STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS - Blu-Ray Thoughts

[Eric W.]

"Whaaaahhh, someone else made a Star Wars movie that everyone liked more than my prequels, whaaaaahhhh!!!!"

That's all I'm hearing from Lucas' side...sour grapes.

Pretty much. Frankly I have a fairly dim view of him overall.




I think it's too little too late from Lucas even if I sympathize with some of his complaints. He's the biggest part of the problem and the reason this all happened.

His prequels weren't exactly amazing to say the least and he just took damned long for ANY of it. Jedi in 1984 we had to wait until the late 90s for something new?

No way that license should have sat fallow for that long. That's HIS fault.

Then the prequels were done and somehow we are suddenly into the second decade of the 21st century. What the hell happened?

Did anyone really want to see Han and the gang as a bunch of old fossils? I sure didn't. It's 20 years too late for them! It's absurd. It's depressing.


It didn't have to happen.

I think he was full of it when he said he always had the full stories ready to go. Obviously not.

You don't wait over a decade plus and then crank out those mostly awful prequels...yeah I know I'm going to get in trouble for that but there it is. They weren't worth it. I wish they had never been made.

He should have made at least one sequel movie to lay things up and move it forward.

I blame him for this even more than whatever I may disagree with from Disney's choices.

Lucas gave us Jar Jar Binks and the damned Ewoks which were more clicheish bad Disney than what's in this new movie. Jedi even closed with a musical number for cripes sake. 1984 to 1999 gulf and we get Jar Jar, Hayden, and midichlorians and some of the most God awful writing and acting I can recall in the modern era in a AAA big budget movie?

Is Disney really going to do worse than that?


We all know what Disney is about and being in the industry he would know even better. What did he think was going to happen?

Cinderella part 3 direct to video but guess what? Still better than his prequels, lumps and all .

'Nuff said.

[Paul MacLean]

Very impressive work for a fan edit and much better than watching the DVDs (which were basically the laserdisc transfers like you indicated).

I've never actually seen the official DVDs. How bad are they? Are they just interlaced NTSC and matted widescreen? (Are they even widescreen at all?)

[mkaroly]

Lucas gave us Jar Jar Binks and the damned Ewoks which were more clicheish bad Disney than what's in this new movie...1984 to 1999 gulf and we get Jar Jar, Hayden, and midichlorians and some of the most God awful writing and acting I can recall in the modern era in a AAA big budget movie?

We all know what Disney is about and being in the industry he would know even better. What did he think was going to happen?

I agree with you Eric (though I have yet to see the new movie); I just think it comes down to GL having an over-inflated self-perception. I give him credit for the general story, his special effects "moxie," the vision of the story AND the wisdom to hire John Williams to score the films, but otherwise IMO he tends to be severely overrated by most (he is getting a Kennedy Center Honors...for WHAT???...lol...what a joke). To me he was never a great writer, and he spent too much time infusing his non-human characters with more dimensionality than the human characters. A lot of what he is complaining about is his fault, and sadly I think he is too self-absorbed to understand that it is.

[DavidBanner]

The actual DVDs put out by Lucasfilm in 2006 just take the 1993 laserdisc transfers as used on the "Faces" lasers and put them a second disc with each single movie release. They are identical to the 1993 laserdisc versions with a single exception - the opening crawl for Star Wars no longer has Episode IV: A New Hope at the top. It's just plain vanilla Star Wars (as I would prefer it).

The laserdisc transfers are 4:3 letterboxed but are not anamorphically encoded. So they'll appear as a little box in the middle of your screen. The movies are only presented in basic 2.0 stereo so there is no surround unless you have your receiver generate something on its own. Fans were happy to get these editions in 2006 but disappointed that Lucas had obviously thumbed his nose at them. He was not-so-subtly giving fans a choice. Watch his new approved versions in full anamorphic widescreen, with surround sound and all the trimmings - OR you can watch the old versions in a little box unless you'd rather blow the image up to a point that the PQ will look terrible. I've certainly done this, but it's not optimal.

The other versions being referred to here are bootleg versions made by a fan in Europe who has admitted he has no training or experience in this stuff. He just cobbled his HD version together out of frustration that he couldn't get the kind of release that he wanted from Lucas. And there's another guy out there doing his own HD non-SE cuts of the movies, albeit with him adding in his own ideas. I'm frankly not a fan of either of these ideas. As someone who works in this business, I have issues with home edits being distributed of commercial movies. It's as wacky an idea as the unfortunate Clean Flicks business that died 15 or more years ago.

