Star Wars, redux (Part 2)

When I was a kid seeing Star Wars for the first time, I didn't know about the whole 'hero archetype' thing. I'd never heard of Joseph Campbell or Akira Kurosawa, and while I'd seen The Bridges at Toko-Ri, I didn't make the connection between that and George Lucas's eponymous movie until I was much older.

Much of the additional material in Lucas's retrofitted Episode IV is window dressing. As I've said before, I don't have a problem with this - Lucas was given the opportunity to do what a lot of directors would like to do, and some actually get to eventually, to go back to a personally important project and to realise more fully the vision they had of how the movie should look, how it should be experienced. A lot of people say it's hubris, the actions of a multi-millionaire micro-manager (I really didn't mean that to come out so alliterative - sorry). I say, "Kudos to you, oh bearded one". Maybe we could have done without the cool "zapping into Mos Eisley on a floating Honda" thing. Maybe we got along alright for the better part of two decades without seeing Jabba until the third/sixth movie. Really, the only people who are going to get wound up about this sort of thing are the ones who are so anally retentive about the original version, they should by all rights have been Trekkers. Go back into your living room and watch your VHS tape of the 1977 release, little man, and take your Boba Fett doll with you.

What makes the film a more rewarding experience for me is the Death Star battle at the end. Or more accurately, the preparation for battle. There's maybe an extra forty seconds of footage there (no, I haven't timed it), but it helps to build a sense of despiration, urgency and resolve leading into the battle scene. You get to see these young guys preparing to fight and to probably die in what should statistically be a futile gesture, like the ronin sharpening their blades and preparing rudimetary fortifications in The Seven Samurai, or William Holden's gunfighters in preparing to go get Angel in The Wild Bunch. You see Porkins and Wedge and the others checking their avionics like real pilots do before a flight. And you get to see Luke and Biggs briefly catching up before the squadron flies out to meet their fate.

Much of the footage in the Special Edition was shot during filming, and for one reason or another it wasn't included in the original theatrical release (like the docking bay scene wiah Han Solo and a decidedly humanoid Jabba). What would have made the experience even more complete for me would have been to include a scene that has never made it into any of the cuts (though I think it appears in the novel - and I know it made the shooting script because I've seen the stills). Originally Luke was supposed to have been visited by Biggs Darklighter, freshly back from the Academy, with news that he was off to join the Rebellion. He invites Luke to come with him, but Luke demures, citing the closeness of the harvest, and how it's not really his fight anyway. Biggs leaves. All up, maybe another eighty seconds of film, two minutes tops. Why was it left out? I guess there were reasons. The pity of it is that it would have given more context to both Luke's emotional paralysis when Biggs fighter is destroyed, and his hysterical "You know about the rebellion against the Empire" yelp at a startled C3PO, which really seems to come out of nowhere. But you can't have everything you own way, can you, VHS boy?