Boy, does TPM stink

I’ve watched the prequels a few times over the years and i think they get better when you read all the novels, and all the side-novels about the stuff happening around them. They help to fill it out a bit. But the one thing I wish they took more time on was the CGI. Some of the battles look so dated now. Presumably it looked okay when it was released which just shows you how quickly technology moves on, because it wasn’t all that long ago they came out. But it’s wierd, because the original trilogy still looks fine. I don’t think that has dated at all — they should have just stuck with the models and the matt background paintings!

Maybe I’m just an old fogey, because I feel that way about the marvel comics as well... I think the old comics with the hand-drawn art give you a nice nostalgic feeling. The new ones can sometimes look too computery for me

 

I can tell you this has been the most consistent complaint about the films other than the dialogue since the films came out. They looked like crap back then. Consider the Geonosis battle in Attack of the Clones--that came out the same year we got Helms Deep in LOTR Two Towers. Helms Deep looks and feels real, it still holds up very, very well considering it's age. People complained that Attack of the Clones looked like a PS2 game back in 2002, and it hasn't aged well at all.

TPM I find actually holds up the best. They used a lot of real sets for Naboo, went to Italy and Tunisia for pretty extensive amount of time, and used more models than ROTJ. Contrast to ROTS which was filmed 100% in studio even though it has more locations than the previous two films.

 

Clones was the first big feature film shot 100% digital.
Phantom was still shot on 35mm (except for one scene) film since the tech was not ready in 97.

The difference in quality betweem Clones and Sith is striking imo. Really shows how fast the tech developed in 2-3 years.

 

The sad thing is this was pretty much true the very first time. Boo!

The good things are Lucas is so masterful and conveying speed, Williams is beyond human with cues, the effects almost all work and hold up (though GL I'm fairly sure has touched up a bit from the theatrical, not complaining as long as false puppet Yoda was removed you can make Jar Jar shoot first for all I care) and the patented Lucas documentary film style work to make it "real" emotionally.
YAY!

 

Clones was the first time that George Lucas used his film to advance technology.
Prior to that I would contend he used and invented technology in order to advance his films.

By doing the former he short changed it and I think it spread to the entire production in a "we'll fix it in post" mindset sort of fashion.

AOTC is my current favorite prequel though because no matter what it does horribly it is totally being a straight up a Star Wars movie while it does it and when it works (aka Obi-Wan Kenobi Batman Detective and the end, Screensaver fest though it might be) it is pretty awesome.

Disappointed because finally we got to the the Clone War that I'd been imagining for over 20 years at that point and it was like that skirmish and some incredible background of no consequence to open ROTS until cartoons years after the fact.

--- Double Post Merged, Jun 14, 2018, Original Post Date: Jun 14, 2018 ---

Sort of disagree we were waiting on Anakin's story. What me and my friends were interested in was the Clone War and Vader hunting down the Jedi. Sure Anakin's fall is a big part of that but it was a side item not the entrée which fuels some of the disappointment because the main things a lot of us were looking forward to and imagining were more touched on in passing to focus on a romance that most observers would rate between clunky and doesn't work at all, a kid's story that is pretty ancillary, and what I think is a poorly executed fall all with dicey performances liberally sprinkled throughout and lots of Screensaver like backgrounds and 2/3 filmed on primitive digital film which combine to make this trilogy appear to occur in a different universe entirely than the originals.

So for me there were elements (not particularly well executed) that I had anticipated and other story elements that I can honestly say no I wasn't looking forward to at all.

Hell, without the Clone Wars series I think it is tough to even argue Anakin and Obi-Wan were good friends.

Idea for story is strong at its boiled down basic "The Fall of Anakin Skywalker", the actual story less so or at least it's focus, the execution of the story another rung or two down the ladder to my tastes.

 

Or the love is an inch deep even if it is a mile wide.

I despise Alien3 with a white hot passion but keep watching the series even though only one has been decent at best since and I've gone on to really like Fincher's work after the fiasco as well.

Sometimes a movie just doesn't work for you and you have to move forward.

 

Well, I personally own a copy of the The Phantom Menace and have owned a DVD copy since it came out.

While there were some things about The Phantom Menace that are forgettable, there are a lot of things that I really liked!

