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Writer: Why Watching the Original Star Wars Again Was a Bad Idea (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: CNET's Michael Franco recently sat down and watched Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope again in preparation for the release of The Force Awakens later this week. His advice to anyone who's thinking of doing the same is to save your childhood memories and skip watching it again. Unlike wine, Franco doesn't think the movie gets better with age. He writes: " Since that first viewing, Luke, Vader and company have loomed large in my imagination, and clearly in the imaginations of many other adults introduced to the sci-fi franchise as kids. So have the rest of the characters, as well as the sounds of a lightsaber, a Wookiee and a TIE fighter and the idea that someday I would learn to control people through the power of suggestion and a wave of my hand. But it now seems that maybe all that got a little gilded in my memory."
In TFA he says he fired up his Apple TV and rented the movie. This is not the original Star Wars. This is the Remastered Fifty Times George Lucas is a dick edition that is probably terrible. Go watch the Despecialized Editions and you might appreciate it more.
If you take the prequels as canon then Obiwan is a really horrible manipulative liar in Ep 4. "Skywalker... now thats a name I haven't heard in a long time" - you mean since you chopped up his father and threw him into a volcano? "Vader betrayed and murdered your father" - we've always known that was a lie, but the fact that he was nearly Luke's father's killer and was lying about this raises it to a whole new level. The "pretending to never have seen the droids before" stuff, the "reluctant warrior" schtick when we know how he actually felt... there's no other way to interpret Ep 4 in conjunction with the prequels other than that he was feigning ignorance in an attempt to manipulate Luke into joining the rebellion in hopes of amending his earlier mistakes. And given that he'd lie (repeatedly) in order to do this... it makes you wonder whether it even was the empire who killed Owen and Beru, rather than Obiwan hiring someone to do it (not like there's any shortage of thugs for hire on Tattooine that he could have paid). I mean, seriously, "Only imperial storm troopers are so precise"? What sort of transparently false "evidence" was that?
And Luke... what kind of moron was he? He's handed a deadly weapon he's never seen before and immediately points it at his head, then opens it and starts swinging it around... then basically converts religions within minutes of meeting Obiwan. Not just converts, but becomes a zealot, scolding Han about not believing in the force literally like half an hour after he first hears of the concept. His only demonstration of "the force" at that point was having seen Obiwan get an unknown person in a white suit to agree with him, when there's tons of alternative possible explanations for that. Quite simply, if Luke were alive on Earth today, he'd be recruited into a cult in no time flat. Could be quite easy pickings for a group like Daesh as well.
Nothing says 'welcome to the neighborhood' like a gunny sack full of dead squirrels.
They are in experience in themselves. Watching them was much better than watching any of the remade versions Lucas has put out. The movie has a very genuine and unpretentious feel yet still has all the excitement you remember from when you were younger.
"Skywalker... now thats a name I haven't heard in a long time"
He actually said that about the name Obi-Wan Kenobi, not Skywalker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...