‘Star Wars’ trio gets long-awaited DVD release

By: Bruce Newman
Posted In: Entertainment

In his own mind, George Lucas identified so closely with the rebellious young hero of the space adventure he was writing in the mid-1970s that he named the character Luke, after himself.

As he made the rounds at the studios to pitch a sci-fi fantasy he was calling “The Star Wars,” with each new telling, his movie sounded more and more like a parable of his own struggle to resist the soul-crushing heel of Hollywood. As leader of the freedom-loving Rebel Alliance in Marin County, Calif., Lucas took potshots at the evil Galactic Empire to the south.

But that was a long time ago, in a world far, far away from the Hollywood landscape of today. Lucas changed everything with “Star Wars.” The movie not only became the second-highest grossing picture of all time (now behind only “Titanic”), it pushed the corporate grandees who ran the studios toward ever-bigger “event” movies. Which meant the independent filmmakers who had thrived during the `70s were suddenly viewed as luxuries Hollywood could no longer afford.

Lucas got very rich and formed a succession of filmmaking companies, such as Lucasfilm Ltd. and Industrial Light & Magic, which made him even richer and more powerful. Lucas grew so powerful he was able to brush off the clamor for the release of his original space thrillogy _ “Star Wars,” “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” _ on DVD. Until now.

“I have become the very thing I was trying to avoid,” Lucas says, noting his own corporate fat-cat status in an interview included in the “Star Wars Trilogy,” which gets its long-awaited release Tuesday.

Thanks to Lucas’ dark side, the DVDs can be purchased only as a boxed set, the first of several bummers imposed on this otherwise happy occasion to bump up the bottom line. But the movies look better than they ever did before, transferred from the original negatives, then given a digital scrubbing that removed something like 100 scratches and dust specks from each frame _ about 10 million improvements in all.

The images are brighter and the colors more vibrant than they were on film, and the dazzling sound design creates a sense of space, not only outer but inner. Collectively, these films represent one of the most awe-inspiring technical achievements in the short history of the DVD format. Unlike similar cleanings that have left Renaissance masterpieces looking denatured, this one embraces the look that Lucas calls “the used future,” in which the objective is not spotless perfection but spot-on realism. The film is clean; Han Solo’s spaceship, the Millennium Falcon, remains gloriously grubby.

The question that some of Lucas’ improvements will raise for ardent fans of the series is whether he needed to fix what wasn’t broken. Each film has undergone subtle, but significant, revisions, beginning with the opening frames of what was once _ and for some of us will remain forevermore _ “Star Wars,” and is now clunkily titled “Star Wars: Episode IV _ A New Hope.”

More troubling to purists are the scenes Lucas has digitally added or enhanced, using technology that was unavailable to him in 1976, when the first picture was being shot. Many of the changes were made before the films were re-released to theaters in 1997 as a “special edition,” although Lucas has continued tinkering with some scenes, sometimes even making changes to the changes.

An example of Lucas’ perfectionism run amok takes place in the first film’s memorable Wookie bar scene. In 1977, Han Solo pulled a gun and dispatched a bounty hunter named Greedo who was chasing him for the price on his head. Solo’s transformation from shady privateer to hero is a crucial part of the story, after all.

But by 1997, Lucas felt Solo was such a beloved cultural icon that he could no longer allow him to shoot first, and changed the scene so that Greedo appeared to draw first. The change was so illogical that Lucas has re-edited the shootout so that it now appears Han and Greedo draw their guns at almost exactly the same moment.

Even those kinds of changes, no matter how wrongheaded, wouldn’t be as troubling if Lucas had put the original version of each film on the discs. But he didn’t. He also refuses to discuss the controversies he created by fiddling with the films in his slightly droning reminiscences on the commentary tracks. It is Carrie Fisher’s wisecracking asides about being told she could play Princess Leia if she promised to lose 10 pounds at a fat farm, and about preparing herself to don the bikini she had to wear in “Jedi” that recaptures some of the films’ original magic.

It’s good to have that magic within easy reach again.

c 2004, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

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