Star Wars – The Phantom Menace – 1999
Ok, so this is widely regarded as the worst of all the Star Wars films, but it wasn’t because of the special effects. Much of the movie’s visuals were created in a computer, the environments, the non-humanoid characters, and the space ships. Were they as good as modern effects? A few of them are. But most of them are very dated. They were good for 1999, but we can do better today.
Probably the most universally hated character of the Star Wars universe is Jar-Jar Binks. The character may have been juvenile and offensive, but the special effects that created him were not, though again, they were a product of their times. At times, Jar-Jar had great photo-realism, and at other times, he almost seemed like a two-dimensional cartoon. And it wasn’t just our beloved Mr. Binks. It was the battle droids, most of the alien creatures, especially the ones in the pod race, and the Gungans. You’d think that since these digital characters were CGI, just like the CGI backgrounds, then the two would look like they were part of the same image, but they didn’t. Just like the entirely CGI battle between the Gungans and the battle-droids. They often looked like sophisticated cartoons that were barely and inconsistently photo-realistic.
Characters like Wato or the two-headed pod-race announcer look like actual cartoons. Yeah, they were pretty bad. Granted, fully CGI characters had come a really long way since their beginnings with the stained-glass knight in 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes, but there was still a lot of room for improvement. And that’s not to say all the alien characters were badly done. The Viceroy and his Neimoidian compatriots were actually pretty good, but in my research, I found that they were not CGI. They were actors in suits. But I also learned that one of the best innovations in the CGI images in this movie was the development of software that simulated the flowing fabric of clothing. But that’s an effect that I don’t think they’ve really perfected, even today.
Still, as I think about it, those things were really the worst offenders of the film’s visual effects. There were other CGI effects that looked fantastic. For example, the entire CGI pod-race looked great, and was exciting to watch, just as long as I didn’t look too closely at the cartoonish alien pilots. The racing vehicles moved smoothly and wonderfully, and they looked fantastic. I also really liked the under-water sequences with the giant sea-creatures, even though they were completely gratuitous and didn’t need to be in the film.
The space battle sequence in the movie’s climax was short, but was definitely up to the standard of what we have come to expect from a Star Wars movie. And the climactic lightsaber battle was awesome! I know that a lot of people like to really complain about this movie and they aim most of their anger at George Lucas for the poor quality of the script. But they tend to forget how great the visual effects were for their time. So I’m not so critical of the movie.