Rewatching "Empire of Dreams"

[krpalmer]

Perhaps out of a desire to "decompress" after watching through the entire Star Wars saga, and perhaps out of the subtle connection that I'm pet-sitting for just one more weekend, I decided to rewatch the documentary about the making of the first trilogy, "Empire of Dreams." The real-life story remains interesting, with its arc from dreams to travails to extended triumph, but one thing that I had been wondering about beforehand was the different interpretations that could be loaded on to the documentary. People who cluck about the Star Wars movies starting out as an idiosyncratic personal project but ending up ushering in an era of big dumb attempts at blockbusters (well, they'd probably just obsess on the second point) may not draw any cheer from the documentary saying that the trilogy made "movies fun again." Of course, I once noticed someone who had seen the A&E version of the documentary to emerge with the single reaction of being offended all over again by the Special Edition effects shown near its close. Some people may simply be beyond whatever help a documentary can provide.

I was impressed when first watching "Empire of Dreams" by the pre-Special Edition (and pre-"Episode IV") footage shown in it, but now I'm starting to suspect that some Special Edition footage was dropped in here and there, for example during coverage of The Empire Strikes Back, when I looked for the snowspeeder visible through Luke's flight helmet and couldn't see it. That's a quibble, of course. One thing that I've contemplated a bit more seriously is that by the time the documentary gets to Return of the Jedi, it's running short on time. Irvin Kershner and Larry Kasdan got to talk approvingly about developing the characters in the appealing "middle act," but Richard Marquand is no longer around to offer whatever insights he had. Instead, we get Harrison Ford and Larry Kasdan musing about the thought of killing off Han Solo. I started wondering if some people would see their conventional wisdom confirmed... but after noting how the documentary did talk about TESB going overlong and overbudget, though, I did get the sense that RotJ's production finally ran more or less smoothly. Not every point about RotJ that the documentary seems to imply is an ambiguous one. In any case, now I'm really done, and will just have to move on...

Comments

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

I sort of felt the same way, that ROTJ was a little rushed at the end. I still think the best official SW doc is The Beginning on the TPM DVD, with this one a close second.