Caffeinated Clint
I don’t care what George Lucas says, in my version of “Star Wars” Han Solo shot first.
Lucas, in an interview with THR where he defends his tinkering with both trilogies new and old, says Greedo always fired first. If Solo had, that would make him a cold-blooded murderer – and that’s just not who the man is.
Bullshit. Shooting first doesn’t mean Solo’s a psychopathic mad-man, it simply means he’s a forward-thinker who is beating the green bug to the punch. He knows exactly what the emerald asshole is doing there, and he’s not prepared to simply sit back and cop one in head.
But Lucas, forever calling us “Star Wars” fans ‘wrong’ (wonder how many copies of the special editions we’d have to buy to admit we’re actually right about some things?), says it was always Han’s gun shooting… second.
“The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t”, says the beard. “It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.”
Yeah, whatever…
Lucas is also quick to defend his replacement of puppet Yoda with CGI Yoda in “Phantom Menace”, neglecting to consider that most of us don’t much give a shit as to what hot props he switches around on that one.
“We tried to do Yoda in CGI in Episode I, but we just couldn’t get it done in time. We couldn’t get the technology to work, so we had to use the puppet, but the puppet really wasn’t as good as the CGI. So when we did the reissue, we had to put the CGI back in, which was what it was meant to be.”
Sadly, Lucas forgot to reinsert the scenes back into the movie that made us actually give a hoot about whiny young Anakin and his long-suffering plight with his bumblebee like slave-master or trim the pod-race sequence down from 4 hours to 10 minutes.
Good news is (or is it?) Lucas hints at a fifth “Indiana Jones” actually coming to fruition (After it’s release he’s going to go back and tweak the other films in the series; Mola Ram will be pulling out a patch of chest-hair from Harrison Ford’s front, not his heart, for a start).
“The Phantom Menace” is of course being re-issued this week in (the dark, diluted, post-converted) 3D format. Though it’s off to a good start at the box-office, the universally loathed prequel will fail to take home the top spot this weekend – as it did in 1999; Rachel McAdams tearjerker “The Vow” is going to split Darth Maul in two.
