Word Press was fast and easy. I ported my old layout over to a 1.5 theme in just a few hours. Importing all my old posts was a snap and I love editing the templates and seeing instant results. Now I have nice things like archives that work, calendar history display, and a single dynamic sidebar template. I merged all the posts from the mindshare dev blog into this one.

Comments are open once again. I’m using an MD5 Javascript hack to foul the attempts at comment spam. Comments should work without any disturbance for those of you with Javascript enabled. If you have Javascript disabled your out of luck, you also can’t see my e-mail address either. In fact your probably just a mindless robot, imagine that.