I would rather see an eventual release of the original versions of these movies in HD, and I believe Disney will provide one. They just won't do it right away. I believe they'll wait for Fox to lose distribution for all but the 1977 film, and then they'll provide something along the lines of either the 2006 DVDs or WB's 2007 Blade Runner edition. In either case, I don't expect Disney to invest the serious money it would take to actually reconstruct the original editions of these movies. But they absolutely could do what WB did with Blade Runner - make a 2K copy of the best possible print or IP of each of the original three movies, and offer that alongside Lucas' revised versions for comparison. I could see them doing this as part of a box set of all 9 of the movies, something they could release in 2020 after Episode IX comes out in 2019, and they could make a larger set to include the original versions.

[DavidBanner]

Back in the 70s, George Lucas had some very interesting ideas about storytelling and particularly about editing. His first three films are really interesting pieces of work that continue to resonate to this day - THX-1138, American Graffiti and Star Wars. They're each a piece unto themselves, and they all develop the same basic thematic material in radically different directions.

THX-1138 is Lucas at his most negative and uncompromising. Basic story is similar to Star Wars - young man rebels against the order of his world, leading to various conflicts and chases. It's quite abstract and shows it's film school origins, but it also has some of the best editing and shock cuts in Lucas' repertoire.

American Graffiti is Lucas at his warmest. Basic story is again similar to the others - all the characters are various aspects of Lucas' personality, showing a kaleidoscope of what it was like to be on the verge of adulthood in Modesto in the early 1960s. There's a strong feeling of nostalgia in this movie, and it did well because audiences enjoyed the characters and were happy to spend a couple of hours in a world ten years before all the turmoil they knew in 1973. That said, there are some really interesting directorial choices in it - a couple of surprisingly moving depth charges with Cindy Williams and Richard Dreyfuss, and then the ending, which had to have come as a gut punch and still has some impact today.

Star Wars takes that same story and transposes it to a mythological fairy tale. But it's roots can easily be seen in the earlier movies.

For those three films alone, I believe Lucas would deserve that award, but that's not why he's getting it. I'd say he's getting it for the creation of both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, both of which have become a part of our culture for the past 40 years for better or worse. He is also getting it for constantly pushing for innovation in films, and actually putting his money where his mouth was in terms of starting up ILM and rethinking the way editing and post production was done. In the 1980s, Lucas and his THX system helped push a lot of movie theaters to update their sound systems - something that made a subtle difference but a real one. And the work of ILM led to many of the VFX we take for granted today. So I wouldn't say he's getting that award for personally writing and directing movies - it's more of a cultural thing and an acknowledgement that he made a real difference in the movie business and an impact in the surrounding culture.

[AndyDursin]

Very impressive work for a fan edit and much better than watching the DVDs (which were basically the laserdisc transfers like you indicated).

I've never actually seen the official DVDs. How bad are they? Are they just interlaced NTSC and matted widescreen? (Are they even widescreen at all?)

Non anamorphic widescreen. No different than watching a DVD-R copy of the last laserdisc release which they seemingly sourced from the same master.

[AndyDursin]

The other versions being referred to here are bootleg versions made by a fan in Europe who has admitted he has no training or experience in this stuff. He just cobbled his HD version together out of frustration that he couldn't get the kind of release that he wanted from Lucas. And there's another guy out there doing his own HD non-SE cuts of the movies, albeit with him adding in his own ideas. I'm frankly not a fan of either of these ideas. As someone who works in this business, I have issues with home edits being distributed of commercial movies. It's as wacky an idea as the unfortunate Clean Flicks business that died 15 or more years ago.

I definitely have issues with "fan edits" where people recut movies to their own liking. There's no justification for that. If someone is trying to do a "preservation" of a particular cut that's no longer in circulation, or restore scenes actually intended to be a part of the film at one point in time, then I can understand the thinking, assuming it's been done with care. It might be a bootleg but when nearly 20 years has passed since the last time they gave anyone an official release of the original versions (I actually don't count the DVDs, which were slapped together from the laserdiscs and no effort went into them at all), I don't blame fans at all for wanting to see the actual movie they paid to see in theaters.

At this point, I can't blame them. A lot of people don't want to wait. The Despecialized versions play well and frankly, you don't need a ton of training to at least improve upon the garbage DVDs Lucasfilm released. There's no indication still they're ever going to be released...I agree it's entirely possible but Disney doesn't do catalog releases anymore on Blu-Ray outside their "Disney Movie Club." The format is something they're becoming less interested in. Certainly STAR WARS is a whole other issue and they'll go where the money is, but who knows what we'll be buying in 2019 or 2020. Probably will be a 4K format -- or a 4K/Blu-Ray combo -- assuming the latter even takes off.

