Now, George Lucas gets a lot of flak for his repeated tinkering with the original Star Wars trilogy: shaving a couple of frames from this shot, rearranging that sequence, adding 3000 unconvincing but all individually irritating CGI aliens to a five second long view of a market square... Frankly, none of it seems particularly consequential, and just serves to underline the feeling among fans that the bitterest irony of the whole Star Wars universe is that the man who created it seems not to actually understand what made the Star Wars great in the first place. It's as if he's of the opinion that it wasn't the extraneous CGI aliens and convoluted plotting which stank up the prequels; it was, in fact, the complete lack of those things in the original trilogy that was the problem. To be honest though, the naysayers really ought to chill out a little bit. Yeah, so putting about four extra rocks in front of R2-D2 rather than focussing on getting a workable script and non-snoozesome storyline for The Phantom Menace might have been a pretty poor use of time, but there are actually a lot of tiny details which lend a little extra oomph to the films. A very little extra, yes, but one that boosts the quality of the special edition cuts beyond the original cinematic releases nonetheless. That's not to say that any of the criticisms of the special editions and edits are necessarily untrue, but if you take off your cynical trousers and instead pop on your jovial, sunny disposition-inducing Bermuda shorts, and treat the special editions as films of their own rather than having a bit of a cry about how unfair it is that the man who made these films in the first place decided to slightly change some elements of them, then you might actually get a lot out of them. Oh, and just so were clear: Han definitely shot first.
