My first thought when I saw "re-release" was actually that Spielberg had caught the Lucas-bug of milking an old movie for more money with "new" scenes or redone special effects but other than better audio I didn't see anything alarming about this. And it's not being re-released on DVD either as far as I know, just on Blu-Ray.
That may be a thin difference but it's still a difference. It's almost certainly still a milk release but it is far less blatant.
Eh, he already did that with E.T. , it got an anniversary release in cinemas with extra scenes added and CGI adds and subtracts. imo, worse than the adds/subtracts to the Sw SE's, as he added the CG to the ET puppet's expressions, which would been the same as Lucas adding Cg to Yoda in ESB, which thankfully he never did, cause it would have ruined half the movie.
At least Speilberg released the original version on dvd in a special double pack, I assume it was digitally remastered, not sure, otherwise it would be the same as what Lucas did with the unremastered SW discs.
All the same, it's a pain in the neck cause the remastered versions are the ones that are shown on tv now, and that is how a lot of kids will be introduced to it, he should not have messed around with the ET puppet, he made it look awful, whereas it was fine before, hell the movie was just fine before as well, the deleted scenes are crap and should have been left on the floor.
It was that and the Sw ones that led to that South Park ep, where they go in to steal the master tapes of the Indy Jones trilogy, after rumours of remastering crap into them surfaced, which in turn led to Lucas and Spielberg leaving them the hell alone in real life.
JP re-released only in the UK? Will people actually go to see it over here, I dunno, never felt like it was that big a deal over here, it's mostly US posters who rave about it on here anyway.
edit: if any US posters want to come over and catch it on the big screen, you can crash at my place, i'll show you the sights and what I get up to on a Friday and Saturday night in the town, haha.