this is not the film...

Rating: 8/10 (21 March 2001)

Dear George,
I remember seeing Star Wars on its first release and being completely immersed in the story, the characters, the effects - to a thirteen year old it was wonderful, I saw it a couple of times after and the magic never diminished.
BUT THEN at the weekend I sat down and saw this "new" film with added effects that more often than not stuck out like a sore thumb. Additions that somehow said "remember that film you loved so much...well actually it wasn't good enough". Well Mr Lucas it WAS good enough, it didn't need some hokey special effects to make it better - for me it had the opposite effect.

In particular the scene with Han and Jabba looked dreadful - it repeated (almost verbatim) a previous scene, made Jabba seem insignificant and unthreatening and made poor Harrison Ford look like a second-rate actor who didn't know where to look.
Sure I still enjoyed the film - but the additions (and of course the inevitable subtractions) meant that there was no longer any magic here for me.
Just because you can do this it doesn't mean you should. You had the opportunity to show off all your special effects muscle in The Phantom Menace, why did you feel the need to meddle with your "back-catalogue" to try and produce a homogenous mass of work rather than a timeline through recent film history. Your attempts failed and now you have a half-decent film where there was once a great one.
Thanks also for giving a treasured childhood memory a thorough kicking.
-Andy (6/10)