Star Wars: A New Hope (Special Edition)
[Friggen' Awesome!][Pretty Good][Meh...][Just Bad...][Irredeemable Crap]
It's so hard to get a firm grasp of this movie. I always thought Star Wars was cool, but I was never part of the popular majority that held it up as any sort of masterpiece. Hell, if asked to list my favorite movies it probably wouldn't be anywhere within the first that come to mind.
That said, only three kinds of movies earn permanent spots in my collection:
Movies I Love Above All Others,
Movies I Have Strong Nostalgia For, and
Movies I Just Find Myself Rewatching So Often, I Might As Well Keep It.
Stars Wars easily earns a spot if not for nostalgia, then just for how often I find myself revisiting it. It's a very standard hero's-journey style of movie, but it's unique setting and imaginative elements set it apart.
Very easy to spot miniatures and other obvious special effects are easily dwarfed by how well everything else is executed. I'm completely sold on this world, with no small amount of help from strong acting, interesting characters, and great attention to detail.
This is certainly one of the most fascinating movies to learn about how it was made given how documentaries make it out to have been one big colossal crapshoot that few, if any, people had any real confidence in. But as much as I may find myself intrigued by stop-motion, rotoscoping, or what-have-you, this movie never really clicked with me in that special way other movies have. The music is certainly great, the stakes are high, and it could even make me laugh, but...
All things considered, the story never really takes any serious risks. It's strange to say about a movie I've seen so many times, but it all seems predictable save, perhaps, Obi-Wan's death scene, but even that's never really understandably justified until the sequel.
The only lightsaber fight in the whole movie is one of the series' most important showdowns, but simultaneously it's least interesting. The dogfights are easily the highlight of action in the movie (which would eventually change places with lightsaber fights as the series went on), but it's largely spectacle. We don't see a whole lot of creativity in how they unfurl. The good guys shoot the bad guys, the bad guys shoot the good guys, and eventually enough explosions end the fight. That's pretty much it, and as an action-adventure movie, it leans heavily on this these.
The best thing about Star Wars, I think, is simply the world-building. We never really see any fantastic locations other than the Death Star, we even open up on something as dull as a blank desert. But the characters and vehicles look so alien and yet worn into these locations, that I can easily suspend my disbelief long enough to think that, yeah... It's friggen' rough in Mos Eisley, the interior of the Millenium Falcon seems like a legitimate place, and it's a special kind of satisfaction I get knowing that only with my experience from this one movie, I can blast open and find a real hidden garbage chute in the Death Star in Star Wars: Battlefront 2.
It just feels real, and engaging, and sounds fantastic thanks to excellent foley sounds and John Williams.
It's a good movie. I like it.
I watched the original Special Edition purely on a whim this time, and the more I watch the movie, the clearer to me that as much as I like the additions the Special Edition adds, they really pop out at me, even if I'm not looking at them. Jurassic Park did a phenomenal job with it's CGI, so much so that it's mostly the practical effects that stand out the most in that movie, however Star Wars was not made with CGI in mind, and in these relatively early days, it really only serves to stand out and distract me from a movie that was already accomplishing a believable alien world.
I don't know if the newest Special Editions have cleaned up that old CGI since, and if they did, I would welcome some of it back (the whole Han Shoots First thing is just funny if you're aware of the change, which I wasn't for most of my life), but the CG I saw today mostly detracted from my viewing experience, which is why I currently own the only officially released theatrical version of Star Wars that ever made it on DVD.
That said, I never felt very strongly either way until the changes I heard about being made to the BLU-RAY Special Editions. HOLY HELL WHY.
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