Favourite frames in the PT

I hope this doesn't bloat the thread or take things too off-topic, but I want to roll back to Ingram's Episode I post. I didn't adequately address it earlier.


Aren't there always trinkets and curiosities to consider? The prequels are the movies that keep on giving. This thread could easily be 500 pages long and we'd still have barely scratched the surface.


Notice that the top of the image makes an angry face. Maybe it's also Lucas making an early point (Nute on the viewscreen) that cinema is superior to television.

There also seems to be a Jurassic Park influence at work:

starwarsverses.tumblr.com/post/47228989553/objects-in-mirror-may-be-closer-than-they-appear


Wonderful film lighting there. The grey-blue tones of the opening sequence also make for a cool, relaxed sci-fi opening. Look at the background and the etchings on the crate. Both are a touch Mondrian.

Anyway, yes:

Neeson looks fantastic in this movie -- as warm, heroic, and mystical as Natalie Portman is beautiful. The camera definitely loves his face. 

That's one of the joys of Episode I: TPM captures him at that neat penumbra between youthful vigour and older age. I believe Qui-Gon was originally going to have white hair, for example (see our forum banner image), but Neeson was reluctant and wanted to keep his own tone. So they settled on a slightly greying look instead. These days, Neeson does look a fair bit older (it's been almost 25 years, after all), and his voice is much darker and much more gravelly (it's very noticeable even in his small voiceover in the climax of TROS). While always masculine and intense, he's actually developed a fairly hardened screen quality since TPM (his "Taken" persona). In TPM, he was just about perfect for the role, I think. A neat reminder that every movie is like a time capsule; and that same quality is part of the (underrated) joy in partaking of the cinematic experience and returning to old favourites. 

For inclusivity's sake, here is our other main character:



Both have a strange degree of quizzical knowingness in their eyes.


Gotta love the delicious colours, the glorious framing, this strange triad of characters, and, of course: Qui-Gon's "slide rule" gesture.


Indeed. We've barely spent five minutes on the lush surface of Naboo, and then Lucas shows us this.


Looks like a fine place to start a lightsaber fight, doesn't it? 


Glossy magazine page-turn. Heat mirage.


Also part of an elaborate archway/doorway/gate motif at work in Episode I.

Connected to its working title: "The Beginning":

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_of_Janus

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus

THE JANUS MENACE


This is absolutely great. Never looked at the shot that way before. Adds a good deal of poignancy to the movie and their bond.

I like how Anakin shouts back to Padme the same warm gratitude:

"I was glad to meet you, too!"

It's so sweet and innocent here. In ROTS, when Padme insists she's not going to die in childbirth, and Anakin doubles down on assuring her, "No, I promise you", less so. A measure of what is lost; and how fear and greed -- and politics/war -- disfigure things.


As remarkable as the CG is in that moment, the whole scene is outstandingly directed. I especially love the chemistry between Watto and Qui-Gon when Watto says, after Qui-Gon shows him the hologram of the queen's fancy-smancy ship, "I hope you didn't kill anyone I know for it." The Disney era is bereft of character design and character moments like these.


Elemental connections and ideogrammatic resonances! The mythic saga underway!! The Beginning!!! 

The story of a boy, a girl, and a galaxy.

Or, perhaps also, a man, a woman, and a simple life of tender care and affection never to be:




It's also (like everything Lucas) a really well-composed shot. Ignoring physics (I'm sure their eardrums would be ruptured, for one thing -- look how close the humans are to the tank), you can believe in the world, because it's so finely-populated. With things: architecture, geometry. Not just people/creatures. But seriously look at the composition here. It's very much a tripartite/tricolour shot that's over in a few seconds. The rule of thirds is followed so perfectly here. Basically: brown (the entrance to the hangar), green (the tree in the centre), and white (the brilliant explosion). And yet there are also people/droids in it. A lively diorama.


The overhead first-person shot is very inventive -- and surely a little echoic of this?



It's nice to see Anakin against green: just a kid on the grass. 

He's happiest there -- like in Episode II when he rolls around with Padme in the meadow.

And Threepio and Tarpals are perhaps trying to process the curious energy levels of this precocious sprog.


Which has such a storybook, "World Of Tomorrow" quality about it (as you've discussed before). TPM really does feel like an earlier epoch in the Star Wars universe.

A world of rich fauna and daguerreotypes vs. convenience stores and smartphones. Or, indeed, podracers vs. skyhoppers.


