Agent Spalko
Guest
Crack that whip said:... but OTOH, I do know many people now, particularly younger viewers who've seen CGI and digital composites their whole lives, have a real problem buying older effects with miniatures, matte paintings, photochemical / optical composites, etc. It sucks, but there you go. Given that reality, I don't know that I can fault Lucas for tweaking his movies in ways that (hopefully) make them more palatable to contemporary audiences while still retaining their essence. Raiders and other movies exist first and foremost not to document their own creation and history, but to present a narrative fantasy to the viewer, and anything that detracts from that is potentially a liability, a shortcoming. I'm pretty torn over this instance of revision, though, since as noted the shot worked fine for me.
And why should we cater to a younger generation that cannot appreciate the historical artistic merits of film making and special effects? By that token we should just arbitrarily redo all of the visual effects of all films prior to Jurassic Park just to make them happy? I staunchly disagree with revisionism. If you want to "update" the effects to look modern, that's fine so long as the film is given the addendum that it is an entirely different version and the original theatrical film is preserved independent from the revisionist edition, something Lucas obviously is against.