The Empire Strikes Back - Harmy’s Despecialized 2.0 version. I love this movie. I think it was lhb here on MZ who once called it the greatest 80’s fantasy movie ever, and I totally agree. It’s magnificent. It suffers a bit from being a middle act where it can’t really stand alone without the other two films. But it has the best writing, acting, and especially dialogue of any Star Wars movie by a long shot. And Darth Vader is at his most devilishly villainous in this outing and it is so much fun!
An interesting technical side note:
Harmy’s version is primarily sourced from the official blu ray. We know the official blu rays have some seriously screwed up color timing with clipped highlights, crushed blacks, incredibly unnatural blue and magenta pushes, etc. Harmy did his best to make a more natural and accurate color palette, but at the time there wasn’t a lot of truly reliable info about the original theatrical color timing. Since then a number of fan projects to restore the film from original 35mm prints have been under way. I have a very rough “Grindhouse” copy scanned entirely from a theatrical print. It’s beautiful and actually has more fine detail than the blu ray but it also has a LOT of print damage and was pretty severely faded to red. They did some color correction on it but it’s definately still too pink.
Anyway, after watching ESB Despecialized, I popped in the Grindhouse version and skimmed through for fun and I realized something. The official Blu-ray, (and thus also Harmy’s version) are often too bright. Like, it looks like scenes have been artificially brightened. This is most apparent on Hoth in Echo Base. In the original film echo base has VERY dark, moody lighting with lots of deep shadows and atmosphere. You can tell the person in charge of lighting worked really hard and the result is beautiful. This is almost entirely destroyed in many scenes in the official version. I’ve posted a few screencaps below. I’m working from an iPad and had to go with what I could scrounge by searching online so these aren’t necessarily the BEST examples, but I think they help make my point. But when you watch them in motion it’s a HUGE difference.
Keep in mind the Grindhouse is definitely a little too red and
probably a little overly contrasty. But the original film is one top and the official Blu Ray is on bottom. Also, in the very last pic, look at how insanely unnatural the little red lights on the bottom of the Falcon look in the blu ray.