I loved Darth Maul, the double-bladed lightsaber, the Jedi Council and Palpatine rising to power. I liked both Naboo and Coruscant. Seeing Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi was a master stroke! Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn was really cool, too. Loved all of that! Liked the cameo of Jabba during the podrace. Liked Aurra Sing, and the Tusken Raiders shooting at the podracers. Enjoyed the heck out of that! Natalie Portman and Keira Knightley in the same movie, practically playing the same character! Loved that, and wished they could have extended that out a few movies. Liked Watto and the fact that mind tricks didn't work on him. Liked the new ship designs (sleeker and less "used"). Loved all of the side glances between characters, especially on Naboo as they are discussing the blockade, and later between Jedi Council members as they discuss Anakin. In fact, I try to count them all as they happen (Side Look Counter). The pod-race itself was Okay; a Star Wars version of a motor vehicle race. What an interesting concept!

After thinking about all of this - what I really liked, what gives? The enjoyable parts far outweigh the low points, and I find myself thinking "this movie really wasn't half bad after all."

 

No. We just watched The Matrix a month before TPM. The difference was pretty big.
TPM was one side-step away from entering into Wing Commander (which had Mark Hammil) video game territory.







Cheers,
Jayson

 

I think basically the OT and PT both look fine and of their time. The puppets and alien prosthetics in the original are as obvious as any cgi in the prequels, the ill fitting storm trooper plastic armour in New Hope, the jerky stop motion of the walkers in Empire. None of this puts me off because it is used imaginatively, likewise the cgi in the Prequels and I just love how those movies look, I find them a pleasure to look at. Lucas took to cgi because he couldn't do what he wanted any other way.

 

For me, the CGI is a bigger problem because the lighting is off between the live and VFX components. This in itself isn't a huge deal, but with how present the CGI components are, it's constant at a rate of almost every minute.

With the originals, the craft employed was well known and the lighting was rarely off between matte paintings and live or stop-motion components.

With the CGI, it was just pushing the boundary far too much for a craft that just wasn't that mature yet. What Lucas wanted was basically what we have now, but he wanted it 20 years ago.

While the originals are often held as launching the SFX boom, and that has truth to it, they were foremost the climax of methods employed for 40 years in Hollywood and were an example of some of the most talented in their fields pushing their crafts to their absolute limit.

So while we can see the edges in both films, the older is infrequent (mostly just group shots of aliens, some blue screen moments, and a couple stop-motion scenes), while the newer is frequent (any shot with a large backdrop, every shot with Jar-Jar, and almost every creature and mass volume extras in the film), and the older was the VFX dream-team bringing their A+ game every day, and the newer was the residual generation of a generation of Lucas pushing ILM to get to the CGI point where they could even accomplish his CGI dream (starting back all the way with Wrath of Khan and moving up to Young Sherlock Holmes, and kissing victory with Jurassic Park) and no one really yet even knew what any of that really meant yet, or even how to try to do it yet.

A lot of the lessons learned in the PT became the lessons of study that lead us to now.

Lord Of The Rings doesn't compare, in my mind, to the mass volume of the PT's CGI.
The CGI in LOTR was definitely better, and a large reason for that was Jackson knowing full well what was being attempted before shooting, and tried to do as much in practical effects and principle photography to help with CGI as was possible.

Lucas infamously had little idea until getting to the post-production of exactly what it was that he was aiming for exactly, and hardly attempted anything to help the CGI teams out. He barely helped out even the actors on set, and this mostly comes down to the issue that Lucas himself only knew vaguely what he was going for.

So much of the filming took place in front of a green screen. I used to feel great sympathy for Ewan and Hayden because they had so much fighting to do and quite often had to fight imagined enemies, which is a little more difficult than just imagining that the pink dot on the floor represents something else. George often hadn’t decided on details of the film, so Ewan and Hayden didn’t know whether they were filming an ironic moment or whether they were about to die.

- Ian McDairmand​

As a a result, you get a young technology that takes a lot of effort, and an unfortunate (lack of) amount of visualized material going into principle photography, and a constantly changing idea of what the final shot is (Lucas was sometimes coming up with a different idea very late in post), so you have moments where the actors not only don't know what they are exactly facing, but whether the moment itself was one kind of mood or another kind of mood of a moment, and then you have VFX teams that are equally as mixed up. There were sometimes teams working with one idea juxtaposed to teams working with a different idea because one of the teams had shown Lucas their result, and that caused him to think of something, and then he asked them to do something a bit differently, and that hadn't filtered down all the way back to the other team yet.

