Pulp Empire

I have to admit, I've seen the poster for Pulp Empire on this site a few times and I immediately dismissed it thinking "Huh? That'll never work." But I ended up stumbling across a few clips on Vimeo tonight including the entire last chapter of the edit and being a fan of both Tarantino and Star Wars, and being intrigued by njvc's choices in the clip I saw, I decided to watch the whole thing.

One of the things I always find most entertaining about Tarantino's films is his oddball choice of music, the bizarre yet genius mix of Motown, surf music, and the occasional Ennio Morricone track that has come to be known as "the Tarantino sound".

Njvc has taken this signature sound and applied it to a cut of The Empire Strikes Back that we've never seen before. It's an arrangement of the narrative that is so unique, even if you were to take away the Tarantino-fied soundtrack, it could be watched on its own merit alone.

What njvc has created here is not quite a Tarantino film and not quite The Empire Strikes Back, but something entirely strange and new, and beautiful. It's very akin to the feeling I get when I watch The Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" playing over it. It feels at once both familiar and alien.

I love radical edits. This kind of fearless fanediting is what I admire the most and it's the type of thing I always endeavored to create when I was editing. It's the concept of "Let's do something completely different with the material..." And njvc has done that successfully.

There's so much I loved about this edit: The non-linear narrative, the character introductions, the split screens, the animation in the cave vision. All inspired work.

But the part that I found to be most improved by this edit (ironically) is widely considered the best and most important in the entire saga. The "I am your father" scene, which is now juxtaposed with Neil Young's "Old Man". The way njvc handled it with the scrolling flashbacks...the father/son parallels. It was just so well done. It even evoked some emotion in me, reminding me of my own relationship with my father and I think that's when art is it's best, when it acts as a mirror for the viewer. So in that way, you've taken THE scene...the most important scene in the entire saga, injected it with an emotional power that elevated what was already there and created a version that surpasses the original (for me), even as iconic a scene as it is.

It's worth the download for that scene alone.

All of that being said, if I had to name a weakness in this edit, it's John Williams. Though he's been relegated to the back burner reasonably well by njvc, it seems the white-bearded maestro keeps trying to creep back in at every opportunity. At times, it sounds like there are two or even three pieces of music playing at once. Not for long, mind you. But it's enough to keep this from getting a perfect audio editing rating.

To be fair, I was wearing head phones while watching, so it may sound better on a TV. It's a tough subject because I know how very, very hard it is to deal with that center channel music in one of Lucas' or Spielberg's films. There's nothing you can really do about it.

Having done 100% audio rebuilds of protracted action scenes, I can tell you, it isn't any fun. It's the same thing that killed my Star Wars: Reborn edits, the frustrating plague of John Williams encroaching into the center channel, ruining something that you know could be so great if only he wasn't there. I always said the greatest gift someone could give to the fanediting community is a clean, music-free audio track with only dialogue and effects for all six Star Wars films...and maybe Indy 4.

But, I know a LOT of work must have been put in by njvc to making Pulp Empire's audio as good as it is at this point.

All in all, you did an amazing job, njvc! I really enjoyed the unique experience you delivered with this edit and I'm hoping you'll do "Inglorious Clones" with Samuel L. Jackson, the ultimate Tarantino/Star Wars connector. There's always the play on "Jango/Django Unchained" you can pilfer too. ;)

--InfoDroid

I really enjoyed this edit. I think that njvc was able to accomplish exactly what he set out to do. The fight scenes and sequence between Vader and Luke was amazing. I would highly recommend this edit to any star wars fan. This community never fails to amaze me, keep up the great work.

Yes, I read other reviews before I got this. And no, the slo-mo did not bother or distract me. The multi panel shots were terrific. Battle of Hoth was a standout sequence.
The loose narrative structure applied quite well to grindhouse cinema of the 70s, which is what Tarentino has made built his career aping. The new jumps in plot also kept me on my toes throughout. I did not notice plot holes so much as missing characters. Uhhh ... Wedge? That was acceptable, however, as it kept the focus on lead characters, and a couple supports. Really nice job juicing Boba Fett's role, by the way.
Music was hit n miss. Sorry, but that last song should have been tossed.
Overall, I really enjoyed this and gave nice reviews on several forum boards, including a link for the trailer.
Quality edit.

njvc deserves an fanedit oscar for this one. If Tarantino saw this he would laugh his ass off saying i wish i have thought of that! I had a smile on my face through out with the music intro's of the main characters,Vaders was the best. And who would think of a Neil Young song in a Star Wars movie,only the brilliant mind of NJVC.This was a new movie experience,having seen Empire so many times before.For any Tarantino/Star wars fans you with love it.And if you dont like this edit you deserve a ball gag like Marcellus had.This could be the start of a genre of Pulp Fictionalizing movies.

Overall, I felt that this was a brilliant edit - there were a couple of niggles, but nothing that should stop anyone from seeking it out and watching it ASAP.

Visuals
+ This is probably the most seamless and stylishly put together FanEdit I've seen. The split-screen Hoth battle especially is excellent and the Tarantino styling is spot-on. Character intros were v cool. Loved the use of B/W.
- Only gripes (and this is incredibly minor) was that I felt there were a couple too many instances of slow-mo.

Audio
+ The song selection was very mostly good and appropriate to the scenes. Loved the Joda-dub/sub work!
- I'm not sure if QT would have used the (admittedly awesome) Chemical Brothers track, and it felt a little out of place given the genre of music used elsewhere. Also, it felt as if there was almost too much new music (I noticed this mostly during the Could-City scenes) - not sure how much of this was due to editing out Williams though.

Narrative
+/- I had a niggling feeling that the reordering of the story could leave first-time viewers scratching their heads. Obviously most people will be coming to the edit already being familiar with the story, so this is probably not an issue.

I seem to have written much more negative than positive in this review, but I'll just stress again that these are all at best minor issues with an incredibly professional piece of work. Well done, njvc!

ps. See it! Now!