The all-digital cinema begins

Rating: 10/10 (13 July 2002)

Well, I'm a Star Wars fan. I think it's going to be a long time before we see another set of movies so imaginative and captivating. Overall, I think Episode I and II are the two most spectacular films of the last 15 years.
But I won't try convincing everyone of you to think like I do. That's not the purpose of this space, although most of the users do not seem to realize this. Besides, so much (good and bad) has been said about this movie that I would only say "I agree with this", "I don't agree with that". By the way, have you noticed that all the bad reviews of Episode II look like a "copy & paste" from another one?
I wrote a full review of this movie but it got too long for me to put in here. So if there's one single soul in this planet curious about it, please e-mail me! Let me tell you about the Titanic-effect, the strange ratings for movies of this kind and the reason of StarWars-mania.
Here I want to talk about the all-digital-cinema tendency. I didn't write this until I saw "Attack of the clones" a couple of times in a traditional projector and in a digital one.
Episode II was filmed entirely with digital cameras. That means in a few words: no quality loss all the way from shooting to projection (if using a digital projector). This you can clearly see in the digital projection right from the beginning of the movie: the Star Wars title and the space background have never looked so good before. You can almost feel the textures of every skin, cloth, ship or wall. There are dozens of wide shots of the different planets in these movies; with a digital projector these shots look dazzling. There is so much detail in the movie you can go crazy trying to get all of the action going on. Unlike in Disney's "Atlantis", I didn't observe any "pixelation" whatsoever in the entire movie. If the industry can improve the resolution to these cameras, then there will be no contest: digital cameras will take over filmmaking.
A much different subject is the digital visual effects. Let's go back to "Jurassic Park" or "Terminator 2". That was the first time we ever looked at the most realistic T-Rex and liquid metal assassin in the history of movies. From that point it looked like digital FX would just keep getting better and better. "The Phantom Menace" took the visual FX to the limit, just as the first "Star Wars" did in 1977. Personally, I didn't expect any less. The movie was a beautiful thing to look at.
But then came the time when you were not so sure. Movies like "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" and "Spider-man" really got me questioning myself: "Is all-digital the way to go?" Now that I've seen "Attack of the clones" I think my answer is definitely "No". Don't get me wrong: "Attack of the clones" is another state-of-the-art SFX movie but it just doesn't look as great as "The phantom menace". I agree that there are some shots that are either too difficult or impossible to do without using digital effects, and having someone like George Lucas in the director's chair, well, you just have to figure out how to come up with something realistic. Examples of these are the speeder chase through Coruscant and the final lightsaber duel with Count Dooku; both look great and they look even better in a digital projector.
Still, there are some other sequences that could have been better looking doing things the traditional way. I still don't know why all of the clone troopers are CGI's when they could have used plain old costumes or why put "digital makeup" to the Jedi children when many of the other character's make up is so great. When you see the interior of the Jedi Temple you might think they selected the realism level of the rendering to "Cartoonish". This movie is full of those contrasts: you can see landscapes or creatures so realistic that you don't even notice they're computer generated, and you can see "virtual sets" so false that you can't help wondering if the Rancor in "Return of the Jedi" looked any more inserted.
I hope that digital effects improve their realism level and that someday they can complement the overall SFX of a movie, along with animatronics, puppets, optical tricks, real sets and some other of the old stuff, just like in "The Phantom Menace" or "Lord of the Rings". I think they can coexist to make the best SFX movie yet.