How many re-masters/re-makes of Return Of The Jedi will there be before George Lucas orders ILM to get rid of that really-obvious attempt to hide the make-up glitch on the side of the Emperor’s right jowel as he tries to seduce Luke Skywalker to the dark side in his throne room on Death Star II?

It didn’t get fixed in the 1997 edition or the 2004 re-spin, anyway. Banthas may now prowl the arid plains of Tatooine, Greedo may now shoot first (whatever your opinion of that), and huge imperial CGI civilisations sprawl before us that were only spoken of in the original versions…but every time I see that sizzling paint-out at the thrilling conclusion of Jedi, my enjoyment of the film is interrupted by the notion of some poor sod sitting up til 4am at a darkened ILM in 1983, painting the celluloid one frame at a time, and swearing revenge on Ian McDiarmid’s make-up artist.

I admit, one can be too perfectionist, and if you’re a director dealing with the work of yourself as a younger person, it’s not necessarily wise. The past is another galaxy – not only do they do things differently there, they often do them better. It can be embarrassing to watch a more ‘mature’ director ironing the charm and idiosyncracy out of work that he did under pressure.

I’m not talking here about the ring-around-the-death-star-explosion in Star Wars mark II (1977/97/04), which is now the poster-shot for the anti-revisionist lobby, but rather that species of tweak where the director attempts to retro-fit the psychological landscape of old projects with new conclusions and tonality – and sometimes threatens to wreck work that he is unable, for whatever reason, to entirely re-shoot.

One example is the omission of many of the more harrowing scenes of domestic break-up between Richard Dreyfuss and Teri Garr in the the 1980 ‘Special Edition’ of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. These scenes contain some of Spielberg’s rawest grappling with the spectre of his parents’ divorce that informs so many of his narratives, yet most of it is absent from the 1980 re-cut.

Since CE3K was a huge hit, these upsetting but also very hard-hitting scenes were surely not removed for financial or market-based reasons. Did Spielberg consider the Roy Neary divorce back-story a necessary catharsis in 1977 for something that he had come to terms with by 1980? And was that part of CE3K’s narrative just – for him - the remnant debris of that struggle?

My own parents were in the throes of divorce when the film came out, and Roy Neary’s woes gave me a deeper bond with the film that I missed in later editions. If nothing else, retaining them would have helped to explain why Neary boards the mothership – abandoning his unbelieving wife and children - on what may well be a one-way journey to the stars. In any case, it advances the plot more than the grafted on, Ron Cobb-designed mothership interior of the CE3K:SE.

To boot, Spielberg is now said to regret killing the mystery of what’s inside the mothership, evidenced by the absence of those tacked-on SFX in the more recent '30th Anniversary Edition’.

Spielberg has now been married to Kate Capshaw for 17 years – if they get divorced, are the Neary fight-scenes going back into Close Encounters for the 35th Anniversary Edition? CE3K, like the Star Wars saga, is more akin to software than a movie, now at version 4.0.

If I talk about Casablanca with a friend, it’s a fair bet that we have a common point of reference as to which movie we’re talking about, but as the Digital Bits review of the second (1998) CE3K revision states: you'd need a blueprint just to figure out what's "new" footage, what's original footage and what was seen only in the syndicated TV version. And there has been another version since.

The aforementioned US network TV edits are another source of endless confusion and movie-versioning, since these – usually extended – versions tend to offer additional or unseen footage in exchange for the excision of instances of profanity, nudity, blasphemy or anything else the network feels might cause their conservative mid-west audience to explode in front of their TVs.

These often-eccentric edits can occasionally worm their way tenaciously from the black-market into proper commercial releases, as happened with the 1989 network edit of David Lynch’s Dune (1984).

Though a huge fan of Dune, and glad to have access to the extra footage in the 1989 edit (the ‘little-maker’ scene is fascinating, if revolting), I can see why Lynch got his name crudely changed to the classic and disavowing ‘Alan Smithee’ on the opening credits: the entire early segment is nothing but a series of frequently-repeated storyboards illustrating a male voice-over that replaces Virginia Madsen’s narration and image; the scene with Gurney (Patrick Stewart) singing his ballad should have been trod firmly and irrecoverably into the cutting-room floor and the 189 minutes is predictably flabby and frequently baffling, even for fans.

Nonetheless the 1989 network cut finally became available to buy legally, presumably in response to clear fan-demand (and much illegal downloading). If you know nothing about the original 1984 film and buy the 1989 cut by mistake, you will have a very false impression of the director’s intentions.

I recognise that my wish that films be ‘signed-off’ definitively at release may be against the spirit of the Web 2.0 age, where all is resurrected, reimagined, recut and YouTubed, to be watched while we eat our sacred-cow-burgers. Nor am I against putting long-standing grievances right…

The 2007 re-release of Blade Runner made sensible use of CGI and excised footage to create a truly definitive version of a longstanding sci-fi classic, whilst the alternate version of Alien³ in the superb Alien Quadrilogy boxed-set finally made some sense of what the hell was going on in Fiorina 161; additionally I have enjoyed the restraint of the medium-quality CGI/SFX substitutions in the Star Trek Remastered releases.

The problem is the raft of unneccessary re-edits and re-releases that ride in on the good reputation of projects like those, as films imitate software in yet a second way: that they must be constantly updated - a lodestar for rights-holders desperate to turn consumer movie consumption from an 'ownership' into a 'rental' model.

Martin writes his (mostly) sci-fi column every Friday at Den Of Geek.