Hundreds of Fans Collectively Remade Star Wars; Now They Remake The Empire Strikes Back

For­get grav­i­ty. For­get even irony. The uni­verse knows no greater force, as it were, than the col­lec­tive enthu­si­asm of Star Wars fans. 35 years after the first of them came out, the films’ pow­er to inspire remains unset­tling­ly imme­di­ate and wide­spread. Or at least that goes for the orig­i­nal tril­o­gy of Star Wars movies, the first of which, A New Hope, under­went a pop­u­lar fan-made remake in 2009. The result, Star Wars Uncut, did­n’t come as the project of a sin­gle enter­pris­ing afi­ciona­do plop­ping him­self into the George Lucas seat, but as a ful­ly “crowd-sourced” motion pic­ture assem­bled out of fif­teen-sec­ond clips shot by con­trib­u­tors called to action by one Casey Pugh. The hyp­not­ic result, whose final cut first screened ear­li­er this year and which you can watch above, offers Star Wars as patch­work quilt, the con­struc­tion of its squares rang­ing from delib­er­ate­ly lo-fi (not to men­tion non-delib­er­ate­ly lo-fi) to sur­pris­ing­ly cred­i­ble.

With one down, the next two of those beloved movies await. The Empire Strikes Back Uncut, whose trail­er appears just above, has now offi­cial­ly opened to con­trib­u­tors, who can claim a fif­teen-sec­ond seg­ment of their own to re-cre­ate. They get thir­ty days to sub­mit the fruit of their cin­e­mat­ic labors, and then the entire film re-opens to accept anoth­er round of sub­mis­sions. This might seem like the kind of irrev­er­ent homage that would irk the cre­ator of the orig­i­nal, but Lucas­film has actu­al­ly endorsed the project this time around. Will their involve­ment extin­guish the under­ground scrap­pi­ness of the ear­li­er effort? Will fans choke under the awe­some respon­si­bil­i­ty of rein­ter­pret­ing The Empire Strikes Back, that most respect­ed of all Star Wars prop­er­ties? They’re ques­tions of import to a true believ­er, though that believ­er might take solace in the top-vot­ed reac­tion in Star Wars Uncut’s YouTube com­ments: “Still bet­ter than The Phan­tom Men­ace.”

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

Star Wars as Silent Film

Star Wars is a Remix

Star Wars Retold with Paper Ani­ma­tion

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.