steverands.com

Han gets to shoot first (again)

May 4, 2006 on 1:52 pm | In Movies |

So it seems as though Mr Lucas has had a change of heart, and that we will be getting the original theatrical versions of the Star Wars movies on DVD after all, come September. A response to overwhelming fan demand, or a means of generating cash for George’s next project? You decide. Will I be buying them anyway? You’re damn right I will!

I’m kind of ambivalent about the whole Special Edition thing anyway: there’s stuff I like, and stuff I don’t. Obviously, the Greedo-shoots-first fiasco rankles, but I always found the inserted Jabba sequence much more annoying. Yes, we all know that it was supposed to be in there from the very beginning, but it’s so obvious that the 1997 addition was just a technical exercise. The scene is superfluous given the earlier (or is it later? It’s been a while…) dialogue with Greedo. You can have one scene or the other, George, but not both.

Only an idiot would claim that there’s nothing of value in the Special Editions, although their biggest success derives from technical embellishments to existing scenes rather than the addition of entirely new sequences. Updating the visual effects in the attack on the Death Star, adding windows to the corridors in Cloud City, showing a herd of banthas running across the Dune Sea: all of these changes work well. Incorporating a new musical number into Jedi’s first act does not.

The only question is whether they’ll bother to ‘digitally remaster’ the original theatrical versions. I hope so. It would be a real shame if they just slapped a crappy version of each print on the discs, replete with dust, scratches, colour-timing problems, etc. These films deserve better than that.