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The page contains mine and others
review of Star Wars episode I The Phantom Menace.
't overly dissapointed.
I can fully understand your initial feelings toward the movie,
but let's
see why you would walk away from the movie feeling like youwould
want
more. I had that feeling too, but couldn't understand why for
the
longest time. I went through my mental list trying to figure out
what it
was. It had the best Special FX, and great characters, a good
plot line
(if you need any evidence of that I suggest you read the novel,
it
delves a little deeper), and over all it was a hell of a good
time.
So why did I feel like I didn't get what I wanted?
And therein lay the answer. Lucas is establishing a whole epic
storyline with this movie. He has faced the challenge that this
is
where it all begins. If you were a filmmaker you would go crazy
trying
to decide what needs to go into this movie. There are so many
dimensions to it, and only a couple of hours to do it in. So what
resulted was at least 3 hours worth of information cut to fit
2 hours.
What do I mean? Well review the first Trilogy, essentially not
much
happens, you have a few settings and a few scenes with a lot of
action,
and a very simple plot. (i.e. Luke finds mentor, discovers girl
in
trouble, finds roudy space pilot start running from the Empire.
Get
captured by evil Sith Lord free the Girl, Loses Mentor, escapes
with
Girl, destroys Battlestation) Very Simple. Episode I doesn't have
the
luxury of simplicity and therefore is forced to show many scenes
that
are short. A good example is the space battle. The design and
graphics
were great, but I wanted to see more! I wanted to see those damn
droid
fighters paste the Naboo. And Anakins accidental attack confused
me.
The Naboo can't get their blasts past the sheilds but a fighter
can just
waltz into the heart of the control ship? A funny scene to be
sure, but
lets see, Obi-wan said that when he first met Anakin we was already
a
great starpilot. Yeah, maybe by accident.
The same with the Saber duel and Maul in general. What an imposing
character! But he only had 3 lines and 2 major scenes. That's
less
than Boba Fett! Having known a great deal about this movie I realized
they had cut 3 of his scenes including shots from the Tatooine
duel.
Lucas was just trying to keep this movie around the 2 hour mark
and it
resulted in the fans lusting for more.
Daryl is right though, once you see it twice, you start to get
a
feel of how intricate the story is, and you start to understand
the
reason Lucas has done what he has. I praised Lucas when he racked
Jar
Jar's gonads on the barrel of the Battle Tank, he's so damn annoying
that at least if he didn't die he wont procreate. But I didn't
hate him
like I wish he wasnt' in the movie. It was more like Obi-wan's
feelings,
he's annoying and we wish he wasn't here, but he was a good character,
and I didn't find him as hard to understand as everyone said.
The movie was good, and has done it's part inasmuch as setting
us up
for the most kickass epic of all time. And to close my review
I'll
quote Palpatine in the biggest understatement of the year: "We
will keep
an eye on your career."
-James
News concerning Phantom Menace Box office and reactions
5-21-99
Kids Fuel 'Phantom Menace' Success
.c The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The ``Star Wars'' prequel was poised to shatter its own single-day triumph and vanquish weekend box office records as theaters braced today for a torrent of children.
``Show me the kids!'' 20th Century Fox distribution chief Tom Sherak said Friday, refusing to predict how much the George Lucas film would rake in by Sunday's final showings.
Youngsters could be the key to the success of ``Star Wars: Episode 1 -- The Phantom Menace.''
Some movie critics complained that the film's 8-year-old central character and sidekick Jar Jar Binks were annoying and would appeal only to children. If so, kids could send the movie over the top.
Movie analysts expect the film to gross $120 million to $140 million by the end of its five-day opening frame.
The movie made a record $28.5 million on its Wednesday debut. On Thursday the box office tally was $12.3 million (a second-day drop-off was not unexpected by the industry), bringing the two-day tally to $40.8 million.
The kid factor should push Saturday's grosses beyond Wednesday, setting a new one-day record, according to industry estimates. The Wednesday take beat the $26.1 million earned in 1997 by previous title holder ``Lost World: Jurassic Park.''
5-20-99
Star Wars Breaks Opening Day Record
.c The Associated Press
By MICHAEL FLEEMAN
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The new ``Stars Wars'' movie made $28.5 million on its opening day, shattering the box-office record set in 1997 by ``The Lost World: Jurassic Park.''
``Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace'' opened at 2,970 locations, some of which have been playing the movie round-the-clock since 12:01 a.m. Wednesday.
The 24-hour receipts totaling $28,542,349 beat the one-day record of $26.1 million set by ``Lost World'' on a Sunday of Memorial Day weekend in 1997, box office tracker Exhibitor Relations Co. reported Thursday.
``Phantom Menace'' also topped the ``Lost World'' opening-day record of $21.6 million, set on the Friday of that weekend.
Analysts said ``Phantom Menace'' should gross $100 million to $140 million by the end of its five-day opening Sunday, setting more records.
