I find 'A New Hope' hard to watch nowadays

Discussion in 'Star Wars' started by ED-209, Oct 24, 2019.

  1. Campe

    Campe Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 27, 2001
    Location:
    Texas
    I despise that video.
     
    Kor and BillJ like this.
  2. fireproof78

    fireproof78 Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 11, 2014
    Location:
    Journeying onwards
    Just out of pure curiosity (perhaps morbidly so) could you explain why? Type it up 5 pages, sources cited, please ;)
     
    Campe likes this.
  3. Campe

    Campe Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 27, 2001
    Location:
    Texas
    I just finished my Masters two weeks ago, man! Fuck cited sources! :p
     
    fireproof78 and HugeLobes like this.
  4. HugeLobes

    HugeLobes Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Mar 28, 2018
    Five years on from my MA and I still think that whenever anyone gets all 'cite your sources'.
     
    Campe likes this.
  5. fireproof78

    fireproof78 Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 11, 2014
    Location:
    Journeying onwards
    Well, it was worth it for the reaction ;)
     
    Campe likes this.
  6. Vger23

    Vger23 Vice Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 19, 2014
    Location:
    Enterprise bowling alley
    This thread went about as well as I expected.
     
  7. cooleddie74

    cooleddie74 Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 25, 2001
    Location:
    The Warped Sector of the Demented Quadrant
    Maclunkey!!
     
    Turtletrekker likes this.
  8. Tallguy

    Tallguy Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    May 2, 2005
    Location:
    Beyond the Farthest Star
    I'll give you mine (shorter with no sources). It completely disregards the cinematography of Star Wars. I'm all for them making Prowse and Guinness more "spry" but that camera work is atrocious.
     
    Kor and fireproof78 like this.
  9. fireproof78

    fireproof78 Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 11, 2014
    Location:
    Journeying onwards
    I appreciate it. I was giving Campe a tough time because he just completed grad school. I sympathize since I only completed grad school 2 years ago.
     
  10. HugeLobes

    HugeLobes Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Mar 28, 2018
    "It completely disregards the cinematography of Star Wars. I'm all for them making Prowse and Guinness more "spry" but that camera work is atrocious."

    Thomas, Bill "Tallguy". 'I find 'A New Hope' hard to watch nowadays'. TrekBBS. 288 (2020).
     
    David cgc, Kor, Campe and 2 others like this.
  11. J.T.B.

    J.T.B. Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Jun 14, 2005
    Double quotation marks within double quotation marks? What style manual is this?
     
  12. HugeLobes

    HugeLobes Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Mar 28, 2018
    I think it's IDGAF.
     
    Campe and J.T.B. like this.
  13. N-121973

    N-121973 Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Jan 9, 2005
    Location:
    Great Britain
    I've re-watched A New Hope twice in the last couple of weeks. The first time was on the eve of seeing Rise of Skywalker for the first time and the second was the beginning of this week when I watched it as a 'double-feature' either side of lunch with 2001 A Space Odyssey (which I watched first). I thought it was much faster paced than I remembered, though the cardboard cut-out X & Y-Wings in the rebel base stood out like sore thumbs on high-def. Couldn't they have been replaced by CGI? One thing I did notice, when R2 & 3PO go into hiding and the stormtroopers retake the hanger bay control room, you can see one of the stormtroopers bash their helmeted head as they go through the door.
     
  14. JD

    JD Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jul 22, 2004
    Location:
    Arizona, USA
    Thanks to Disney+ I was able to watch the deleted scene from the OT movies yesterday. I wish they had left in the stuff with Luke at Tosche Station, I thought it had some nice character stuff for him.
    The only other one that I really wish had been left in was the scene with Vader contacting Luke as he was finish up his green lightsaber.
     
  15. Noname Given

    Noname Given Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    May 22, 2001
    Location:
    Noname Given
    Yeah - that's why I feel Lucas claims of 'all the bad effects I want to fix' ring hollow - because in the first theatrical 're-release' of the remasted STAR WAS - A New Hope, Lucas also left Darth Vader's light saber as un-colored in the scene where he's walking towards Luke running into the Falcon in the Death Star hangar bay. George left a number of things 'not fixed' with the remaster.

