Star Wars: All The Movies Ranked From Worst To Best

8. The Special Editions

Forget the prequels, it's the Special Editions that really put a mar on the Star Wars legacy. If you don't like Episodes I-III you can just ignore them. But if you can't stand (deep breath) Greedo shooting first, the CGI smogasboard of Mos Eisley, Jabba in A New Hope (or the fact the movie's now subtitled A New Hope), Kiwi Boba Fett, Jedi Rocks, a snouted Sarlaac, Vader screaming "Nooo" as he kills the Emperor or, worst of all, Hayden Christensen as Force ghost Anakin, then tough. Originally intended to be a restoration of the original trilogy to celebrate the 20th Anniversary (and get a new generation hyped for the prequels), Lucas became increasingly enamoured with the prospect of actually altering the movies to utilise ground-breaking CGI to enhance the experience. The results are, across the board, terrible. He does fix several technical issues - blue screen bleeding, matte lines - but these background improvements are negligible compared to the amount of sh*t forced into the foreground here and in the later DVD (2004) and Blu-Ray (2011) releases. But that's only half the story. Taking the standpoint that these were the definitive versions of the movies - the ones he'd always wanted to make - Lucas made the original edits unavailable, leaving fans with no choice but to sit through his increasingly deranged tinkering. The Special Editions are still, at their heart, the movies we all love, but the bastardisations turn them into something else - it's like watching the originals, only with George Lucas pausing them every five minutes to jab you sharply in the side with his pen. And, with a high quality version of the unmeddled prints unavailable (the only feasible options are VHS rips and the lazy Laserdisc-sourced DVD bonus feature from 2006), they are a bigger blight on Star Wars than anything else (yes, even The Clone Wars).