Babel On, Babel Off: Well, it didn't suck.

As Lisa puts it, "At least it went out with a Bang and not a Wimper." And that's what we were all hoping and praying for.

Immediate reactions:

A few too many unintended funny moments.
Palpatine's scarred face looks better under a hood. Unhooded, it looked like a huge rubber mask. That whole scene got lots of laughs from the audience.
Why was he up and walking about so fast after being scarred by his own lightning? I know that the "I'm so weak" thing was a put on, but you'd still think that he'd be at least a little woozy after getting force-lightening'ed all over his face.
You'd also think he would have stopped shooting the force lightning once he realized Windu was blocking it. Why keep scarring his own face?
How exactly did Annakin manage to go from "You can't kill him. He has to stand trial. It's not the Jedi way." to killing the younglings half an hour later?
Couldn't Lucas make up his mind? First it's the "I want to be the most powerful Jedi ever" motive from both Clones and the early part of this film; then it's the "I have to tap into the Dark Side to save Padmé" motive; then it's the "Padmé is sleeping with Obi-Wan" motive.
I actually liked the idea that he was disillusioned by the Jedi asking him to spy -- they could have done a lot more with the "the Jedi are abandoning their own values" or "the Jedi aren't any better than anybody else" idea; maybe if he had burst in on Windu about to kill Palpatine and didn't know why and it just looked like murder (although what about the bodies of those three other Jedi in the vestibule?)
I didn't think Obi-Wan's accent was so bad
I agree that the battle scene at the beginning was basically dull; not that it wasn't beautiful but you just didn't feel anything: which of course was the problem with the last two movies and is in fact a pervasive problem with big-budget movies these days: just as the first Harry Potter, though it was very faithful to the book, just seemed like it was "going through the motions" of listing all the scenes in the book but without leaving you feeling anything (the subsequent ones are much better) and just as the first two prequel Star Wars movies just were a sequence of pretty vignettes that didn't hang together with any depth or feeling. Of course the battle scene at the beginning was going to be a dud: even the landing of the broken-in-half ship (by the way, they didn't explain why the ship broke in half -- oh, and they didn't explain the gravity thing either: there's no "up" or "down" in space so what would the tilt of the ship as a whole have to do with whether the elevator shaft was horizontal or vertical to them -- are we to believe they were already that far into the planet's gravity well? I'm such a nerd to even think about it) was going to be a dud: of course we knew all the principals were going to be around for the rest of the movie so we could hardly get worried about them in the first scene
Grievous wasn't as good as I expected; he just wasn't that scary. He looked silly with his bad slouching posture. Also unless you had seen the Clone Wars animated series you wouldn't know why he was coughing so much. The scene where he was fighting with four light sabres was pretty good though.
The movie in general had the best light-sabre scenes so far from all 6 movies I think.
Yoda's battle with the Emperor was pretty durn good.
So was Obi-Wan's with Annakin
Oh, did anybody notice that people were referring to Palpatine as the Emperor even before they had had an opportunity to hear about the creation of the Empire? Or that they went back and forth between Chancellor and Emperor? Or between Republic and Empire? It was a mess.
Why did they have to split up the twins? Annakin had no idea they were twins (since as has been mentioned everywhere, they may have hyperdrive but they don't have ultrasound in this galaxy)
Yes the "You're so beautiful because I'm in love no because *rolf*" dialog was "execrable" (my new favorite word), but frankly so was a lot of the rest of the dialog.
How could Obi-Wan just walk away and leave Annakin to sink into the lava? Wasn't that a little unnecessarily cruel? Wouldn't he at least have killed him to put him out of his misery? Or maybe even try to drag him out of there so at least he didn't burn to death? They could have made an effort to show him unable to rescue Annakin: even though he had killed the younglings and gone over to the Dark Side that wouldn't mean Obi-Wan wouldn't feel anything for him.
Oh, let's face it; spending too much time thinking about any Star Wars movie is a fools errand, even the good ones. The pinnacle of Lucas's writing achievement was the "I am your Father" moment; that was the closest to any real conflict or character development. It's an insult to comic books to call it comic book. You don't go to Star Wars for depth. You go for fun. And for the most part, this one was fun, and although perhaps it wasn't enough to make up for the monstrosity of the last two (last three, actually), it was still pretty good.