Star Wars special edition DVD

[Deja Q]

The scene where Greedo 'shoots first' looks tacky. Han doesn't move swiftly to the side, his image jars to the left as if somebody had cut and pasted it there. It does not work and why is Lucas so insistent on making Solo out as a good guy. He's a smuggler and thief. He's the type TO shoot first for reasons of self-preservation.

When did Lucas have a sabbatical at the Brady household anyway to decide the scene had to be changed?!

(the Han over Jabba scene looks like he's climbing stairs as if he needs to dumb a constipated load too, never mind Jabba coming across as friendly with Han regarding "Why did you fry poor Greedo" and all... it ruins the belief Jabba is a nasty mofo as said and seen in later movies. And Jabba was seen as a human in Ep IV as well - it should have stayed deleted.)

[Orrex]

1. Greedo-shoots-first is the worst thing that Lucas has ever done re: Star Wars

:rant:

Worse than Jar Jar Binks and worse than casting Jake Lloyd as Anakin.

In a single ill-considered revision, Lucas stripped the trilogy of one of its most powerful themes: personal redemption. In the original version, Solo evolves from a self-interested, uncompromising loner into a fighter in a worthy cause. The transformation takes two whole films (it's complete when, on the platform of the carbonite freezer, he stoically accepts his fate because it will (he believes) save his friends), and then we have a full film to witness his behavior post-transformation.

But in the rehacked reissue, Lucas wipes out anything like character development and instead makes Solo a garden variety guy-with-blaster. He starts as a wisecracking nice-guy acting in his own defense and ends up as a wise-cracking nice-guy acting in his friends' defense. Boring!

Han's shoot-first elimination of Greedo is positively iconic in its power and significance. Lucas' revision (akin to Spielberg's retroactive removal of guns from ET: The Extra-Terrestrial) has all the hallmarks of a director gone soft with age.

Additionally, the scene with Jabba could have been wonderfully effective, but again Lucas botched it. Since Jabba's speaking Huttese, there's no reason at all to keep the same lines as written for the original (human) Jabba; any half-assed writer could have come up with suitable dialogue to match Solo's speech. Worse, Jabba's speech is about 90% identical to Greedo's, which is just plain stupid.

Lucas is a hack who got lucky 30, 27, and 24 years ago, largely because he stumbled onto a good cast of actors.