Fan-made version of original Star Wars film is honest to a fault

Top, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill in Star Wars, directed by George Lucas. Courtesy 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation; AP Photo

It's the sore point that continues to niggle ardent Star Wars fans: they cannot purchase the 1977 eponymous first instalment because, officially, it doesn't exist.

Instead, what they’ll find is a digitally remastered cut, full of added CGI, reworked audio, suspect colour-correcting and entirely new scenes and ­characters.

This special edition, released in cinemas in 1997 and on DVD in 2004, has been said to turn even the most hardcore Lucas fans against him. What makes it worse is that the director doubled down on the criticism and refused to release the original non-digital version, claiming the classic was, in fact, a botched job.

“It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it,” he told the Associated Press. “But I want it to be the way I want it to be. I’m the one who has to take responsibility for it. The special edition, that’s the one I wanted out there. The other movie, it’s on VHS, if anybody wants it … to me, it doesn’t really exist anymore.”​ ​

For many fans, this was a crushing blow. They couldn't comprehend why the multibillionaire refused to allow them to see the original Star Wars movie that led hordes of moviegoers to fall in love with the series in the 1970s.

So they made their own.

Titled Star Wars: Despecialized Edition, a group of fans reconstructed the movie in its 1977 widescreen, high-definition form from little more than VHS recordings, ­attic-found illegal versions and bits of the original film reel. Then they posted an online guide that included 14 pages on how to obtain a copy, plus stills from the movie with commentary on how it was restored.

The fact that they were able to make the movie at all is amazing. We’re not talking big-budget Hollywood re-release but a bleary-eyed quest by a few guys on their computers, working with little more than scraps.

Upon watching the first 20 minutes of Despecialized, you might begin to think that it abandons the goal of restoration in pursuit of making the edit visually superior. That would have been true had they not left the half or so dozen production mistakes corrected in Lucas's 2004 special edition.

For example, in the series’ first lightsaber fight, the post-­production team neglected to give Obi-Wan Kenobi’s weapon its signature blue glow, in turn exposing for a shot the true identity of the lightsaber: a stick covered in aluminium foil.

Even the miniatures used to shoot spaceship battles in the original visually stand the test of time against the 2004 version which, ironically, look outdated and ­artificial.

The post-production computer graphics used in movies today are taken into account during the shooting of the scene. Actors, directors and the graphics team work to blend CGI with live filming against green screens and motion detectors.

However, with the original Star Wars bereft of such technological advances, the idea of imposing computer graphics on a movie not prepared for its inclusion creates an aesthetic disconnect. For example, the CGI spaceships in the 2004 edition neither match the background nor the actors' performances.

Perhaps Star Wars: The Force Awakens director J J Abrams understood such follies. In a recent interview, he said that "wherever possible, whenever possible, we tried to do things as much on camera as we could. And that meant that a lot of artists on that side of things were building things not with pixels but with wood and paint and foam and actually constructing sets that we could have done in post[-production]".

One wonders if Lucas, despite his genius, now harbours a sense of shame for what he did. The saga of the original version has now taken on a life of its own – it feels like an old teenage diary the author intends to keep locked away. But to anyone who compares the elegance of the original trilogy (released between 1977 and 1983), to the prequel trilogy (1999 to 2005), that diary reveals a man at the peak of his creative powers. One hopes Lucas will reopen that chapter one day – or someone could force the issue by unearthing the original for all to see – before it permanently tarnishes his legacy.