Empire Strikes Back Gets A Quentin Tarantino Style Fan Edit
You probably have something very important to do with your day, like paint your house before the rainy season starts, run a bunch of vital errands, or pick up a loved one at the hospital. In reality, I should have said, you had something important to do today, because whatever it was that you were going to do, that’s going to have to wait. You have to love the combination of the internet and free time because it so often results in things like Pulp Empire, which, if the title didn’t clue you in already, is The Empire Strikes Back (the best of the original trilogy) completely reedited in the distinct directorial style of Quentin Tarantino. And yes, it’s as good as that sounds.
The full movie is 89-minutes long, so before you dive in, you should watch the trailer, which is embedded above for your convenience, to get a better idea of exactly what you’re in for. Then again, you all are an intrepid bunch, so it won’t surprise me if you simply jump in head first without even testing the waters (that’s not a bad strategy, because the water is just damn fine).
This video (or videos, as it’s broken into chunks, or chapters, like the Kill Bill saga) comes from FanEdits.org and was cut together in brilliant fashion by someone named NJVC (somehow I doubt that was a name bestowed by his or her parents at birth, but I could be wrong, people name their kids things like Blue and North West these days, so what the hell do I know).
The title may be Pulp Empire, but right away you notice that this cuts across a wide swath of Tarantino’s filmography (I guess they could also have called it Empire Dogs). All of his trademark devices are present and accounted for. You have his use of black and white for aesthetic and thematic reasons; the score is varied and eclectic, full of unusual choices from unexpected genres, yet it is always somehow perfectly suited to the action onscreen; and perhaps chief among these, Pulp Empire employs Tarantino’s traditional nonlinear method of storytelling. As you can see from these videos, you start at the end, right after Vader reveals to Luke that he is his father. And then you spend the rest of movie finding out how they get to that point.
More than anything, this is really damn clever. And beyond that, there are a lot of fan projects that have a good, unique idea at their core, but the follow through often doesn’t carry all the way to the end. Pulp Empire, however, is fantastic from start to finish, and is, above all, shockingly well edited and put together for something a fan did on their own. So big props to NJVC for doing something awesome. We hope he does more. Now if we can only get Tarantion to make that sci-fi movie he was talking about.
And we’re not entirely sure about how legal this is (fan stuff like this falls into a kind of grey area fair use wise), so you might want to watch this sooner rather than later. Like I said earlier, whatever else you had planned today will wait.
