Star Wars: Special Edition (George Lucas), 1997 Review from Cinephobia
When I first heard that George Lucas wanted to rerelease "Star Wars" with new special effects, I thought it was a great idea. There are a lot of dodgy shots in Star Wars: Lucas was working with primitive technology on a very tight budget. This meant that some effects were visibly fake (one alien in the Cantina was obviously just a guy in a werewolf mask) or disappointingly staged (such as the static, uninteresting movement of the fighters in the final battle).
The changes made in the final battle scene for the "Special Edition" are along the line I hoped Lucas would take. He has resisted the urge to mount a major overhaul, and some of the new material is great: there is a fantastic new shot of the Rebel squadron flying towards the Death Star. At the same time, the better shots from the original film have been left unchanged. The wonderful shot of the Millennium Falcon emerging from the sun is an example of this. There are also some new effects elsewhere in the film that are excellent, such as the very dramatic new shot of the Jawa's sandcrawler.
Many of the other changes, however, are seriously misguided. The first really bad sequence is a brief one: several stormtroopers search the desert for R2-D2 and C-3PO riding large creatures (apparently known as "Dewbacks"). This sequence was present in the original, but in shorter form, with stuffed, immobile versions of the Dewbacks visible in the distance. Lucas obviously felt the advances in computer graphics made on Jurassic Park provided a perfect opportunity to bring these creatures to the fore, making "Star Wars" just that extra bit more exotic. The problem is, the creatures look terrible. Like some of the creatures in "Jurassic Park," the skin looks slightly wrong. More seriously, however, they are terribly animated. On "Jurassic" Spielberg had a team of experienced animators manipulating the dinosaurs (led by Phil Tippet, who ironically did some brief stop-motion work for the original "Star Wars"). Here, though, the creatures' over-exaggerated movements make it look suspiciously like Lucas let the computer boffins animate them themselves.
This annoyed me. Yet in itself it does not really count as artistic vandalism. What does, however, is the awful scene in which Jabba the Hutt appears. This has been made possible by the existence of footage of Han Solo meeting Jabba the Hutt that was cut from the original. Lucas claims that the scene was cut because he ran out of money to complete a special effects Jabba. He says the swarthy actor in the original scene was present merely to give Harrison Ford somebody to play against, and that Jabba would have been a stop-motion creature inserted in post-production.
I find this extremely hard to believe. The scene is simply not filmed in a way that would have made this feasible given Lucas' tight budget and the limitations of 1977 technology. If he had been adding a creature, wouldn't he have prevented Ford from walking both in front of and behind the actor? Wouldn't he have had them standing still? Wouldn't he have chosen a thinner actor who could be more easily hidden "underneath" the animated Jabba? All these factors combine to suggest that the shot Lucas claims he intended was virtually impossible. Jabba would have been a more ambitious special effect than anything achieved in the two (much higher budgeted) sequels. (A check of Alan Dean Foster's ghostwritten novelisation, which included the Jabba scene, seems to bear this out: Foster's description of Jabba is vague, but to me reads as a human).
If this is true, then Lucas cut the scene not because he couldn't achieve it, but simply because it didn't work. The evidence bears this out: the scene is terrible. For some reason, the dialogue repeats much of what Han had said to Greedo word for word. Jabba is far too friendly to Han, giving him an extended time period to pay his debt with almost no argument. Not only does this clash with the tough Jabba we would see later in "Return of the Jedi," but it also undermines Solo's motivation for taking Luke and Obi-Wan. Perhaps oddest of all is that the scene ruins the moment in which we first see the Millennium Falcon: a little later Luke, Obi-Wan, and the droids are led into the loading bay, and we get a chord of music for our first look at the ship. Yet with the Jabba scene included, we've actually already seen it. And this is before I even mention the poor effects work. Jabba is better animated than the dewbacks, but he still looks like an effect (give me a rubber puppet any day). And because of the twin difficulties of plausibly moving Jabba and fitting him into the frame, he's been made smaller, so that he looks nothing like the "Jedi" Jabba. This rather defeats the purpose of reinserting the scene.
Given all these problems, why did Lucas put it in at all? The answer is surely that he felt he needed more than a simple spit-and-polish of his old film to maximise the hype. After all, this is much more than a simple re-release. Lucas is in pre-production on Episodes I to III of the Star Wars saga, to be released starting in 1999. A three film commitment is not to be sneezed at, so the re-release of the old films is a perfect way of testing the waters while stoking the fires (if I may mix a metaphor or two). Not to mention the fact that through his control of all Star Wars merchandise (toys, computer games, books, lunchboxes... you name it) Lucas stands to make zillions if the re-release takes off. Thus he needs to make the re-release huge, and the best way to do that is to offer the fans "a few new surprises." Extra footage is the perfect hook - even if it comes from the cutting room floor.
This is change for the sake of change, and it harms the film. It's not unlike the colorisation of black and white movies: to me the fact that Lucas is doing it to his own films makes no difference.
___________________________ Review (C) 1998 by Stephen Rowley. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce in whole or in part without my permission.
I can be contacted at cinephobia@Not!yahoo.com (Remove the Not! for the correct address).
For a slightly different version of these ideas (focussing slightly less specifically on Star Wars), go to: http://www.werple.net.au/~lerowley/specedit.htm
For more reviews and essays, check out Cinephobia: http://www.werple.net.au/~lerowley/cinephob.htm
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