great

Rating: 9/10 (9 December 2015)

A 1988 congressional hearing heard that colorizing old black-and-white films would constitute "destruction of our film heritage". The speaker's statement continued: "In the future it will become easier for old negatives to become lost and be 'replaced' by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten."
It's hard to believe now, but that speaker was George Lucas. He'd re-release his most beloved trilogy of work, complete with a catalog of updates and changes, just nine years later. And in the 13 that have followed, he's gone out of his way to wipe away all evidence that any other versions ever existed.
This week, Lucas announced that the Star Wars saga would be coming to Blu-ray before the end of 2011. The piece of news missing from early announcements, unearthed during an interview he gave to the New York Times, was that the original trilogy would be presented in the special edition form that appeared on the 2004 DVD release, rather than the classic versions released between 1977 and 1983. Sign up to our Film Today email Read more
The 2004 special edition features all of 1997's awkward edits – Greedo shooting first, Han stepping on Jabba's tail – and adds even more egregious acts of self-mutilation. Most notably, Return of the Jedi replaces Sebastian Shaw as the spirit Anakin Skywalker with wooden imp Hayden Christensen, star of the prequels.
"In essence, films never get finished, they get abandoned," Lucas told American Cinematographer magazine in 1997. "The other versions will disappear. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the Special Edition. I think it's the director's prerogative  to go back and reinvent a movie."
The DVD edition, at least, featured bonus discs holding weak transfers of the original versions, even if they felt like poorly treated outcasts, added just to prolong their humiliation at their creator's increasingly malevolent hands. The Blu-rays won't even feature those.
Lucas says that's because the process of remastering them for HD is prohibitively expensive. During his interview with the New York Times this week, he claimed that putting them on the Blu-ray would be "kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good. When we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version."
Alexandre Philippe directed documentary feature The People vs George Lucas, which premiered at this year's Edinburgh film festival. He believes Lucas has no intention of letting the films' original versions exist. "We've heard all the excuses: they don't represent George's 'original vision'; the negatives of the movies were permanently altered for the creation of the Special Editions; they can't or won't put in the time and resources needed to properly restore the films. Now, we're told that releasing the originals is an oxymoron. As the reasons for not releasing the originals pile up, they simply don't add up to anything coherent any more."
It's hard to believe it has never occurred to Lucas that his position on the colorization of films is at stark odds with his approach to Star Wars. But the most oft-repeated line from the Lucas camp is that his original vision for the trilogy simply wasn't achievable when the films were first made in the 70s and 80s. That only makes one wonder if Lucas's "original vision" might not have created the cultural classics that resulted from the constraints of the time.
Lucas's posturing about cultural legacy when it comes to his beloved black-and-white classics should surely apply here. That legacy was defined the moment the first Star Wars film opened in 1977. By his own standard that means the films now belong to audiences, in their original, unaltered form.
Philippe says it's up to the fans to preserve that legacy now, just as they maintained a healthy trade in bootlegs of the Star Wars Holiday Special when Lucas tried to bury that. "I'm counting on the technologically savvy fans to keep them alive, restore them, and make them available."
One truth to come from Philippe's documentary is that, for all their complaints, Star Wars fans will never stop loving the saga, even if "the saga" is now more a description of Lucas's poor decision-making since 1997. They'll be first in the queue for these Blu-rays, even if that means they have to make their peace with Greedo shooting first.