It will be at least that long though, because Fox isn't going to pay a cent for new masters when they're going to lose the distribution rights to the five movies they don't own.

[DavidBanner]

We agree that Fox isn't likely to put any more money into Star Wars. They're just going to sit back and collect their cut while they can for the other eps, and hang onto their rights to Ep 4 into perpetuity.

You raise a good point about Disney and physical media. They've already given up on issuing 3D Blu-rays in the US (other than for Marvel movies). By 2020, my instincts say we'll still have plenty of Blu-rays and probably just a scattering of 4K or UHD. If Blu-ray is the laserdisc of the DVD era, I presume that 4K is the "Superbit". Sounds great as an idea but makes no difference to 99.9 percent of home theater viewers.

I still don't think physical media is going anywhere for some time, despite Apple's attempts to push things toward the virtual. Yes, it's great that you can see whole libraries of movies and television shows online digitally at Netflix or the others, but that doesn't mean those shows will always be there. Rights expire and other services pop up, each wanting their fee from you. (I'm waiting to see what happens when CBS All Access pulls all the CBS shows off the other services and demands everyone pay 5.99 a month just for that...)

[AndyDursin]

You raise a good point about Disney and physical media. They've already given up on issuing 3D Blu-rays in the US (other than for Marvel movies). By 2020, my instincts say we'll still have plenty of Blu-rays and probably just a scattering of 4K or UHD. If Blu-ray is the laserdisc of the DVD era, I presume that 4K is the "Superbit". Sounds great as an idea but makes no difference to 99.9 percent of home theater viewers.

I agree wholeheartedly David. I still just wonder about Disney specifically though. It's not just 3D movies -- they appear to be finished releasing live-action catalog titles, or catalog titles of any kind on Blu-Ray, unless it's an animated movie (as I wrote before, there are titles like SPLASH, QUIZ SHOW, WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING, WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT, and TURNER & HOOCH that are only on Blu-Ray overseas. Never were released here). Even some newer titles like AGENT CARTER and AGENTS OF SHIELD are only on Blu-Ray domestically as Amazon exclusives.

They have issued more catalog Blu-Rays recently through their Disney Movie Club banner (RETURN TO OZ, the HERBIE movies, etc.) that you can get through Ebay if you don't have a subscription (and they're fairly inexpensive), but I think the larger point is they seem to have given up on Blu-Ray. Unless it's a new release or a reissue of something like ALADDIN, they don't seem to care about the format.

I agree totally about physical media -- it's going to be around -- but I still wonder about the prospects of how and where the "untouched" STAR WARS movies will eventually be released given Disney's relationship to the format right now.

[AndyDursin]

A recap of Lucas' often backhanded comments about Disney:

http://io9.gizmodo.com/a-not-so-brief-h ... socialflow

[AndyDursin]

In either case, I don't expect Disney to invest the serious money it would take to actually reconstruct the original editions of these movies

Fox paid for a 4K restoration of ZARDOZ. There is no reason on this planet why there cannot or should not be a 4K restoration of STAR WARS.

[DavidBanner]

Not sure what they were thinking with Zardoz, but Disney is not the same as Fox. They are notoriously cheap - even more so than Lucas, and Lucas was pretty cheap himself.
Fox has little incentive to work with anything other than the original 1977 movie. It's possible that they would agree to participate there. The other movies go out of their purview in 4 years.

I do think that we'll see 4K masters of the extant versions of all 6 of the Lucas-directed or produced movies. Even II & III, which really won't benefit from 4K.
But working on the original versions of Eps IV-VI would mean that they'd have to do a jigsaw-puzzle reconstruction, including hunting for endless trims to rebuild all the laser hits, etc. Much simpler to just do a 2K scan of an IP. I believe Disney will follow that course, if for no other reason than that it would allow them to have HD copies of those movies without spending an unreasonable sum to do so.

[Paul MacLean]

I do think that we'll see 4K masters of the extant versions of all 6 of the Lucas-directed or produced movies. Even II & III, which really won't benefit from 4K.

Yeah, it would be kind of silly, as II and III were shot in 1080!

Though personally I thought they looked fine projected on a big screen.

