Lord Starfish said:
This is true… but then the original Emperor in that shot was an old woman with the eyes of a chimpanzee, dubbed over by someone who didn’t sound even remotely like Ian McDiarmid. The change could certainly have been executed better, but I think I prefer the new version to the old here (minus the afforementioned stupid dialogue change).Yeah. I mean, come on, defending the original Emperor hologram is just dumb. It makes you look like a fanatical purist and it almost undermines our entire argument for the originals being better as it gives Lucas apologists plenty of ammo to say we’re blinded by nostalgia goggles and would literally say anything different is worse, even if it is clearly better.
Or maybe you have an extremely negative response to someone’s opinion because you’re biased and have already decided which one you prefer? I get what you’re trying to say in principle, but there’s no strong objective defense about this change.
The original does indeed break the continuity with RoTJ to such a degree that a properly re-done Emperor could have been the most difficult SE change to argue against. I would eat my OOT-loving words if they nailed the hologram update. It ends up not being something we need to worry about, because every single aspect of the update was botched.
Seeing fat, rubber-face Ian instead of layer of white makeup Ian is nearly (but not quite) as reminiscent of the prequels as “Weesa free”, “NOOOO”, the dug thing, and creepy ghost Anakin. The performance and dialogue changes are also crap. It’s frustrating enough that they got the look and sound of the Emperor so wrong in RoTS. But oh well, it’s not as if it’s the main flaw of the film or would have saved it. But why would we want to be reminded of that in, arguably, the strongest Star Wars film ever produced?
As there are two rather imperfect choices, I’ll take the one that was a product of its time, not and not revisionist. It carries OOT era flaws, yes, but in exchange for just as many prequel era flaws.