his_spiffynesss

My cousin works at the local movie theater, so he was able to get us in for free to see the re-release of The Phantom Menace in 3D. It was mostly for the benefit of is eight year old nephew, who is the rabid Star Wars fan in the family.

But hey, it's a free movie, so I went to the theater with them, before hand I got on Rifftrax and downloaded their commentary for it and loaded it in my ipod. But it was clear a few minutes in I got my timing off, and ended up a couple minutes behind the movie. I gave it up by the time they got to Corruscont, and just sat through the rest of the movie with just regular audio.

It should come as no surprise that Lucas has gone and changed the movie. The puppet Yoda has been completely replaced with CGI, and I suspect a few extra scenes of the pod race drivers were added as well. The digital High Def transfer also made a lot of the minor details stand out, I found my eyes drawn to all the things Lucas probably didn't want me to notice, like all the fine hairs hanging out of Queen Amidala's ludicrous wigs or obvious rings of rubber around Darth Maul's horns. High Def is really something of a curse for Hollywood, it's making it harder to hide reality in movies.

As for the 3D transfer, it had the typical limitations of post production 3D transfers. You don't really get the field of depth you get with a full 3D production. At best you get two layers of depth, with some item in the foreground seeming a bit closer than the rest. By comparison, there was a preview for the new stop motion movie Paranorman, in 3D it was much more immersive than Phantom Menace. The scenes in the woods did feel like you were standing in the forest.

I'm thinking I'll skip the rest of the prequel 3D releases, but I will catch Star Wars and Empire. I'm thinking the flatter, old fashioned model effects of the originals will actually transfer better to 3D than all the fancy CGI model work of the prequels.