[mkaroly]

So I am way late to the party but I finally saw SW last night...I really enjoyed it, much more than any of the prequels to be honest. Despite the few complaints I will list below, the one shining triumph of this movie is that the HUMAN characters had dimensionality to them, and it was easy to attach on to them and care about them - even Han Solo's son. This was something, IMO, the prequels failed to provide. Some of it had to do with the acting and the script, but to me it seemed like Lucas was more concerned with giving characters like JJB, the Diner owner in AOTC, and any number of CGI characters more depth than the actual human characters. JJ Abrams managed to stay away from things like that and instead put the focus on the human beings. The acting in this movie was excellent - the actors that played Fin and Rey had great chemistry; I loved Han Solo's dry humor ("That is not how the Force WORKS!"), and there were genuine moments of sadness, despair, humor, and hope in the film as a whole. I thought the score fell a bit short; however, I went with my bets friend and his wife and kids to see the movie, and over the End Titles he was humming the Kylo Ren (whatever his name was) theme - that five note motif. My friend likes many of the same film scores most of us here like (we are the same age, 46), so at least there is one theme in there that is somewhat memorable! Again, overall I really liked the film and its focus on the human characters. Now on to the complaints:

Complaint the first: although the planet is not a Death Star...it was a Death Star-type. It got destroyed TWICE in the regular films...why are we all going back to it? Dark Side of the Force people...IT DOESN'T WORK! Lol...can we please move on from a Death Star type weapon and find something else to threaten people with?? In addition, I am kind of tired of the redux. The movie seemed to play like a "parallel universe" movie, and I truly hope that moving forward (like immediately, with the next film) the filmmakers will take this in its own direction rather than relying on what came before. I don't mind a little nod here and there, but I am tired of the "parallel universe" type direction. I know history repeats itself, but move on!

Complaint the second: BB8 was kind of nothing more than a family pet in the film. At least R2 had a part to play and was a character in the previous six films, so I hope BB8 actually takes a more active part in the films moving forward as an actual character. Otherwise, get rid of it.

Complaint the third: Did anyone else think at times (in conjunction with the first complaint) that the movie played more like a television show spin-off where the main characters from the first show stop by the second show to legitimize it? Look...there's R2 (who basically does nothing but suddenly, at the end, provide the map and pass the baton off to BB8 I guess)...look, there's Admiral Akbar and that weird dude that was with Lando in JEDI...then the audience applauses. It's hard to describe what I mean, but maybe it would have been better to keep some of those characters out (though it is plausible that would have still been around at the time the movie takes place).

Complaint the fourth: There were two eye-rolling moments in the film for me, both dialogue/story related. The first was Kylo Ren's moment of struggle when he talks to the Darth Vader mask for inspiration and strength...telling us he struggles to keep in the dark. Honestly, I felt that was unnecessary and very goofy to hear the character announce what he's thinking. There are plenty of moments in the movie where one could see the struggle of the character without dialogue (Fin's moment early in the film on Jakku, Rey's confrontations with Kylo Ren) - couldn't he have done something in silence that would have communicated his struggle more profoundly? Why have the Darth Vader "NOOOOOOO!" JEDI moment here? The other was Fin's buddy Biggs (whatever the best flying pilot in the Resistance's name was) explaining that he got thrown from the TIE fighter - it seemed to easy an explanation to me and made my eyes roll.

Complaint the final (on behalf of my best friend's wife): She pointed out that they did a disservice to Leia by costuming her the way they did. Instead of putting her in General outfits and clothing that spoke authority, they dressed her up like the loveable but sad grandmother, and to her it demeaned Leia's character and authority. She felt that those moments she was on-screen were sappy because of it - like the filmmakers were pulling heart strings there in an insincere way (my interpretation of what she said). I think she has a point there.

When I see it more, maybe I will complain about other things but ultimately it's nitpicking at this point. Overall, it was a fun film and very entertaining. It took too long for this to come out, and I hope the sequel will not take five years to come out.

[AndyDursin]

Complaint the third: Did anyone else think at times (in conjunction with the first complaint) that the movie played more like a television show spin-off where the main characters from the first show stop by the second show to legitimize it? Look...there's R2 (who basically does nothing but suddenly, at the end, provide the map and pass the baton off to BB8 I guess)...look, there's Admiral Akbar and that weird dude that was with Lando in JEDI...then the audience applauses. It's hard to describe what I mean, but maybe it would have been better to keep some of those characters out (though it is plausible that would have still been around at the time the movie takes place).

I know what you're getting at. My issue is these "shout-outs to nostalgia" are clumsily handled in most of these reboot/remake/sequels. The problem ISN'T that they're there -- the problem is that they're not organic, they're not woven in effectively enough and they're poorly done.

R2 sitting in the corner is one example like you said Michael. It's very sad when you consider the whole conception of STAR WARS was that the series was supposed to be told through C3PO and R2D2, their adventures linking through the various events -- Lucas himself dropped the baton to some degree with that in the prequels and Abrams didn't pick up on it here either. He should have.