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Star Wars Trilogy (Widescreen Edition) Customer Reviews (232 - 234 of 272 Reviews)

Three Stars for the First Film
If you weren't anywhere near the summer of 1977 it would be hard to really explain the excitement that the first STAR WARS film caused. I was 14, perhaps the best age to see it, and I completely fell in love with it. Of course, so did everyone else.
(By December, I was also completely sick of it and ready for the next great sci-fi film released that Christmas: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND).

I still think the first is the best, no matter how much tinkering George Lucas does with the special effects.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was good until it stopped. It did not end. It stopped. I remember being infuriated walking out of the movie in 1980. My sci-fi nerd buddies were ecstactic and I was asking, "How long do we have to wait now to find out what happens?"
Three years later came RETURN OF THE JEDI and I hated it. Harrison Ford's Han Solo, the most interesting character, took a backseat to adorable little furballs. I'll always remember watching JEDI in a theatre filled with little kids making the laser sounds and then walking out to see the toy store across the mall with piles of Ewoks and crap from the movie. A 2-and-a-half hour toy commercial that ends with the signature "yearbook photo" shot of everyone standing together, all smiles (even the bad guys return as happy ghosts to wave from the sidelines).
So I was pretty disillusioned with the FIRST three films by the early 1980's.

(I saw THE PHANTOM MENACE in theatres. Snooze-fest. Caught part of ATTACK OF THE CLONES on HBO. Like the online newspaper parody, The Onion, said, it was "like C-SPAN from another planet." But I'll probably see the last one when it comes out, out of loyalty for the first film that entertained me in a lifetime far, far away....)

"Very Special" Editions Only Serve To Portend Jar Jar Binks
A friend of mine clued me into his pet term for the Star wars rerelease films, now reissued on video - the "very special" editions, as in the "very special" episodes of sitcoms or "very special" like Jason Biggs' trumpeteer is perceived to be in "American Pie 2". In short, the original Star Wars films were reduced to treacle when, in their rerelease form, they could have garnered a new generation of fans.

Let me qualify something here. You are not a bigger Star Wars fan than I am, nor do I "not get it". I was born in 1975. My earliest Christmas pictures have me standing next to a Death Star toy with assorted characters and playsets strewn about. I got Boba Fett, Yoda, and the Emperor in plain, small cardboard boxes via mail order. I saw Star Wars in rerelease when I was four, saw Empire at the Ziegfield in NY when I was five, and was first in line for both ROTJ and TPM on their opening days. In-between all that, add in the countless video games, comic collecting, book reading, and whatnot, it all adds up to one thing - I have a deep affection for the Star Wars franchise, but that doesn't mean a slavish devotion to George Lucas' decision-making.

People say Lucas has a right to do whatever he wants with his original trilogy films. This is incorrect. Technically, as he owns them, he can do whatever he wishes. However, especially fourteen years after the fact (1983-1997), the films have a cultural resonance and are beloved for what is in them. Fundamentally changing them would be like DaVinci adjusting the smile on Mona Lisa's face or Shakespere deciding that Ophelia and Hamlet ride off into the sunset together. There is a cultural point, that all artists usually have the good sense to recognize, when their art takes on a life of its own and is no longer simply theirs.

George Lucas doesn't seem to get this. So much of what he does in the Special Editions is strong - the tidying up of effects, the cleaning up of the negative and the sound, and even the addition of some scenes constitute a director's right to go back and try to make his film better. What Lucas does, though, is go beyond this. Whether by making Greedo shoot first, Luke scream after tossing himself into the void, adding Jedi Rocks while removing the original song, or even changing the end music and sequence for ROTJ, Lucas has done more than tweak the mechanics and flow of his film. He has, instead, fundamentally altered our perception of events and of how we process and experence the films. In short, he has taken something familiar and made it into something cold and alien. There is no excuse for this.

For a generation of inspired 20 and 30-somethings, along with their parents, Star Wars represented something familiar, something good, and something we wanted to be associated with. The '97 rerelease, represented here in this collection instead left us feeling unwelcome, as if Lucasfilm decided we had lived out our usefulness and was moving onto a new audience, one that had to have Vader's return to his ship at the end of ESB explained and shown step by step. Very special, indeed.

While there are aspects of the special editions that are good, the negatives far outweigh the positives and it pains me to say that this Star Wars collection is not worth having over the original versions. You would be better off finding those or getting copies of them than you would owning and watching the special editions.

Han was supposed to shoot first; he's a different char now.
Han shooting only after Greedo shoots is just one of the worst offenses of a movie kid-napping ever. Changing the character of Han from a tough, take care of #1, scoundrel. But now, he's more like a flower child that only shot at Greedo [the bounty hunter that can't hit something from a half meter away?] because Greedo shot first.

Dumb.

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