REVIEW: Star Wars Episode IV: REVISITED (2008)

Summary: Imagine, if you will, a classic film. Imagine that over the years, the creator of the film had released and re-released different versions of the film, fixing and adding some things while breaking and destroying others. Of course, I’m talking about Star Wars. Lucas has gone out of his way to change his “final vision” of the movie and the 2004 DVDs were the most recent set. They were great quality and tried to fix some of the mistakes he had created in the 1997 Special Editions, but they managed to get the color balance all messed up, making Vader’s lightsaber pink and so forth.

In 2006, fan editor Adywan decided to take all of the suggestions from the OriginalTrilogy.com message boards and create the ultimate edit of Episode IV. Using a combination of the 2004 SE DVDs, the 2006 original DVDs, music soundtracks, mono mixes, and his own special effects, Adywan fixes what may or may not have been broken.

Thoughts: Every single thing that I’ve ever had a problem with about Episode IV SE is gone. Jabba looks fake? Take him out! Han shoots first? Forget about it! Rope pulling that one droid in front of Luke’s hut? Deleted!

Repeated shot are mostly gone (if you look behind R2 during close ups, most of them still had the Death Star control room in the background instead of the Millennium Falcon interior). Colors are fixed, all laser and lightsaber effects have been redone, people don’t fall over without getting shot, ships move more dynamically… The list goes on and on.

Some of my favorite highlights are:

• Most of the cantina aliens now have some movement to their Halloween-mask faces. Blinking, grimacing, it brings them to life.
• Vader and Obi-wan’s duel has been sped up and “Battle of the Heroes” from Episode III plays in the background.
• There are tons more ships firing tons more lasers in every battle. It makes everything much more exciting.
• The Death Star is more of a threat. It is firing as it explodes now.
• Chewie gets a medal from Leia.

If Lucas was going to pretend like the original editions didn’t happen, and went back to fix things in the DVDs, its a wonder why he didn’t go this far. Adywan has done the incredible, making the only version of Episode IV I will ever watch.

Overall: Perfection, perfected.
5/5