Favourite frames in the PT

pixel noun

pix·​el | \ ˈpik-səl

1 : any of the small discrete elements that together constitute an image (as on a television or digital screen)

2 : any of the detecting elements of a solid-state optical sensor (such as a CCD or CMOS device)

The pixel (a word invented from "picture element") is the basic unit of programmable color on a computer display or in a computer image. Think of it as a logical - rather than a physical - unit. The physical size of a pixel depends on how you've set the resolution for the display screen

What decade of shlock cinema, I ask you, was more influenced by its burgeoning technological counterculture? The 1990s B-rental era was riding waves. Cybernetics of the late '70s and throughout the '80s was one thing, its biomech premises limited to isolated software, red-scans and little tubes pumping milky-white stuff; its media premises an exaggeration of UHF mega-corps and cable television. But the '90s yielded a universe online and in turn leveled the playing field like never before between corporate supervillains and any lowly (anti)hero or member of "the resistance" who could interface his way to revolution by booting up or jacking in-to the net, the grid. The grid, then, as a concept would take on a pseudo-existential expression of emotional realities with acts of cognitive transference or even literal expressions of spacetime as heroes could be killed then reborn across separate realms. With budgets ranging from reckless to limited, often the thriftiest of plot formulas involved some linear cat 'n' mouse chase between tracker and courier, assassin and renegade, bounty hunter and their bounty—themself always the possessor of some data file vital to humankind. Even with cyberspace as a de facto detail or, alternatively, films set in present day, depicted cityscapes were unified in their natural evolution just beyond the art deco memorials of Blade Runner to become labyrinthine extensions of virtual dystopias with a stronger fusion of then-contemporary Asiatic and Eurocentric milieu, and with a stronger proclivity towards MTV rave that by that time was in full swing.



Where director Danny Cannon was the first to adapt Mega-City One with brutalism and holograms, a Mœbius rendering of space-age Manhattan was Luc Besson's style of choice; and less we forget the anime cities where buildings looked like gargantuan external hard drives. Otherwise, save for a one or two big studio productions that had the money to spend on cutting edge FX, the future from the '90s typically offered low-rent matted sprawls dotted with oriental languages or generic billboard electronica.



But always noteworthy was a distinctly sensual fetish for one or more of the stock dystopian sci-fi premises -- A.I., cyberspace, cyborgs, hacktivism -- that were often fashioned with heroines/sidekicks made up like sex dolls and altogether seemed to realized unknowingly at least one or more aspects of the correlating urban futurist-fantasy table-top RPG Shadowrun.




Also props to Danny Cannon for bringing to screens the first complete live-action set piece featuring an aerial vehicle chase through mazes of towering luminous structures; Besson would follow two years later more vividly featuring a most inconvenient cab fare. Despite whatever failings in storytelling respective to the films, these two sequences impressed for their time and marked clear lead-ins for that which we examine below.



Lastly, we must appreciate yet another clear prototype, PS1's scroll-shooter Einhänder from 1998. Soak in the fighter chaos matched with virtual exotic cityscapes that seemed to be the culmination of all dystopic concrete jungle media from nearly two decades leading up thereto, and at high-speed!

...and then George Lucas & Episode II happened.

The speeder chase through Coruscant is Digitization of the most quixotic order. What I find fascinating about this sequence, looking back twenty years later, is how artifactual it looks upon closer inspection; a nice way of saying dated. Yes, dated. Let's be real. Background vistas of Episode II's Coruscant are basic. Diminutive. Two-dimensional. By today's technical standards, almost unworked, as if we're seeing mere previz animatics only marginally upscaled. A negative? Not at all. Something uncanny is going on here: the sequence (Episode II, the PT) is NOT dated, but vintage. This movie doesn't deal in cyberspace virtual reality ...or does it? All the imagery above is not an argument for correlations with themes and motifs but a preface for aesthetic context [thus separate from Mirroring and Symbolism] where a Jedi aerial pursuit of a hired assassin equates a metaphorical information superhighway—what the '90s literalized so Lucas could then send further back into genre past to become Buck Rogers pulp made anew.

Dated vintage yet nonetheless meticulously crafted for its day, and so among these sorta Favorite Frames I wish to emphasize gauze and palette, the momentum of action captured as split-seconds of evocative unfocus, along with precise attention to tableau. 

"And where does the newborn go from here? The Net is vast and infinite." - Major Kusanagi

Zam, hajib.

Using silhouettes effectively. The light-shift dynamic throughout this whole sequence is sophisticated almost beyond fathom.

Note the principle characters in each diorama are nearly identical in scale, Lucas' discipline in consistent ratio grammar.

Streaks. Even blurred, classic Star Wars is abstractly worthy of wall art.

AAAUUGH!!

I just love this. Obi-Wan is there but...not quite there. It's dreamlike compositing that practically begs for stereoscope. This image has the smell of glossy full-color book page.

The Anakin equivalent.

Lucas also understood a necessary contrast between fast and slow moving proportions in this shot, the super-ship like some kind of marine mammal grazing through star-plankton.

Some of those charming CD-ROM backgrounds I was talking about...

...and yet the application of pinpoint lights and delineated designs nearly breaks the critique. It's retro AND tactile all at once. How, goddammit?!

Great in-camera lighting slanted across the actors.

USB port. Pay attention to the green for enter and red for exit-only. FX supervisors who still abide in-universe logic.

One of my truly favorite shots. Feel the Force. Obi-Wan and Anakin's ionic night out on the town.

Another kind of brilliant light burst.

Bodyboarding the internet. I love how this part of the city has mall levels.

Zam diffused. She's very radio-theater, I can't exactly articulate why. There's a bit of The Shadow here.

The first Star Wars bathed in red-light-district neons.

Anakin thinks she is a changeling, and I think this coverage was done on bluescreen. And I dig it, once again: there, but not quite. It's two separate in-camera realities. George was on drugs.

Verhoeven's showgirls upfront and center / Verhoeven's Sharon Stone just off-camera, in the ladies room doing some coke. It should be appreciated the second wave sexual revolution that the '90s claimed along with the precursor to deepfake, digital morphing; both present with teen-Anakin's hormonal projections and the idea of a gender-fluid trans-species assassin. 

If Attack of the Clones and its Coruscant gauntlet is not as much the full-on time traveling experience into the last decade of the 20th as I perhaps exaggerate here, fuck you if it doesn't leave gleaming traces. Just, something about it...