Star Wars: 9 Reasons The Special Editions Are Secretly Better
4. Better Landscapes
Tatooine in particular looks a lot less like rural Tunisia in its revised state, and a lot more like the kind of place one might bullseye womp rats in ones T-16. The added detail to matte backdrops may not be the kind of thing youd salivate over when reading the back of the DVD box on the bus home, but when you compare the two side by side the improvement is enormous. Rather than being presented with a vista and thinking, Is this Mos Eisley spaceport Im meant to be looking at or just an indistinct pile of beige sludge, the clarity and detail of the new landscapes is much more immersive, and gives us some convincingly lived-on planets rather than bits vague splodges of brown on top of slightly darker splodges of brown. I wish I could say the same for the heinous amounts of badly rendered CGI fauna knocking about, particularly around Mos Eisley, but the only thing they achieve is to take A New Hope closer in tone to The Phantom Menace with its whacky background characters doing hilarious pratfalls every 30 seconds.
