Friday, September 2, 2011

Star Wars 3.0

There's an ongoing debate at SpinoffOnline about the further revisions being made to the Star Wars series for it's release on Blu-Ray.
I added my two cents...
Re-doing elements now, over 35 years later in the case of the first film, alters both the intent and thrust of the movie.
If you look at the novelization of the first film (by Lucas and Alan Dean Foster from Lucas' screenplay), many story aspects, including the Emperor, the Fall of the Republic, and the Luke/Leia relationship (you can't believe they're brother and sister in the novel or film) are vastly different than what resulted, decades later, in the prequels.
That's because Lucas himself is not the same person he was back in 1976.
He's changed.  In some ways for the better.  In some ways for the worse.  We all go thru it.  But when we have a mid-life crisis, we don't have the money to change an entire universe to suit us.  He does.
Imposing that current, altered, worldview on his earlier works seems...ill-advised.
It was dumb when his buddy, Steven Spielberg, digitally-removed guns from goverment agents' hands and replaced them with walkie-talkies in the video release of ET for no real reason except that, years later, he had little kids, and like any overprotective parent, he overreacted.
It was character-altering when Lucas had Han shoot second in the Cantina, making him less of an opportunistic sleezeball than he was originally-shown to be...by Lucas himself!
And, it was sad, that, instead of just "cleaning up" the Oscar-winning fx of the first Star Wars, he replaced the Oscar-winning sfx with digital work that, a decade later, looks dated.
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Thanx for posting!