Posted by u/yotothyo, it was intended as a way to enjoy Star Wars while using the black-and-white to study film lighting. The post has been circle-jerked for calling it “Kurosawa mode” despite it being a fun experiment to understand cinematic lighting and visual storytelling.
Been watching Star Wars in "Kurosawa mode" and it's awesome
Turned the color all the way down on my tv so it's black and white and switched the language track to Japanese w/English subtitles.
Makes them feel even more like the hidden fortress/flash gorden serials they were meant to be.
It's awesome. I'm going to watch all of them this way. A neat way to view them in a new way if you seen them a million times.
The phantom menace is particularly interesting because it actually looks really good in black and white (better then in color in my opinion) and the Japanese dialog covers up the bad voice acting of the originals. Young anakins voice actor for example plays it a little more low key and I actually enjoyed the character a little more. The cg looks better too.
As an added bonus on Disney plus the alternate language tracks line up with the lip flap so it doesn't look like a bad overdub.
Anyway, super super cool experiment highly recommend it.