Movies That Should Have Been Epic

[Cyberman]

I notice that the Star Wars series was mentioned. While I think the prequels are pretty much universally held to be quite dire, the original trilogy really ought to be seen as a product of its time. The original Star Wars, even before it acquired Episode IV status, was really crafted by hand as they went along; in fact since nobody knew what ILM was going to do with the special effects (Lucas had apparently wanted simply to film model spaceships being thrown past the camera), plus the non-human characters all voiced their own lines muffled behind their masks - not to mention poor Darth Farmer - everyone thought it was going to be a flop and wondered what the hell they'd got themselves into. In fact, my personal opinion is that there should never have been any sequels; as a space-opera fairytale, with wizards and princesses to rescue from a Hidden Fortress, the story worked perfectly on its own. The sequels, good as they may be, are a little too curate's egg for my taste and almost threaten to disappear down the rabbit-hole of religious philosophy. However, I think that to fully appreciate the films, you have to be about twelve years old when watching them for the first time and ideally be in 1978 with everything that was happening in the world during that period.

Anyway, there is a whole group of extremely talented people who spend their time re-editing and, arguably, improving professionally-produced films, which are available to download free of charge so long as you own a copy of the original film. Some of the best work I've ever seen is by a bloke who called himself Adywan who has already re-edited the original Star Wars, correcting the many errors from the original cut as well as ones that were somehow introduced into the DVD and Blu-Ray releases. Cracked featured his work in this article, which is how I found it, and which not only showcases but gives links to an entire list of over two hundred and fifty changes he made to the special effects, continuity, undoing most of the Special Edition vandalism, cleaning up the picture quality etc. I've downloaded his version of Star Wars: Revisited and it's damn professionally put together. You'd swear it was a commercial DVD, proper menus, covers, disc labels and all.

He's currently working on an improved version of The Empire Strikes Back and plans to rework all six films to bring them all into line with each other, style-wise. Promised alterations to the prequels include: no mention of Anakin becoming Darth Vader, so as not to spoil the shock reveal in Empire (whoops, sorry - spoiler); no mention of C-3PO being built by Anakin, in fact Threepio won't even appear until Revenge of the Sith; no Midichlorians; and absolutely no Jar-Jar.

Hopefully, the films truly will be epic.