Flesh Skywalker wrote:From a certain point of view, any story you tell evolves. Don't tell me you have a story that you tell exactly the same way every time and it happened just as you say it does in the story. You don't and it didn't. My best friend tells a story about me in college that gets better and more ridiculous every time he tells it. I love it when he has to tell it to someone who hasn't heard it before and I get to hear it again. It's the same for me with these movies. The fact that nearly all other directors don't do this amplifies you attention to the changes made. They are George's stories and he can change anything he wants until he dies. That's the earliest you guys can expect a chance at getting the original theatrical release of the movies on whatever format available then.
Well, the only problem is that this isn't oral storytelling that varies with each performance- it's cinema, what ranks next to literature as the most "set-in-stone" method of storytelling. It's not so much a matter of the story evolving as it is going back and changing what was already released. Now, to a certain extent I'm fine with this- many Director's Cuts, Extended Editions, and the like actually improve upon the original release, and in the case of something like
Blade Runner or
Superman II, are closer to the director's original vision of the film (In terms of editing, mind you), which wasn't originally achieved, usually due to studio intervention.
In the case of Star Wars, it's a matter of George claiming that the original versions of the films were only about at 30% of his "original vision"- a figure that comes off as so incredibly insulting to the many people who worked countless hours getting those visual effects just perfect and all the people who slaved to make Star Wars the classic it is today. So all that George really does is touch up on effects that really didn't need to be touched up on, and add in a lot of pointless filler and eye candy (Often to the point of distraction- I'm looking at you, Mos Eisley and Jabba's Palace...).
The fundamental problem behind Lucas as a director is that he views film-making as something between the director and the film, with no one else coming in between the director's vision. In reality, though, editors, writers, actors, and so many other people involved with a film can help add to or deepen the director's initial vision. A great line is meaningless unless it's delivered with a powerful performance. A thrilling chase scene can't happen without the proper editing, visual and audio effects, and a good score to boot. It takes a director to put all those things together, but he is not the sole contributor to the scene. I think after Lucas took the mantle of writing, producing, directing, and partially re-editing
Star Wars, it warped his view a little of how a film should be made, and I think made him feel he was the only visionary behind it. It certainly explains his love of CGI (Which effectively negates all other contributors except sound editors and actors), and how he feels he has the right to go back and needlessly change what so many people toiled to make so many years ago.
Sometimes a director could be unhappy with how he handled the film, and might wish for a re-edit or something similar to better convey how he thought the film should've been directed. That is fine, and I can perfectly understand that. However, that's not what Lucas is doing. He's changing it for the sake of doing everything he wants to with CGI, and doesn't really take into account whether it positively or negatively impacts the film. And that's lazy film-making, first and foremost.
