Movie Theories
Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 8:17 pm
The recent spate of movie threads has made me want to dissect movies a little more...exploring such things as how and why movies were made a certain way....including why the director's cuts typically add shots and scenes that aren't in the finished movie.
Here's my movie theory on the movie Star Wars Empire Strikes Back:
When they penned the story for the second movie they had to accomodate Mark Hamill's quick and horrifiying bout of ugliness that he had gone through after A New Hope.
The man had literally aged 84 years in the short span between the ending of filming the first movie and the script reading of the second. Mark Hamill was no longer the youthful, baby-faced kid they hired on for A New Hope.
Now they had spent all this money on special effects but the budget just couldn't handle a blue screening of Mr. Hamill's face in every shot of the new movie with footage from the first movie. It was prohitively expensive back then.
So they made the snow beast maul his face straight off the bat. They first covered his face with a snow mask and made the setting extremely cold...so that it looked like Mark Hamill was whincing from the cold when uncovered his face. That was the first thing they did to help explain his ugliness. Then of course a few seconds later they instructed the snow beast to maul him so that they could put him in a tank (which again hid the ugly with refraction) when he got rescued. Then everything was neatly wrapped up in the recovery room where Luke - for the first of many times - had the urge to stick his tongue into his sister's mouth.
The "Enhanced Version".
I feel they deliberately put in more CG shots of Bespin and the like to get more content into SW: ESB without showing more shots of Mark Hamill's sudden ugly.
Here's my movie theory on the movie Star Wars Empire Strikes Back:
When they penned the story for the second movie they had to accomodate Mark Hamill's quick and horrifiying bout of ugliness that he had gone through after A New Hope.
The man had literally aged 84 years in the short span between the ending of filming the first movie and the script reading of the second. Mark Hamill was no longer the youthful, baby-faced kid they hired on for A New Hope.
Now they had spent all this money on special effects but the budget just couldn't handle a blue screening of Mr. Hamill's face in every shot of the new movie with footage from the first movie. It was prohitively expensive back then.
So they made the snow beast maul his face straight off the bat. They first covered his face with a snow mask and made the setting extremely cold...so that it looked like Mark Hamill was whincing from the cold when uncovered his face. That was the first thing they did to help explain his ugliness. Then of course a few seconds later they instructed the snow beast to maul him so that they could put him in a tank (which again hid the ugly with refraction) when he got rescued. Then everything was neatly wrapped up in the recovery room where Luke - for the first of many times - had the urge to stick his tongue into his sister's mouth.
The "Enhanced Version".
I feel they deliberately put in more CG shots of Bespin and the like to get more content into SW: ESB without showing more shots of Mark Hamill's sudden ugly.