While some of that was true of the originals as well, there was a much larger technological limitation pressed on Lucas which forced him to be more focused on knowing what he was going for before principle photography began, and that made a rather large difference in the outcome of the VFX matching the live action; leaving Lucas' infamous indecision (or inability to be "done" or "final" with anything) to be an issue almost exclusive to the editing room only (and the amount of material on the floor from the edit room is at this point pretty famous).

So while neither film trilogy is seamless between their real and fake components, the PT easily takes the cake at showing off the division line between the real and fake in spades.

I have to thank the prequels for helping to kick off VFX to where they are today, but I also have to shed a metaphorical tear because the way that they did so was pretty much sacrificial.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Well thought out post Jayson, I agree that cgi was in its infancy while stop motion had long been developed. Yet there were things cgi could do that just couldn't otherwise be done. I also think I have a higher tolerance for seams, I like the art of the Prequels and it is using the technology to achieve something that couldn't otherwise have been done, if I like the look I can forgive a lot.

 

I agree - the difference is big. The Matrix is in a kind of green-tinted monochrome, whereas Phantom Menace is awash with colour.

I'm sure the low-colour, high contrast look featured in many movies like The Matrix is just a way to hide the imperfections of CGI.

Lucas had the courage to keep it colourful.

You stole my thunder! I was going to say the same.

Yes . CGI looked like CGI. But Yoda looked like a puppet and the Rancor looked like stop-frame animation. Even to my child eyes of the day.

But none of that interfered with my ability to enjoy the films. It didn't make the films 'bad'.

 

Quite true.
I can still watch The Last Starfighter and it's really obvious where the SFX comes in on that film.

There's lots of issues with the PT, however, and it's not to say that they can't be liked, or even loved.
I just wish it didn't have so many technical issues because it's really unfortunate to see so many in a Star Wars film. It's one thing to have continuity issues (I'm staring at your Rian Johnson!), but holy toledo the PT has just so many technical issues that I could probably run a class off of talking about them.

We've covered the VFX, but then A) there's the paradoxical costume to environment mismatch issues, B) the classic Lucasian cardboard dialogue...but this time without anyone editing him down to make it work better, and C) then there's the most unsung issue of them all - the camera blocking.

With (A), it's just a short conversation. What the hell man?
I get that the world is more pristine now, but things don't add up. No one ever gets dirty regardless of where they live, what social class they are, or what they are doing. Unless you're Anakin in the fall from grace - then you finally get dirty as you burn.

I mean...these are slaves


And this one isn't


Both wear pristine clothing in spite of the former working in the hot climate of two suns and the latter chilling out in an air-conditioned environment with all of the whims attended to if he so chose.

This is a ceremony


And this is where people are fighting


And while I totally get the Flash Gordon aim of a pristine aesthetic, I really do, the net effect in reality is that you end up with a very flat layer between social and activity contexts within the film.

Everything is very singularly toned and doesn't match anything of the contexts.
You could basically get the same result by sticking action figures on sets in your back yard.

In the OT, you had that difference between "work" and "dressed up". There was a contextualized fitting of the costumes to the environment they were in.
Things got messy, even if they were nice and pristine (e.g. Stormtrooper armor).


As to (B)...I think enough has been explored on this, but let me just say that Lucas always needs someone to punch up his dialogue and not using someone to do that this time around was always going to leave technical flaws - chiefly the fact that Lucas forces exposition like no one else in a class AAA film.
It's really grinding, and he's really aware of that. That's why he usually uses someone else to polish it off, but for whatever reason, this time around he swung for the fences solo style and you really see that in the end result. There's at least around the ballpark of a 50% increase in character telling us what they think and feel in the PT over the OT, whereas the OT relied more on showing us what the character's thought and felt. There were still shameless exposition lines in the OT, but by far a heck of a lot fewer.

