The cheese is why the prequels are fun to watch though! We've all worked through our collective trauma about how trashy the prequels are, now we're ready for good ol fashioned hate watching.
You can destroy the negatives with extra processing but you can't destroy the prints. Lucas has original prints and if he didn't he had the millions to acquire them. If fans did it, Lucas could have.
In hindsight, all of media used to have this "meh, close enough" attitude about it: Vinyl LPs, audiotape, broadcast TV, film, iffy projectors at the local theater, AM radio, it all had limitations well within the range of human perception. Plus, everything the consumer got was a lossy copy of something else. Everything had noise, and everything cost some amount of fidelity no matter what you did. In light of this, "authenticity" is really a No True Scotsman argument, where we argue forever about intent, the optimal fidelity for the time, and what one would have experienced.
Come to think of it, an easy approximation for a time machine is to buy some aviator frames, smear some Vasaline on the lenses, and stuff your ears with some cotton.
If the original trilogy is anything to go by, George Lucas desperately needs a good editor. I can't imagine a longer cut will be anything but worse than what we got...
The "special director's anniversary editions" or whatever the hell they were called were the worst bullshit insult to those of us that grew up with the original trilogy. Fuck you, George Lucas.
Literally his first wife. One reason why New Hope and Empire Strikes Back were so good. Once Lucas got divorced, his screenwriting fell off a cliff.
Also, incidentally, Carrie Fisher became an acclaimed script doctor towards the end of her career. She was rewriting a bunch of her own dialog in Return of the Jedi. She fixed up the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's "Hook". Sister Act, Lethal Weapon 3, Scream 3, Coyote Ugly, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith are also on her resume. She patched up the first Austin Powers movie and saved Mike Myers from himself.
For it to work, he needs to keep his mystery. Like, I don't want to see him collect his laundry. But basically just him going round the galaxy mercilessly hunting down and murdering the crap out of Jedis.
George Lucas should screen this cut of the film at Sodankylä Film Festival in Finland.
That way, he could be feted by the most dedicated of the film buffs. AND experience the Aurora Borealis. Localised entirely on the geographic region he is in.
Everything cool about them is despite George Lucas not because of him. Sure the battles are cool, the CGI scenes are cool, but the prequels were wayyyyyy too much a direct implementation of what Lucas thought was going to be good to ever have been good lol.
The original Star Wars movies were better because Lucas wasn’t famous yet and had to actually listen to the people around him.
Honestly, I’d rather just ditch the terrible plots of both movies and just go have fun in Star Wars Battlefront playing with all the cool hovertanks and robots.
It's got several of them, and that's the only redeeming quality.
I re-watched it recently, and was reminded just how bad it was. I only saw The Phantom Menace in the theatre, and the disappointment kept me away from the releases of the next two installments - money well saved.