You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned
I told a good friend of mine about the following news item, and his response was, "Holy s*** f***ing cow dogs," which I guess is about an accurate and honest reaction as you could hope to receive.
Succumbing to years of public pressure, George Lucas, the flannel-clad douche who took my boyhood dreams and pissed all over them with Episodes I-III, has finally deigned to release the original theatrical cuts of the first Star Wars trilogy. The discs hit shelves Sept. 12, which will probably be soon immortalized online as Virgin Unification Day, and will be pulled from stores by the end of the year. The DVDs will include the original versions of the film and the digital orgies of self-indulgence that Lucas released in later years.
I fully support using film preservation technology to digitally clean up master prints so that movies can be kept for the future. It's a process that's been happening to paintings for a long time, and ensuring the survival of a work of art is an important process. But to use that same technology to alter the original movie by inserting new aliens or cityscapes, or to stupidly backpedal and turn your anti-hero into a spineless jerk, well, then you're making a whole new movie. The geeky kid in me wants the original films the way I saw them when I was 6 years old, but the movie nerd in me wants the original films because of their importance to the larger scale of cinema history.
A film is a snapshot of what the world or a specific country was like at the time of its release, an amalgam of what we could achieve at a certain point in time with regards to effects and writing and production and storytelling. The reason Citizen Kane is so revered is that it went technically beyond what anyone else thought you could do in the early 1940s. Similarly, Lucas' original space trilogy ushered in a new Dark Age of summer blockbusters that used A-level budgets for B-level stories, fusing the sublime and the ridiculous so permanently that, 30 years later, we're still feeling its effects. The original films aren't just valuable for their nostalgia, but as a picture of what one 33-year-old filmmaker did to change the face of American film.
And besides, I think it's high time Lucas did something to atone for Jar-Jar and Hayden Christensen and the stunning disappointments of the prequel trilogy. Releasing the original films is a good way to start.
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