2 days ago
As a child I thought Star Wars was the greatest film ever made. Now it looks terrible
Growing up in the 1980s, I must have watched the first instalment of Star Wars more times than I can count. The release of the digitally remastered VHS in 1994 must have brought the viewing tally into triple figures.
Yet at the British Film Institute's (BFI) Thursday night screening of a 35mm Star Wars release print – shorn of every last upgrade, buff and twiddly addition to have been inflicted on it over the last half-century – I felt like I was watching a completely different film.
'Fresh pair of eyes' would be the obvious phrase to reach for, except there was nothing fresh about the joyously craggy, grubby, stolidly carpentered spectacle which unspooled for two hours on the BFI's screen one. The frictionless, corporate sheen of Star Wars as we've come to know it was missing: every scene had the visceral sense of watching actual people photographed doing actual things with sets and props that had been physically sawn and glued into place.
The slapstick between C-3PO and R2D2 looked clunkier, and therefore funnier; the Death Star panels were less like supercomputers than wooden boards with lights stuck on, and so better attuned to the frequency of make-believe. It felt less like watching a blockbuster in the modern sense than the greatest game of dressing up in the desert anyone ever played.
The screening in London was, extraordinarily, the first time that George Lucas's space fantasy opus had been (legally) screened in a cinema in its original state anywhere in the world in 47 years. As one of the 900 attendees enthused in the foyer beforehand: 'We are at, quite literally, a once-in-a-lifetime event.'
Others pointed out the oddness of this nationwide clamour (audience members had travelled from all across the UK to be there) to see a film which is technically available to anyone with a DVD player and/or a Disney+ subscription. 'It's insane that one of the most popular films ever made has been effectively hidden from its fans in its original form since release,' said a bearded man in his 40s in a Death Star t-shirt.
Tickets were disbursed to the lucky few via a series of online ballots, all of which filled up in seconds, while an eventually 100-strong returns queue began to form at 7.30am, before the venue had even opened its doors.
The mood inside was festive in a BFI way: no cosplayers, merchandise or lightsaber duels, but plenty of members digging through the classic Star Wars material in the Reuben Library which had been lovingly arranged on desks by curators. (These included some contemporary 1980 reviews of The Empire Strikes Back, in which a number of critics surmised the franchise had already run out of steam after part two.)
An authentic shooting script used on set in Tunisia by continuity supervisor Ann Skinner was on display, and delicately leafed through with gloved hands. (Skinner, now 88 years old, was herself present for the screening.) As for the print itself, its survival was described by BFI chief executive Ben Roberts as a 'uniquely British miracle': as a dye-transfer Technicolour edition struck in the UK, its colours were as vivid and details as sharp as the day it first screened.
Revival screenings of Star Wars using the coarser, more faded Kodak Eastman prints did still take place until the early 1990s. But even these didn't show the film in its original form. By the time of its first theatrical re-release in 1980, Star Wars had been retitled 'Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope' to fit with Lucas's plans for a nine-part saga, while some of the dialogue had been switched out for new takes.
The audio was remastered and altered again for the various home entertainment releases in the 1980s and 90s, and then came the Special Edition – an egomaniacal rebuild which added new scenes, changed others, and swapped out many of the models, puppets and hand-painted backdrops for the finest digital effects the mid-1990s could supply. (In long-arc-of-history terms, this is a bit like going all-in on the finest clubs made by Gronk the caveman.) And again, this new version of the film and its two immediate sequels were obsessively meddled with by Lucas over the following two decades, until the 4K remasters appeared on Disney+ in 2019.
During all of this tinkering, Lucas has steadily maintained that his ever-shifting updates are the 'real Star Wars', and the originals just a shoddy work-in-progress which he has no interest in making publicly available ever again. But at the BFI's two back-to-back screenings, his decades-long injunction was momentarily and gloriously undone.
Star Wars 1977 opening scene, 16mm
Star Wars 1977 opening scene, 4K
BFI audiences are usually impeccably behaved, but rumbles of pleasure kept rolling through the crowd at the sight of long-unseen visual effects like the anti-gravity field beneath Luke Skywalker's landspeeder (created with mirrors and a smudge of vaseline on the camera lens). There were also ripples of pleasure at the appearances of the many innocuous lines ('Hello there!', 'Only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise,' and so on) that have long since calcified into memes.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, when Harrison Ford's swashbuckling smuggler Han Solo shot first in the Cantina stand-off with the bounty hunter Greedo – the subject of one of Lucas's most contentious edits – the crowd broke into a round of applause.
Lucas's famous antipathy towards this earlier version meant that as soon as the BFI announced the release cut of Star Wars as the opening gala of this year's Film on Film Festival, rumours swirled on X and Reddit that it was taking place without its creator's consent. Not so, said Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who appeared briefly on stage beforehand to assure the crowd that what they were about to see was all above board.
Kennedy, who was in town to oversee the casting of the forthcoming Star Wars: Starfighter film starring Ryan Gosling, unfortunately didn't say if the screening signalled a softening in Lucasfilm's stance, or if it would remain a historical one-off. Still, the film's 50th anniversary is fast approaching, and the best way to mark it is obvious. This screening also proved that it would be possible. Talk about a new hope.
