TPM 25th Anniversary Re-Release!

Yeah, I always say, TPM and AotC are the purest forms of Star Wars.

I saw it today, full house in a smaller theater. Mostly 40-somethings and about a dozen kids. Everyone was laughing at Jar Jar's antics. I guess nobody is going to pay $15 to hate-watch something though.

First thing I wanna say is, as time goes by, I grow more and more in awe of Pernilla August's performance. The casting was perfect throughout, but she is the unsung linchpin.

But yeah, seeing it in the theater again took me back to that magical spring of 1999. Seeing it with a bunch of friends on the first day, one of them sneaking in.

I was surprised there were no displays in the lobby. In fact, I didn't see any, except for a very small one for a Wolverine movie(?). Do they not do that anymore?

Yeah, the sound was a big highlight of the theater experience.

Oh, there was some warning upfront to stay around after the movie ends for some trailer for a TV series.



Of course I left before the credits were over.

People don't realize what they have until it's gone.

Still, it's always interesting to see more and more people realize the importance of Lucas.

Saw it, loved it! Great experience in the theater again, just awesome. I look forward to seeing the other two in the cinema again. The epic sweep of the GL six films is something that has a magic and expanse about it that few films have ever really been able to capture. Each film feels like 4 films jam packed into one, in the best way. The podrace could be the finale of any other film; here, we still have a whole act afterwards. All six of the GL SW saga are basically the ultimate dream of concept art and production design realized; art nouveau and art deco styles and world cultural styles everywhere, so much historical and anthropological inspiration all over the place. It's just incredible. I think it's why I got into the games and books, because the world he put on screen was so vast and rich and real; blink and you'll miss anything Lucas shows you, he doesn't linger. Like Scott did expertly on Blade Runner, he passes over incredible things quickly, and that gives a feeling of reality to it all.

As a side note, having finished Young Indiana Jones and having loved it, I couldn't help but notice perhaps a little thread to it -- in a lot of those episodes, the story of Indy takes him to a place where he runs into a famous or important person in his journeys, usually by accident. Well, that's pretty much what happens here with Anakin! There's a lot more than can be said about this film but those are just a couple on the fly thoughts.

I don't know if you guys remember, but when he says "this trilogy is not just Anakin's -- it's Palpatine's," that reminds me a lot of that essay I wrote up back on TFN about Palpatine being basically the narrative driver of the prequels. It's cool to see more and more people understand the unique and cool way the story of those films is constructed, rather than compare it to something it was never meant to be.

It's a fact -- or, at least, a sort of perceptual fact -- that film grain is more aesthetic, as well as that grey-green look that film scans tend to have. It's not that the HD transfer of TPM looks like crap, but it is flawed. And one of its flaws is extremely heavy DNR in some shots, and less DNR in others. Even this very inconsistency in noise reduction is distracting. Always has been. Commented at length about it after my 3D viewing in 2012. Really, though, they're stuck with the picture they've got, because it's straight from the digital negative (digital master), which would have to be re-edited from scratch, including all the original film negative being scanned in at 4K with high colour depth on a modern scanner, to yield a significant improvement.

And since TPM, like all the prequels, was essentially a child of digital editing, or digital directing, where shots were manipulated on a computer, and all at 2K, there is no underlying analogue negative to go back to. There would, presumably, still be the so-called O-neg or OCN that physically ran through the film cameras on set (for the parts that were filmed on film; some shots were captured digitally on early digital HD cameras), but again, that would have to be scanned in anew and re-digitised for any appreciable improvement in picture quality. Other than that, yeah, there are these 35mm versions around, since almost all theaters back in the day showed film prints, struck from the digital master.

Of course, in the case of AOTC and ROTS, film negative wasn't used as the capture medium during the filmmaking process. But again, if you want a more authentic "theatrical" experience, you can find scans of 35mm prints used to exhibit the latter prequel movies, as well, on release in many movie houses at the time.

He says, "start with [the OT] because there's still something so pure about those films, they really show George Lucas' vision in it's early days.

There's still something so pure about the PT, too. And they really show Lucas' vision in that era.

I'm not too picky about which order people watch them in, but don't paint it as there's some loss of magic after the OT.