Am I the only one who thinks they both contain “the movie”?
The only change that ever bothered me was Greedo shooting first (and even that one is not a huge deal to me). The rest is minor.
I don’t think young Anakin at the end is minor. It makes no sense. If you are evil the majority of your life and become good in your final moments, you get to be young in the afterlife.
Why would he even want to be young Anakin in the afterlife?
I don;t like the change either, but I could see it. “Young Anakin”, as you put it, is the way he looked before he was horribly scarred and permanently disfigured. I can see why he would choose to look that way (If it is even a choice).
Yoda and Obi-Wan were’nt young.
I disagree with that. Anakin showing up as a kindly looking old guy doesn’t make any sense. He was never that person. He was a young man until he turned to the Dark Side, and then he spent the rest of his life in a mobile iron lung. At no point in his life was he an avuncular middle aged man. When he decides to manifest as a force ghost, you’d expect him to either look like he did the last time he was fully human (which would be his last self-image of himself as a good person), or he’d be a floating torso covered in burn scars (if he’s forced to look like he did when he died).
Actually, I suspect the truth is, they could have appeared as anything they wanted. They’re dead. They’re no long constrained by the physical world. They could have shown up as a trio of shaved wookies, or midget rancors, or the hosts of Good Morning, Coruscant if they’d wanted, but since they were specifically trying to communicate with Luke, they showed up in forms that he would recognize. The forms they pick don’t actually correlate to their existence as being of pure energy in any meaningful way.
Having him appear as a kind looking old man is more poignant to me because you see what he would have looked like if he hadn’t become evil.
I could see the reasoning for both, but I think only the Sebastian Shaw version feels touching or authentic.
I totally agree, but if you think about it he shouldn’t be that old at all. Based on the timeline established by the prequels he was what, 40, 45 when he died? Sebastian Shaw was in his 70s when he filmed that scene. Maybe that was part of the reason for the change.
Normally I wouldn’t mind young-Anakin at the end of RotJ. His appearance there makes sense to me. I can see keeping old Anakin: Miller says “he was never that person”, but you could argue that he was, during the final moments of his life. Both arguments make sense to me, so whichever way Lucas decided to go is cool.
The problem is that this means that Hayden Christensen is now in the Original Trilogy. This I cannot forgive.
Yeah, exactly. Much as it makes sense that he’d look like he did before becoming Vader, I still don’t like it for that reason.
But would Luke have recognized what young Anakin looked like?
Yeah, that’s about how I thought about it too. Plus not wanting Hayden C. in a place he hadn’t been for decades of my life.
No more than he’d have recognized old Anakin.
My point is, during the final moments of his life, he was a good person again, but he still was a hairless quadruple amputee with massive facial scarring. His appearance in the original edition is, at best, an approximation of what he might have looked like if he’d never become Darth Vader - but I don’t think his appearance there was the result of the universe “fixing” him to look like he “should.” I’m fairly certain that Anakin deliberately chose to look like that, so that he could appear to Luke as a true father figure just once in Luke’s life. Which, as cactus waltz says, is a much more touching and authentic decision, from a directorial point of view.
Appearing as young Anakin is the better directorial choice, if one presumes that the audience actually liked young Anakin. Had he been an engaging and sympathetic character, I think I would have preferred to see him instead at the end, instead of the older figure, because it would be a reminder of everything I’d liked about the character before his fall. It would work better as closure for the audience, whereas the original scene works better as closure for Luke. But given the actual quality of the prequels, I think this sums the whole thing up the best:
It doesn’t help that Shaw’s expression radiated pride in his son and gratification at his forgiveness by his fellows. Christensen’s grin just looks sort of creepy. The grimace of a man standing in front of a green-screen who has been told to hold his smile for far too long.
I guess that’s in-character, given Christensen’s performance in the prequels.
It’s a little more complicated than that. The original release of the original trilogy on DVD was as a boxed set, one disc for each special edition movie, and a fourth bonus disc with a documentary or something on it.
Then later, for the second release of the original trilogy on DVD, they were released separately, with each movie coming with the original version on a second disc.
There have likely been other releases since then, as besides tinkering Lucas seems to need to change the packaging from time to time, but as I had what I wanted I stopped paying attention to releases after getting the original versions. Until now with the bluray releases pending anyway.