Re-release? Please, I’ll take the original.
With the 3D re-release of the Star Wars trilogies due this week, we can expect a multitude of small but significantly annoying changes to the original films. I will just state for the record that the prequels are particularly poor in comparison to the original trilogy, so for this post I will ignore the prequels completely and pretend they never happened…
Episodes IV – VI are widely regarded as some of the best sci-fi films ever made. Take a look at any list and you’ll find all three films in the top 100 and Empire Strikes back will more than likely be in the top ten. That’s ten best films of all time in any genre mind you. I was nine years old when I first saw Star Wars: A New Hope in the cinema for the first time and the experience has stayed with me until this day – it was simply breathtaking. Unfortunately for me, I have only ever seen the 1997 re-release in the cinema and due to Lucas’s pathetic selfishness I suspect many of you have never seen any version of Star Wars on a big screen.
The Star Wars Trilogies are the only films that we cannot get a license to screen. And once the 2012-2017 3D re-releases have done their short exhibition rounds, they will again be locked away in Lucas’s bunker.
But I digress. Last year the long awaited Bluray versions of the Star Wars trilogies came out and their quality is unarguably superb – they are even a significant improvement on the colour correction fails of the 2004 DVD releases – anyone notice the green lightsaber on the Millennium Falcon? Whoops! But the problem I have with them is the little edits here and there that ultimately change the way we perceive the story and more importantly the characters.
Pretty sure Ben Kenobi's lightsaber is meant to be blue...
Now I don’t mind small things like continuity errors, or colour corrections or even replacing some really ropey special effect for something slightly better, but what Lucas has done to the original trilogy is pretty unforgivable.
Editing for the sake of it
Here is a lovely example of Lucas’s butchering. In the original 1977 cut, Han Solo is cornered by Greedo who is collecting a debt Han owes to Jabba. Han has little choice but to shoot first and ask questions later, thus setting up Han as someone who walks the fine line between good and evil and makes his character arc all the more interesting.
However, in the 1997 special edition, for some inexplicable reason, Greedo shoots first making Han a lucky SOB and nothing more. Whats worse, is the special effects look like they’ve been done by a 10 year old using After Effects for the first time.
The filmmaking process
Making a film is not a straightforward process, stories and characters evolve as actors bring their own ideas to the film. Scenes are often re-written to take into account unforeseen events during production, such as Brad Pitt breaking his arm during the filming of Seven. When a film is edited, often the order of scenes is changed and quite often scenes are deleted to make a better film. Deleted scenes are exactly that, deleted. For a reason. Often a scene adds nothing to the story and the film is better off without them, so why Lucas? Why did you add a load of them back in?
This is a terrible example of picking up the dregs from the cutting room floor. In the 1997 special edition of Episode IV, Lucas decided to restore a scene where Jabba waits for Han as he returns to the Millennium Falcon. We don’t learn anything from the scene that we didn’t already know, apart from what Jabba looks like – although he looks completely unlike the Return of the Jedi version. So not only does Lucas manage to ruin part of Episode IV by introducing the Millennium Falcon before its proper reveal scene, he also ruins the start of Episode VI!
Are big budgets to blame?
Interestingly the reason this scene was originally cut was that Lucas ran out of money for the stop motion Jabba to replace the human actor in the original footage. Perhaps this goes some way to explain why the prequels just aren’t that good… At the time when the prequels were in production, Star Wars was the most profitable film franchise ever, and has only recently been overtaken by Harry Potter and James Bond. When you are in charge of a franchise worth over $4.5 billion, your budget becomes ‘unlimited’ - certainly, you wouldn’t have to cut scenes because you ran out of money.
Star Wars is not the only franchise to have the same fate, The Matrix (1999) is another highly regarded sci-fi film was made on a relatively small budget of £40 million. It was lean, mean and pushed special effects boundaries, much like Star Wars did in 1977. Its sequels however had a combined budget of over £160 million for what is basically a 2-part bloated action film with less story than the first film between them. They could have been so good…
When you face a budget constraint, you really have to be super critical of what you have – only keep what is absolutely necessary and what you end up with is a lean film that has exactly what is needed.
If you look at the Star Wars prequels, you will see enough cluttered CGI to melt your face – its almost completely unnecessary and CGI just does not stand the test of time like model shots do.
This shot from the 1977 version of Episode IV was ground breaking at the time and still holds up pretty well today.
This is a scene that was added to Episode V in the 1997 special edition and re-mastered for the Bluray release last year. To be honest, SUSUtv could do a better job with a green screen than this… I guess that’s the problem isn’t it. The original trilogy was so good because they had to build a 1:1 scale model of the Millennium Falcon, whereas the prequels were mostly shot in a green screened studio with the motto: “It’s ok, we’ll fix it in post”.
This brings me back to the 3D re-releases set to happen over the next 6 years. If you read my previous post then you will know how I feel about 3D. Who knows what Lucas will do with them this time? Perhaps Alderaan will shoot first? What these Star Wars re-releases are, is another version for the sake of it – no one wants to watch Star Wars in 3D. All we really want is the original copy as it was in 1977 remastered for Bluray; but leave the continuity errors, its what makes them special. We love the fact one of the storm troopers bangs his head!
In Conclusion
What I really want to see, is Cinema returning to its roots. I’d far rather watch a film shot on a clever set with clever camera work than something swollen and utterly crap from a CGI house, tailored to the directors every whim and fancy – its not good cinema. I want more stuff like Moon. Oh and the original 1977 cut of Star Wars.
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