Star Wars Revelations

Did you know there are two Star Wars films out this year? There’s the one fans are already queueing up for, but first up is Star Wars Revelations, a 40 minute fan film set in George Lucas’ universe which serves as an impressive demonstration of how far fannish enthusiasm, a universe with plenty of room to play in and modern graphics and animation software can take you.

You can download the entire film as a 250MB Quicktime movie or Windows Media file entirely free of charge, or there are somewhat larger ISO disk images of the film plus commentary tracks and behind the scenes documentaries. (A BitTorrent client is required to download the ISO files, and is strongly recommended for downloading the Quicktime and WMV versions. Share and share alike, people.)

Whatever fans may think of what George Lucas has done with the universe he created nearly 30 years ago, there’s no denying that his willingness to allow the fans to play with his toys so long as they’re not making money and don’t use his characters and setting for “salacious” purposes is admirable.

As Clive Thompson notes in his Slate article about Revelations, there are a few other franchises which could benefit from such openness. It’d be interesting to see what the fans could do with the Trek universe, to take the most obvious example. I realise that all this film-making is in one sense just fanfic writ large, but I think the step from written fanfic to filmed fanfic is a huge step: all of a sudden, you have to measure up to the source material in every respect: not simply visual effects, but costume design, sets, cinematography and acting. (OK, you don’t have to reach the standards of the originals, but as I’ve said elsewhere with regards to HHGTTG I think that people trying to rework material in a visual medium are held to higher standards.)

Revelations may not quite measure up to the original in all those areas, but it’s a heck of a good effort, and I look forward to seeing other people try to pull this off. Heck, there’s umpteen generations of Slayers out there, just waiting for someone to tell their story.