    As for the Storm Trooper hitting his head, that's been a part of all the versions; and I always thought it just showed further that theses guys were human and fallible. :)
     
    Campe and N-121973 like this.
  16. Kor

    Kor Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jul 31, 2001
    Location:
    My mansion on Qo'noS
    Is the deleted stuff inserted into the movie, or is it a separate thing like the "extra features" on DVD and blu-ray?

    Kor
     
  17. cooleddie74

    cooleddie74 Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Apr 25, 2001
    Location:
    The Warped Sector of the Demented Quadrant
    Separate. Those scenes were never reincorporated into the movies they came from. They exist as deleted scenes and separate material.
     
  18. J.T.B.

    J.T.B. Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Jun 14, 2005
    Nah, it was a good decision to cut all that. There's a lot going on in the first 15-20 minutes, a lot of information to convey, and the Luke scenes would really mess up the flow of the movie.

    And seeing them that way doesn't give the full picture of how they break up – and disrupt, IMO – the pacing of the first quarter of the movie. Think of how they would have been placed:

    • Artoo and Threepio are introduced and find themselves in the middle of a shootout as stormtroopers board.
    • Some kid in a desert looks up to see spaceships in the sky, gets excited and takes off.
    • Darth Vader makes his entrance on the rebel ship.

    • Artoo and Threepio look back at the star destroyer as the pod falls toward the planet.
    • Luke goes into some kind of hangout, banters with his young adult friends and shows them the ships in the sky.
    • Stormtroopers bring Leia before Vader.

    • Threepio, lost in the desert, sights some kind of vehicle and waves to it.
    • Biggs and Luke talk about the rebellion and Luke's future.
    • Artoo enters a spooky ravine.

    As I said earlier in the thread, Star Wars asked some heavy lifts of the mainstream 1977 moviegoer. Nobody knew what was going on or why, but Lucas and his editors were very clever about securing audience buy-in very early in the movie. One of the keys was quickly establishing a strong emotional connection with the viewer. Nothing new about that, but in this case the connection was with two non-humans, one of which couldn't be understood, which was a somewhat radical step.

    One way the emotional bond was cemented was for the audience to identify with the robots as underdogs, targets through no fault of their own of a relentless pursuit by some obviously very bad guys. The robots caught up in circumstances beyond their control were a bit like the audience, who didn't know all the ins and outs of this strange world. By keeping to two settings, one at a time (the rebel ship, the desert planet), the audience stays focused on the stakes for the robots and the princess (who is obviously good and associated with the robots). By the time Luke is introduced (with masterful shots and scoring), the droids' adventures have so established them with the audience that their sympathy transfers straight over to him. "Oh great, now they're going to be after this poor kid, too."

    To keep the focus singular, two other scenes were also moved:
    • "Look sir, droids!" was moved up, from around the sand people observing the landspeeder to just after Threepio and Artoo are reunited on the sandcrawler. This established that the bad guys were quite close on the trail and upped the danger factor.
    • The Death Star boardroom/choking Motti scene was moved back, from just after the sandcrawler reunion to after the scene in Ben's home. This kept all attention on the droids' situation.
    Again, it's easy to overlook all this after having the movie's structure as common knowledge for 40 years, but the choices made by George Lucas, Paul Hirsch, Richard Chew and Marcia Lucas were pretty brilliant and a big part of why we are still talking about the picture today.
     
    Tosk, Kor, HugeLobes and 1 other person like this.
  19. Smellmet

    Smellmet Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Aug 5, 2013
    Location:
    The Northern Shires of England.
    I used to find the early scenes on Tatooine after the films opening a bit slow when I was kid, now, I think they're just magical and among the best scenes in the film.
     
  20. JD

    JD Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Jul 22, 2004
    Location:
    Arizona, USA
    Looking at it in that context, I can see why they were cut. They're still good scenes though, so I'm glad we at least got to see them as deleted scenes.