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This is what The Empire Strikes Back would look like as a Bond movie

This is what The Empire Strikes Back would look like as a Bond movie

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The Star Wars opening crawl is probably the most famous film opening in history, but while the hand-cranked yellow text is memorable, it's hardly stylish. This video from Kurt Rauffer changes that, reimagining the intro sequence for The Empire Strikes Back in the style of the second-most famous film opening — that of Bond movies. The result is a hyper-stylized tweaking of the Bond formula, replacing guns and girls with spaceships and Sith lords.

Rauffer has used long and languid shots of some of Star Wars' core iconography, zooming slowly in on lightsabers, snowspeeders, and Darth Vader's helmet. The Death Star trench run, the pivotal moment in the previous movie, is rendered in red and blue wireframe, a hyper-stylized version of the movie's '70s-era user interfaces, and there's even a nod to Luke's famous fall in Cloud City after he reject's Vader's truth.

The video, which serves as part of Rauffer's student thesis at New York's School for Visual Arts, only falls down slightly in music choice. It's set against Radiohead's "Spectre," a rejected song for the Bond movie of the same name, and while the track certainly sounds Bond-ish, it feels a touch too Earthly to go alongside Star Wars' swashbuckling sci-fi. Even so, the effect works, and makes me want to see a reversal featuring Bond movie stories explained by block yellow text. "It is a dark time for MI6..."


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