Why I dislike the reinserted Jabba scene in A New Hope
"There is no terror in the bang, only in anticipation of it". - Alfred Hitchcock
Hitchcock understood that what the audience imagines is often more powerful than anything you can show. That’s why I think putting the Jabba scene back into A New Hope was a mistake—no matter how good the CGI Jabba got.
Filmmakers, like any artists, can get fixated on details that feel essential to them but don't actually matter—or even register—for the audience. What’s interesting is that the updated Greedo scene does a better job selling the danger of Jabba’s bounty, and it does it by leaving Jabba himself to the imagination.
As a kid, having to wait in suspense until the third film to finally see this gangster Jabba—who’d been looming over Han for two whole movies—was an unforgettable payoff. It was a buildup you could only experience once.
Anyway, that’s just how I see it. I’m sure plenty of people would disagree, but I think there’s an objective storytelling principle at play—one that Lucas stumbled into out of budget constraints, but that ended up serving the story better than his original idea. Any artist knows this kind of thing happens all the time. The real skill is in recognizing when the limitation actually made the work stronger.
#video #movies
"There is no terror in the bang, only in anticipation of it". - Alfred Hitchcock
Hitchcock understood that what the audience imagines is often more powerful than anything you can show. That’s why I think putting the Jabba scene back into A New Hope was a mistake—no matter how good the CGI Jabba got.
Filmmakers, like any artists, can get fixated on details that feel essential to them but don't actually matter—or even register—for the audience. What’s interesting is that the updated Greedo scene does a better job selling the danger of Jabba’s bounty, and it does it by leaving Jabba himself to the imagination.
As a kid, having to wait in suspense until the third film to finally see this gangster Jabba—who’d been looming over Han for two whole movies—was an unforgettable payoff. It was a buildup you could only experience once.
Anyway, that’s just how I see it. I’m sure plenty of people would disagree, but I think there’s an objective storytelling principle at play—one that Lucas stumbled into out of budget constraints, but that ended up serving the story better than his original idea. Any artist knows this kind of thing happens all the time. The real skill is in recognizing when the limitation actually made the work stronger.
#video #movies
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