Consider that ESB is thought of as the love story of the OT and it has "I love" once in the entire film. Fast-forward to AOTC in the PT, and it has "I love" seven times, and most of those aren't even related to a context of saying, "I love you". That means that it belittles the value of the phrase by the time we do get there because we've heard these characters talking repeatedly about what they love (and what they hate...sand, it gets in everything).

So it's not really about the wooden dialogue; even the OT had that. But it is definitely a technical issue that it just tells us everything right on the surface with no real show. That's called exposition in the craft and it's not usually thought of as a thing to aim for. It's considered a last resort, and if you do have to do it, use distraction or hide that you are as much as possible. But in the PT, no attempts are made. It's front-and-center the whole way through.

As for (C)...hooooboy.
This would take far too long to properly go into but Lucas really wanted to homage the silver screen so much here that he purposefully set up his camera blocking to match and employed mostly only those classic methods of blocking, tracking, and framing.
It is really cool from a film nut/dork side of things, and I still want to make a cut of the PT reskinned into silver-screen film in sepia tone and sound (because I think the film will really leap up a level if it looked like it was shot), but from a non-film nut/dork side this creates a very slow moving film by modern standards.

You go from The Matrix to TPM and just flip back and forth with those two and it's just night and day...hell it's Earth and Mars level of a difference.
The PT's are just a duck out of water in their camera blocking, and that was on purpose, but there's a consequence that comes with that and a lot of folks are going to feel it.
Some might like it, but almost everyone is going to notice it, and a lot of folks are going to find it stiff and slow.

Think of the fight scenes in TPM. Now I want you to watch the fight scene with Qui, Obi, and Maul when you get a chance, but this time around pay attention to the camera. Notice the lack of movement in that camera. Notice that we are slow panning and slow tracking a camera in an action scene.
Note also how wide the shots are, and how frequently the shots are wide, and how much action happens in each shot rather than the modern method of lots of shots with snippets in each shot.

You are a breath away from a stage play fight here. I'm not aiming to smack talk TPM, keep in mind, I still watch it.
I'm just saying...it definitely has flaws that are deeper running than just a consequence of being the first to really try to hit a full CGI film.

Cheers,
Jayson

--- Double Post Merged, Jul 1, 2018, Original Post Date: Jul 1, 2018 ---

That actually played against him, I agree.

Even when he did dark settings, things were still dangerously close to, but not quite nearly, the level of Spy Kids.

This doesn't mean they aren't films that can be enjoyed.
I still enjoy the PT, and honestly, my girls find them far easier to watch than the OT.

It's just a part of what the PT is. A part of it is a wonderful fairy tale, and an epic story. Another is a technically flawed film that has issues even when it came out.

Also...speaking of puppets...let's not forget this...


Cheers,
Jayson

 

I wonder if they’ll ever update the prequel trilogy like Lucas did with the original movie? Seeing as so much of those films were created inside a computer they could probably re-do huge chunks of them and make them look fantastic.

 

Lucas actually did; just not in ways you would expect - except for Yoda.

It stopped when Lucas retired.

Here's a summary. I don't agree with all of their points, nor like their snide tone, but it's a quick run down of the changes.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/whatcu...changes-in-the-phantom-menace-special-edition

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Oh lord how the author of this thread is presumptuous. First off the reason I have long detested bashers of the PT and this goes with those who bash the sequels is that you are so aggressive in others seeing the movies from YOUR perspective. I am in 40's and I know older fans who enjoy the prequels so the critic talking point that only younger people like the PT and that one is impressed by special effects and battles and not story is FALSE. I love the story of the films and yes I do enjoy the battles and special effects. Stop using critics as your crutch when making a argument. Critics are terribly biased and have stupid reasons for liking or not liking a movie. In this day and a age they have been rendered to near irrelevance and lastly Episode 1 which is the lowest rated of the prequels received mixed reviews I think you need to be able to designate what the definition of panned means. I don't care how this comes across but I stick by this the originals were a culture phenomenon that people never experience and can't be replicated. Many claim to be Star Wars fans but they are pop culture fringe fans. I feel that some say they like Star Wars because pop culture mandated they be a fan of these movies because it is such a big thing and than when you get these FAKE fans speaking for REAL fans you get diluted messages. If you don't like the prequels that is fine you but don't antagonize others and stop throw a fit that people don't share your OPINION because at the end of the day I don't care what you or others think I care what I think