The movie is so big that some employers decided to not fight the Force and just pay to send their workers to theaters.
``Everyone wants to see this movie, and we thought it would
be fun to send our whole company,'' said Steven J. Lund, president
and chief executive of Provo, Utah-based cosmetics seller Nu Skin
Enterprises, which reserved a theater for all 1,600 employees
and one guest each.
New 'Star Wars' Succeeds Visually
.c The Associated Press
By TED ANTHONY
NEW YORK (AP) -- It is 22 years later now, an entire generation after a thunderous space opera set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away changed the look of the cinematic future forever.
In 1977, George Lucas and his young crew at Industrial Light & Magic introduced a new sci-fi epoch -- one of shiny, white-uniformed storm troopers, a shiny black-helmeted overlord and a vision of space like none before. But it also presented a novel vision of well-worn spaceships, dented droids and no shortage of grime. An old-style story with an altogether new look.
Today, with two decades of staggering technological innovation at his command, Lucas' encore poses a vexing challenge: telling a fresh ``Star Wars'' story that unfolds a generation before his initial trilogy -- yet still manages to dazzle a post-''Blade Runner,'' post-''Terminator,'' post-''Matrix'' audience.
Visually, he has succeeded. When it comes to production design and special effects, ``Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace,'' which opened Wednesday, is as far from the original ``Star Wars'' as an iMac is from an Apple II.
As it must be. A sci-fi epic, after all, is made or broken by the way it looks, and the sophisticated eye of the multiplex moviegoer would settle for nothing less.
```Star Wars' broke through the envelope, and every subsequent picture has built on that,'' says Paul M. Sammon, author of ``Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner.''
In ``Phantom Menace,'' the effects of the past 20 years of moviemaking are evident. Though it riffs off the original trilogy in music and plot, the new film is a sweep of images and props and tableaux that could barely have been imagined, much less executed, in the summer of 1977.
Computer-generated star ship dogfights ring far truer than their motion-controlled model ancestors. Shadows are everywhere, thanks to crack computer graphics and plotting. Tatooine's Sahara-like landscape (Tunisia, actually, with visual nods to Cecil B. DeMille) is far more textured and layered and gritty than it was in the original.
The other worlds conceived by design director Doug Chiang and production designer Gavin Bocquet -- the regal, Ottoman-like capital of Naboo and the futuristic urban-sprawl planet of Coruscant, a latter-day vision of Fritz Lang's silent classic ``Metropolis
are the film's highlight. And the Galactic Senate, a mushroom-shaped arena where each planet's representatives glide to the center in hovercraft to speak, is an achievement.
``The new footage reminds you how old the old `Star Wars' is,'' Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia, wrote in Newsweek this month.
``Star Wars,'' arriving nine years after Stanley Kubrick's groundbreaking but intentionally sterile ``2001: A Space Odyssey,'' was in many ways the first film that created a spacefaring society where items aged and rusted and got dirty. Not so the original ``Star Trek,'' Gene Roddenberry's utopian vision of space, where the USS Enterprise sparkled and dust rarely reared its head, even on strange new worlds.
But here was the Millennium Falcon, a bucket of bolts that seemed to reach warp speed with only spit, chewing gum and Han Solo's arrogance. Here was the Death Star's garbage chute, replete with gooey leachate and a bottom-sucking beastie. And here was R2-D2, a dented, scuffed droid that Luke Skywalker bought from a Jawa junk heap like an old AMC Pacer.
``The Empire Strikes Back'' (1980) intensified the visual richness, concocting an ice-encased rebel base and a bayou-like planet that was home to the Jedi master Yoda. ILM was refining its techniques, and it showed: Scenes were drenched with color, and the battle between Luke and Darth Vader in the gray reactor core of Lando Calrissian's otherwise dazzling Cloud City was awash in shadow and silhouette.
``Return of the Jedi'' (1984) added the Ewoks' forest planet and Jabba the Hutt's seedy lair. By then, many of the creatures had taken on a decidedly Muppet look and some of the Ewok abodes resembled parts of Walt Disney World's Adventureland.
``In the first movie, we were on the sand thing, it was all kind of a brown color. The second movie, I put it in the snow and it was all kind of white, and we did the green, swampy kind of thing. The third ... a forest was really the only thing I had left,'' Lucas said in a 1995 interview released with the video edition of the trilogy.
``There's a whole color and environment motif,'' he said. ``The good guys are all earth colors and the bad guys are all colorless.''
Despite the trilogy's innovations, Lucas and ILM were working with toddler technology. Their models could simulate reality only so far. The storm troopers, and even Darth Vader, seemed polished with Lemon Pledge and tended to resemble plastic action figures. Same story at times with the Death Star, the Imperial tie fighters and the rebel X-wings.
