George Lucas has vandalized a classic movie

Rating: Null/10 (27 September 2004)

I remember fondly the original Star Wars movies in the theatre when I was a child. They were an excellent combination of special effects and plot development which made them the great classics that they are.
Then the prequel trilogy came out...
The prequel movies abandoned plot cohesiveness in favor of creating more opportunities to showcase the computer generated effects which are produced by Lucas' firm, Industrial Light and Magic. Foolish plot holes were created and the overall tempo of the movies was compromised to achieve the goal of more and more special effects scenes.
Most people have been able to simply offer a dismissive sigh, accepting that George Lucas really isn't a very talented screenwriter, and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a script when it's being written. At least we still had the original trilogy, which rests in our memories as great cinema.
That all changed with the release of the new DVD version of the original trilogy. Lucas jumped in with his clumsy editing and rewrote whole sections of these movies so that they could be more like the prequel trilogy. "Modern" CGI effects were inserted into the classic movies in a seemingly random manner, breaking the continuity of the originals into a sick parody of the memories that we all have of these classics.
One of the sadder botched edits done to the first Star Wars movie (now called Star Wars IV: A New Hope) appears to have been done out of political correctness. I guess Lucas now believes that a good guy would never shoot first in a gunfight, so in the bar scene where Greedo confronts Han Solo it appears that Lucas had to make some changes. I remember as a kid watching the original movie at the theater in 1977, and cheered as Han Solo covertly drew his gun under the table and shot Greedo without warning. I was surprised to see this scene edited for the DVD release to show Greedo actually firing first, missing badly from about five feet away before being shot by Han Solo.
Special effects added throughout the movie seemed to do little more than break the flow of the movie in the same manner in which they cripple the prequel trilogy. The worst examples of these edits actually occurred in the final movie, Return of the Jedi, so I won't comment about that here.
I wonder whether this isn't some marketing game, where Lucas expects to make a bundle of money off the badly edited DVD, and then in about 3 years will repackage the whole thing again without the modifications to release a version of the first trilogy that we would all run out and buy. However, much like the whole "New Coke" conspiracy theory, I really don't believe that there is any plan involved in this badly edited product. This is just the final product of the inflated ego of George Lucas, a man who believes that his special effects can make anything better.
If that is the case, then he is badly mistaken. His additional special effects have vandalized a cinema classic.