Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace in 3-D

Episode I: The Phantom Menace is back in theaters for a 25th Anniversary (Really? That long ago?) and it's doing really well at the box-office, beating out NEW movies. And I've been hearing "buzz"...like an NPR report on "All Things Considered Weekend" that damned with faint praise (hardly the "reconsideration it promised).

But, it did raise some issues, that led to some actual...thoughts. So, I'm re-running my review of The Phantom Menace when I viewed it in its 3-D version.

Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (in 3-D) (George Lucas, 1999/2012/in perpetuity) "Star Wars" is the one series I was curious to see in 3-D—the clean, simple lines of force (pardon the pun) from the first immersion into those films (a long, long time ago in 1976) was along a line that extended from behind our heads to points close to the center of the screen: the opening titles that flashed, then crept into a distant infinity; hyperspace travel that zipped into that same bulls-eye quadrant; the cavernous, warehouse spaces of the Empirical HQ's; the approaching death-spirals of various death-stars; slaloms through asteroids and skimming over ice-fields. The movies already seemed yearning to stretch 2-D images into three-dimensional spaces, and although Lucas' spacial sense and action lines became increasingly complicated, and precise cutting more extreme, he always kept that sense of background/foreground busyness that leant itself to three-dimensions without (literally) rubbing our noses in it...or poking our eyes with it.

Naturally, they'd start with Episode 1 this time. After all of Lucas' tinkering over the years, 3-D seems like a natural place to go, especially for the reasons already listed, and there's been enough time out of theaters to make projected images seem unique (plus, there's a ready-made audience already grown up on all six films, who may actually prefer the prequels to their predecessors...despite the sneering of their fathers--"Shut UP, Dad!").

But, whatever the design sense going into the films, they were still SHOT flat.  Yes, there's a lot of post-production digital imagery that can be manipulated, but the actors—the live ones, anyway—are still forever tied to the backgrounds on location, and any cutting/pasting/shifting is going to make those portions look as fake as those late-model View-master pix that weren't taken with stereo-cameras on location, and looked instead like cardboard standees in front of a shifted background.

Not sure how they did it—I suspect it's the adding of shaped shadows to facial features and bodies—but, the 3-D effects are convincing and seamless, and although the picture loses some luster due to the lower light-levels (and those damn glasses), they're the same minor annoyances one finds in any 3-D presentation-it goes with the depth-of-territory.  And, as most of the SW films, pains had already been made to make things multi-planed enough to justify the conversion. Some of the speedier foreground elements tend to go rather unmenacingly phantom-like, but those are on rare occasions. 

Some random thoughts:

—The big vista shots, especially with the Naboo city-scapes, tend to look a bit more miniaturish in 3-D—although the sky-scraping Coruscant scenes play very well.

—I also got the impression that some shots which resisted conversion were just replaced with closer shots—the main ones being Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson, who seems to have made the best choice in underplaying his radical Jedi ideologue, although it tends to undermine the character's importance) clucking a Tatooine beast-of-burden into motion, which I was under the impression was done in a fuller shot than the close-up this has, and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor, who had the best acting arc of all the actors in the prequels) doing a spinning lightsaber move seems to have been moved a bit closer than the original.

—I don't remember The Phantom Menace moving as fast as this viewing seemed to. It's still pretty amazing to see how precise the editing is, and yet manage to get all the visual information necessary to follow what's going on, something not helped by the sound mix, which tends to prefer effects impression over clarity.

—Interesting how Keira Knightley blends in the role of Queen Amidala's decoy/hand-maiden with Portman's more formal Queen acting (although, considering Knightley is probably a full foot taller than the miniaturish Portman, shouldn't the instinctual Jedi have noticed the subterfuge a little earlier?).

—The last 20 minutes work like gang-busters with the cross-cutting Battle for Naboo on four fronts—the Gungan invasion by battle-droids, the Padme-led attack on the palace, the attack on the droid-command ship, and the three-sided lightsaber duel, and it's helped immeasurably by John Williams' "Duel of the Fates," which after consisting of a subdued omnipresent sonic wallpaper for most of the film, kicks things into high-gear. 

—Haters are still going to hate it—and, indeed, the fan-boy line has been staunchly adhered to in 3-D reviews—but, the Trade Federation plot resonates a bit more after the NAFTA kerfluffle and the bank meltdowns, and I still like the midi-chlorian idea making Anakin a "virgin birth"—leading me to the thought at the time "what if Jesus Christ turned out to be an asshole?"—even if it was all revealed to be a bio-engineering project by Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith.

No, it ain't perfect—it's a little stiff, with shots of smiles for smiles' sake, and the dialogue clunks along, even if some vital bits of information are slipped in under the radar, along the way. But, as one friend remarked after seeing a student-remixed version of Episode IV, "God, I forgot it was such a cheese-fest." It is. The thing is based on old "Flash Gordon" serials and embraces the sensibilities of that style of ham-fisted major-key film-making. It's a fantasy film, not a Guide For Living, and subtlety was never in the blue-print. It is a small, quaint little conceit-film-series made Epic by the adoration of its fans. 

Yet, for some reason, George Lucas is to blame for the pushing of "product" (I haven't read any of the 3-D reviews, but the word "greed" keeps popping up in them), when it's the marketplace that drives these things. If people stopped buying this stuff, he wouldn't keep tossing it out there, revamping, tinkering, and attempting to make the films transition across the decades and technologies. We have met the Sith, and they are Us. And, boy, are we dumb!

2024 "Reconsideration"

As Roger Ebert said in his review of The Phantom Menace, "If it were the first 'Star Wars' movie, 'The Phantom Menace' would be hailed as a visionary breakthrough. But this is the fourth movie of the famous series, and we think we know the territory."

Just so. 

But, there were a couple things that Lucas hadn't really addressed in his Universe filled with exotic creatures and wondrous sights.

One of them was fashion, not only in apparel, but also in architecture. The previous films the former was dominated by uniforms and casual wear, and for the latter—other than the cloud-city of Bespin and the militaristic gloss of the Death Stars—everything else was supposed to suggest an improvised environment cobbled together with wire and spit.

Now, there had to be vast functioning cities of well-engineered design with an established history. And the clothes, for the higher end of dignitaries and royalty, had to have an air of regality and authority, where no one was allowed to dress like a scruffy nerf-herder. Nobody really complained about that.

The other was ethnicity. In a bio-diverse Uni-sphere, it was a little improbable that everybody would sound either American of British (the only exception being Millennium Falcon co-pilot Nien Nunb, who spoke in Kenyan). And so, for the sake of diversity, understand, accents were provided for the Gungans, the Trade Federation, and for Watto, the junk dealer on Tatooine. Character accents (that is, the way they speak)—eschewing the very recognizable French, German, and Italian kind—were treated as if they were racial slurs (they are considered offensive, still, in that NPR "reconsideration" above). But, the binary Yank/Brit accents are a bit limiting for such a Universe, don't you think? Shouldn't it be a bit more diverse? To American audiences, apparently not. It's not in our comfort zone. As I said at the end of the piece above, boy, are we dumb.

But, hey, it's just a movie. It's not like anybody treats it like a religion or anything.

Right?

That's right. "We think we know the territory."

 

What we don't know is how damn sensitive we are.