Just gotta say: that's one of my favourite Padme costumes.


Six gates. Or five between Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon: coincidentally the additional number of Star Wars movies Obi-Wan appears in.


Which so much of the imagery in Episode I is evocative of. If Obi-Wan is St. Peter, then Qui-Gon is John The Baptist. 


Digital visions realised.

I like this one with Obi-Wan too:

Both Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan riding eopies recall imagery of samurai riding horses, and both characters were influenced by Makabe Rokurota from The Hidden Fortress.

Yes. The galaxy is still a bright and shining place in TPM, while in RotS night has fallen. Luke is a glimmer of hope, as is the hyperdrive to the crew in TPM.

P.S. Krystalogy's preview is the best preview ever.

It's also a very good example of a Deus ex Machina. Yoda descends from the sky in a war machine and allows the remaining Jedi in the arena to cheat death. The only problem is, in doing so, like with Anakin pledging to Palpatine in the next film, there is a consequence: the Republic itself turns into a war machine. Yoda has just basically doomed everyone. Another Pyrrhic victory for the Sith. Ingenious storytelling.

BTW, I once tried to edit that Wikipedia entry with exactly this example of Yoda arriving with the clones. It was quickly scrubbed off by one of Wikipedia's many zealous editors. I was told my edit was invalid because I hadn't supplied a reliable source -- like, say, a film critic. 

On the commentary track, Lucas himself conflates this moment with Han returning to save Luke's butt in the Millennium Falcon at the climax to ANH. Probably shouldn't have used "butt" and "climax" in the same sentence there. "You're all clear, kid. Now let's blow this thing..." OMG. Well, anyway, he does. AOTC is actually a fairly orthogonal tribute to ANH. I had this all written down somewhere.

Basically, AOTC is the "25-year-old" version of ANH, having been released twenty-five years after the original film. It has a cantina/nightclub, a Skywalker watching a sunset at the homestead, some classic banter between Artoo and Threepio as Artoo again goes idly wandering off on a desert planet, there's a moment where the twins or the parents of the twins suddenly find themselves stuck on a tiny ledge behind a sealed door (the twins swing to victory, while the parents plummet below), and there's either a garbage masher or a droid factory (where Luke almost drowns and Padme is almost incinerated, while Han and Anakin recklessly indulge in violence that goes nowhere). In the garbage masher, Han tells Leia to "Get on top of it", while Obi-Wan quips in the arena that Padme "seems to be on top of things". Hammer Horror buddies Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee also beautifully command the screen in both films -- the former is even delivered the Death Star by the latter.   


Yep. There are endless revelations and recontextualisations in the prequels. They're like a living canvas for Yoda's direction to Luke in TESB: "You must unlearn what you have learned." It's this continuous unlearning that is key to the PT's relevance and brilliance.

Klimo's Ring Theory isn't the be-all, end-all of explaining the rhyming structure of the movies. One of the easiest ways of describing the II-IV pair is that they're even-numbered episodes. Lucas gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that many structures are possible when there's six movies, each made of three acts, in two trilogies, where adjacent films lock arms, as does "every other" film in the super structure.

Another way of looking at is that AOTC is "where" ANH should or would be in the PT structure. TPM is sort of a distanced overture. AOTC performs a mixture of Episode I and "middle act" duties. Obi-Wan also explains to Luke that he fought in the Clone Wars and "was once a Jedi Knight" in his hovel in ANH. But he only becomes a Jedi Knight at the end of Episode I, and the Clone Wars don't erupt until the end of Episode II -- or even Episode III, when multiple skirmishes have erupted across the galaxy, technically ("Begun this clone war has"). Obi-Wan's full line, of course, is: "I was once a Jedi Knight the same as your father." And Anakin himself isn't a Jedi Knight until Episode III.

Luke himself glimpses "a city in the clouds" in Episode V. So, between Obi-Wan's recollections in IV, and Luke's visions and intuitions in V, you could say that the characters are performing a kind of mythopoeitic imagining, thus "conjuring" the Clone War storyline of the PT -- that is: Episodes II and III -- out of the Akashic Records (two letters that make up the magical DNA of STAR WARS). Hence Episodes II and III have a lot of interesting rhyme-y stuff of their own. At the end of Episode III, Yoda tells Obi-Wan that he will teach him "how to commune" with his vanished Master. And in Episode I, they walk the world together. Star Wars is much stranger than Klimo supposes.