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My brother sent me some money for my birthday last month, and I finally decided to spend it on the Star Wars Blu-Rays. I've got quite a few nitpicks with it, but overall, if you aren't a purist, or extremely picky about things, the movies have never looked better. For the rest of you (and I know that is about everyone here), I'm going to confirm what most of you have no doubt suspected. GL is a g**d**n ****ing idiot and a lazy a** ba***rd. At this point, I'm pretty sure he's just trolling his customers to see how much shit they'll put up with and still keep buying his products.
If you are interested, there are lots of reviews all over the 'net about quality, changes, etc. You may read those for a more thorough analysis. For my opinion, if you've been holding back for a better release than the DVDs, which had a plethora of issues, then keep waiting. If you don't own them on DVD and have been wanting to watch them, and you don't mind the price tag, then pick them up.
The good: The picture quality and clarity is very good. The sound is really, really excellent. Han now shoots almost perfectly simultaneously with Greedo. That's progress, I guess. Some will like it, some won't, others won't care at all.
The cons: Lucasfilm did a lot of rah-rah crap on how they had fixed the color timing and brightness/contrast issues from the DVDs for the Blu-Rays. For the most part, it was a lot of rah-rah crap with no results. Color issues abound in all the original trilogy, and in all the same areas as before. A couple of shots that they used for their promotional material have been adjusted, but for the most part it still looks like the same as the DVDs. Almost all of the space battles are too blue-shifted, resulting in flat ship colors and really crappy explosions with too much green (yellow + blue = green). The whites often aren't, and the lightsabers are still atrocious. Luke's is generally better than Vaders, both in the green and the white, while Vader's lightsaber, both in Empire and Jedi changes colors constantly, even in the same shot! It is still a pinkish-magenta, although it does look like someone did a token effort to make the core of the lightsaber whiter. They just didn't fix the color issuses. Why, I have no idea. They've got time to make the Ewoks look really freaking creepy with the badly CGed eyelids, they'll screw up Vader's redemption with two terrible "No"s (the first one I thought was OK, and everyone made too much of a big deal about. Then a couple of seconds later, the second one. They'll make Obi-Wan's krayt call sound like a drunken frat boy farting and screaming in pain while tripping over something in the hall. Why won't they fix the freaking color of something so obvious as a red lightsaber? The deathstar explosion at the end of ANH is still in black and white, as is the Millenium Falcon going across the galaxy in the background at the end of Empire. Really? Really.
Episode 1 has had a lot of noise reduction applied, and in some instances it really shows. For the most part, however, unless you're looking for it or are super sensitive to that sort of thing, most people won't notice it.
The extras? Mostly stuff you've seen before, even though they claim it all has never been seen before. There were a few new things, but mostly it is stuff that you've never paid to see before. That doesn't mean you haven't seen it on youtube, or on a TV special, or at a convention, etc.
The menus of the discs themselves are garbage. Generic, non-Star-Wars-y, complicated to navigate, too long, and impossible to skip through. They really look like some defaults in someone's blu-ray authoring software. I've never seen such lame menus on any Blu-Ray release, and only worse on the really low-end $5 DVD releases that don't really have menus. Lazy cheap crap. The SW DVDs had much, much, much better menus.
The packaging is also garbage. 100% cardboard, not even any plastic. There are cardboard envelope sleeves for the discs. Not even a garbage spindle to keep the backs of the discs in good condition. The artwork on the container is also pretty much trash. They've got an entire universe of concept art, Ralph McQuarry paintings, production stills, etc. It seems like they surfed the net for the lowest quality SW art they could find and slapped it on the lowest quality packaging materials they could find. I'm sure they saved money. I don't see any reason why I should pay money for it.
There's a lot more that I could gripe about. I may later. My advice: Get them if you don't have any of the movies on DVD. Keep your laserdisc rips or the extra discs from the DVD release with the unaltered originals in VHS quality. If you have previous DVD sets, keep them for the actually decent production values and extras. Pirate the Blu-Rays if you need to. You probably don't need to waste your money if you were disappointed at all at the DVDs. If you hate the special editions, you'll triply hate these Blu-Rays. I don't think we're ever going to get a quality release of these films, and this is probably the best you'll ever get. Whether that is worth it to you or not is up to you.
Seriously, I'm considering returning mine to Amazon.
Summary:
Picture: C, due to colors and other issues.
Sound: A
Extras: D+
Packaging: F
Production Values: D-
Movies and changes: C-
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Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!
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