``It worked then. It wouldn't work now. It needs more texture,'' says Stan Bertheaud, an architect and screenwriter at Woodbury University in California who studies production design and cinematic visions of the future. ``There's just more on the screen today. There's more stuff up there happening in the background.''
The film that truly pioneered stuffing ``stuff'' into the background came five years after ``Star Wars,'' courtesy of director Ridley Scott.
Scott had already pushed things visually in 1979's shadow-drenched ``Alien,'' which featured its own dark, steam-belching ship and an oozy, predatory extraterrestrial. In 1982, even as the otherwise mediocre ``Tron'' was introducing computer graphics into production design, Scott changed the look of science fiction forever with ``Blade Runner,'' a muddled retelling of a Philip K. Dick story. Many consider it the most visually rich sci-fi movie ever made.
``Blade Runner'' built a future -- Los Angeles, 2019 -- that used today's reference points as its foundation. Familiar brand names abounded: Cuisinart, Coca-Cola, even Atari (a not-so-prescient move, it turns out). Colored neon was deployed liberally to evoke the gaudy look of Tokyo's Ginza strip. Futuristic architecture was retrofitted with older building styles to create the layered look of a society with a past.
This was eons ahead of the flat, metallic futures of 1950s sci-fi. Sammon calls it ``one of the most compulsively detailed motion pictures ever made.''
``Blade Runner upped the ante,'' the author says. ``It presented a flood of visual information. And the audience was left to sort out the function of these things for themselves.''
``Blade Runner'' paved the way for ``Terminator'' (1984) and ``Terminator 2: Judgment Day'' (1991). It made possible ``Total Recall'' (1990) and the post-apocalyptic Western landscape of ``The Postman'' (1997). It inspired Luc Besson's ``The Fifth Element'' (1997), which postulated a futuristic, ``Metropolis''-like New York City complete with rusted yellow hovercabs, cloud-level skyscrapers and a flying Chinese-junk lunch cart that floats up to Bruce Willis' apartment window to sell him noodles.
Concurrently, a darker vision of the modern city was developing in the ``Batman'' movies, in which production design was crucial to the plot. Batman was a product of Gotham City; it had to be as dark and ghoulish as he was.
The first ``Batman,'' under production designer Anton Furst, drew heavily from film noir depictions of the American city between 1945 and 1959. But it also drew in fantastic, almost cartoonish architecture, a mix of Gothic, neoclassical and art deco.
In ``Batman,'' the vertical stone megalopolis pushes down upon its citizenry. Steam belches continually; decay is everywhere. With ``Batman Returns,'' production designer Bo Welch conceived a slightly different Gotham, a city of neo-fascist architecture, with its cold-stone ``Hall of Records'' and its even colder Gotham Square, a soulless reinterpretation of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. And in ``Batman Forever,'' the architecture functions as overt monstrosity -- giant globes and structures that are lovingly built only to come tumbling down in the urban chaos.
By the time ``Phantom Menace'' came around, then, the visual requirements for a film -- effects, props and scenery -- had evolved. Lucas knew that. He didn't want to simply re-create the look of the trilogy; he wanted it to be mere foundation.
``We've been saturated with designs from the original `Star Wars' look for over 20 years,'' Chiang says. ``So I was really pleased when George asked for something new, such as chrome, sleek shapes, Art Nouveau and Art Moderne. That's when I realized that 'Episode I' was going to be something new and not just a reworking of the earlier material.''
Chiang, who drew on everything from 1950s car designs to African art for his vision, describes the age in which ``Phantom Menace'' unfolds as ``polished, individualized and refined -- perhaps even overly designed.''
``It could be called a `craftsman's era,''' Chiang says.
He began creating images in 1994, and Bocquet started work in 1996. In the end, 250 computer artists worked for two years, and 95 percent of the frames in ``Phantom Menace'' included digital work -- three times as many as any previous movie, according to 20th Century Fox.
The result was a production with the detail and architectural impact of ``Batman,'' a layered, more visual, ``Blade Runner''-like look and special effects that ILM spent years perfecting on non-Lucas films.
It has droids that roll into battle and uncoil with a come-get-me stance; a computer-generated supporting character; the streamlined Naboo star ship, with a fluidity inspired by the liquid metal of ``Terminator 2''; a double light saber used as a martial-arts tool; and tie fighters that seem more predatory than plastic.
This is the look of ``Phantom Menace.'' Sure, the good guys are still vaguely earthen. But the orange-black countenance of Darth Maul, who resembles Kiss' Gene Simmons after a particularly long gig, is anything but colorless.
``If the story's good, then that's the main thing,'' Woodbury University's Bertheaud says. ``But the film loses credibility with an audience if the production design is lacking.''
By drawing from the best of the past 20 years and adding its own newer visions, ``Phantom Menace'' far surpasses anything that its ``Star Wars'' predecessors had to offer. Which, of course, is what audiences demand.
Oh: And the haircuts are a lot better as well.
