Now, this isn't a decision that I've come to lightly. After all, if there's one thing any right minded sentient life form can agree on it's that remakes almost universally suck balls. And everyone likes Star Wars, right?
Well, nearly everyone. Hello George. Yes, we are talking about you. Again.
To be fair, it's not necessarily that George hates Star Wars. He certainly seems to hate Star Wars fans, or at least he enjoys trolling the shit out of them. You may be aware of the internet shitstorm in the face of the latest additions to whatever the most recent version being released is. I'm not going to go into all the details here, but as I understand the films now go something like this:
It's one thing to revisit a film and make a few tweaks. I't another thing entirely to KEEP DOING IT. Every few years another version comes along, and every time things have got a little bit worse. It's like a game of chicken between the audience and the realisation that the entire original trilogy was more of a fluke than a sign of any real film making talent on Georges part. As if the prequel trilogy weren't evidence enough.
The most fitting analogy is of watching an old friend slowly self destruct. They're clearly ruining themselves with drugs or alcohol or CGI and we know that they're not going to get any better. We know that we simply can't help them anymore, and that we should stop lending them money and attention and maybe find a new franchise to hang out with. But we can't quite let them go. Because they once meant something to us. Because of the good times. This is exactly the problem with the ongoing special editions. We can't, as Star Wars fans, distance ourselves from them like we should.
And when I say ongoing, I mean it. You know as well as I do that there WILL be another one. And another. As long as the possibility of squeezing a few more pence out of the broken, hollow shell that is all that remains of this franchise exists, they will keep coming.
And so we come to the crux of the argument. If George is so dissatisfied with his films, why does he simply not remake them completely? If it's his desire to strip out all that marvellous, groundbreaking effects work and replace it with dull lifeless CGI then why not start from the ground up? Strip it all back to greenscreen and start again. Then he could throw in some dull lifeless actors as well, since apparently that's what enjoys so much.
Such an event would, of course, be undoubtedly awful. I shudder to think how bad it could be. But, you see, that's the beauty of it. It wouldn't be REAL Star Wars. It would be some new version that we didn't have any investment in. We would be distanced from it, and it could go off and suck as badly as it wanted whilst we enjoy our "proper" old Star Wars.
Or at least we could if they'd ever release a decent non fucked with copy.
However, even this, for me, doesn't go far enough. Now, I've been a Star Wars fan for a number of years. From before the dark times. Before the prequels. But even then the franchise was beginning to creak and buckle under the weight of it's own lore. I read all the novels, and even managed to ignore the fact that they told exactly the same story for quite a long time (What's that you say, there's a rogue/crazy/evil Jedi or other force user, and their somehow involved with a planet destroying super weapon? AGAIN?!?!). But with every single extra that had at least 1 nanosecond of screen time having saved and/or threatened the entire galaxy at least once it start to get a bit much. And don't even get me started on bloody Boba Fett.
part of the problem of course was that the authors were so constrained. Everybody wanted more Star Wars, but there was never really the opportunity to really move anything forward. Well, to be fair there was, it's just no one was allowed. So we entered into this dreadful 23 year long stalemate where nothing really changed and you eventually came to realize that, as the only stable form of government in all that time the Empire had in fact been right all along. With the writers denied any opportunity to explore the past they never had a firm foundation to build towards a new future. It wasn't until the New Jedi Order series that anyone really tried to push the series in any sort of direction at all, and that didn't exactly go according to plan.
So, here's what I'd like to see. Rather than every 5 years George churns out another special addition with a little more soul scraped out, let's remake Star Wars. Every 5 years. Get a different director every time, and then just let them do whatever the hell they like. Just think about that for a second. Pick your favourite director and think what it would be like to see their version of Star Wars. Unconstrained by anything that had gone before. Think what Takashi Miike could do. Or Quentin Tarantino. Zak Snyders visual polish. Have Tim Burton goth it up (Inevitably it would have Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Leia and Johnny Depp as everyone else). Have Ridley Scott do a proper 3D treatment. Hell, get Uwe Boll to do a version, it couldn't be much worse than the special editions.Anything could happen. Some may be bizarre, or awful, or great, or anything in between. But none of them would take anything away from the original.
Anything has got to be an improvement on the current state of affairs.
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