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Rewatching "The Beginning"
Aug. 12th, 2007 09:14 amLast fall, I rewatched the whole Star Wars saga and capped it off with the "Empire of Dreams" documentary. A comment raised at that time started me thinking about also watching the long documentary included with The Phantom Menace DVD, "The Beginning." Obviously, it took me a while to get around to it, and I may have found the time to rewatch it at last through the simple decision it was about time to take a break from Mystery Science Theater 3000, but I've done it.
Still, my first memories of this particular documentary are a bit more melancholy and ambiguous than with "Empire of Dreams." At the time that the TPM DVD came out, I was pretty far beaten down by the constant and, it seemed, all but unchallenged negativity. I definitely wasn't about to watch the movie disc itself, for fear that the hard evidence would at last beat through even my thick skull and I would conclude that maybe people were right; perhaps George Lucas just couldn't tell bad work from good any more... but I did manage to watch the documentary. Prompted perhaps by my brother pointing out a scene or two, though, I started worrying about something else: perhaps George Lucas was so obsessed with "fixing it in post" with his fancy new technology that he didn't bother to pay attention on set...
Even then, though, the documentary did settle one point with me. My varied fears may have sprung from one single web site meant to discuss lightsabres. The author had concluded from the TPM trailers that Obi-Wan was "too flashy" in terms of lightsabre combat, that he "twirled his sabre" too much and made too many "showy" moves... and then somebody added a comment that this must have been Ewan McGregor's way of showing distaste for "working in front of too much bluescreen" and for "Obi-Wan's small role." (I include the link solely as a demonstration; going back to even an archived version of it irks me to this day...) Watching just how much drill and choreography Nick Gilliard put into the lightsabre duels, though, began to make me think that maybe those web site commentators were just plain wrong, that they had let their own preconceptions of what a lightsabre duel "had" to be like (plugged, just perhaps, into the feeling that Star Wars "has" to be something grim and gritty and "realistic") keep them from asking themselves what else the "Duel of the Fates" might have packed into it.
I suppose even so that I did start rewatching the documentary with the feeling that, with its lack of overall narration and minimal on-screen titles, it was something of a "blank slate" on which any viewer can see precisely the confirmation they want. Then, I began wondering about even that. Little moments like George Lucas himself deciding to step away from making Binks a "pure" computer-animated creation (which reminds me of how the Nemoidians were said to have been turned into "conventional, on-set" aliens at the last moment), and then learning it would be cheaper anyway to do that than to animate a mere head onto Ahmed Best's performance, start adding up for me, along with things like Frank Oz being impressed by some early work on Watto, which seems to me about as far from those making sanctimonious comments about how puppets are just plain "better" than computer animation as you can get. Some people may yet try to add up other moments (or at least particular interpretations of certain moments) to reach a different conclusion. Just perhaps, though, I'm willing to think they're just plain wrong too.
Still, my first memories of this particular documentary are a bit more melancholy and ambiguous than with "Empire of Dreams." At the time that the TPM DVD came out, I was pretty far beaten down by the constant and, it seemed, all but unchallenged negativity. I definitely wasn't about to watch the movie disc itself, for fear that the hard evidence would at last beat through even my thick skull and I would conclude that maybe people were right; perhaps George Lucas just couldn't tell bad work from good any more... but I did manage to watch the documentary. Prompted perhaps by my brother pointing out a scene or two, though, I started worrying about something else: perhaps George Lucas was so obsessed with "fixing it in post" with his fancy new technology that he didn't bother to pay attention on set...
Even then, though, the documentary did settle one point with me. My varied fears may have sprung from one single web site meant to discuss lightsabres. The author had concluded from the TPM trailers that Obi-Wan was "too flashy" in terms of lightsabre combat, that he "twirled his sabre" too much and made too many "showy" moves... and then somebody added a comment that this must have been Ewan McGregor's way of showing distaste for "working in front of too much bluescreen" and for "Obi-Wan's small role." (I include the link solely as a demonstration; going back to even an archived version of it irks me to this day...) Watching just how much drill and choreography Nick Gilliard put into the lightsabre duels, though, began to make me think that maybe those web site commentators were just plain wrong, that they had let their own preconceptions of what a lightsabre duel "had" to be like (plugged, just perhaps, into the feeling that Star Wars "has" to be something grim and gritty and "realistic") keep them from asking themselves what else the "Duel of the Fates" might have packed into it.
I suppose even so that I did start rewatching the documentary with the feeling that, with its lack of overall narration and minimal on-screen titles, it was something of a "blank slate" on which any viewer can see precisely the confirmation they want. Then, I began wondering about even that. Little moments like George Lucas himself deciding to step away from making Binks a "pure" computer-animated creation (which reminds me of how the Nemoidians were said to have been turned into "conventional, on-set" aliens at the last moment), and then learning it would be cheaper anyway to do that than to animate a mere head onto Ahmed Best's performance, start adding up for me, along with things like Frank Oz being impressed by some early work on Watto, which seems to me about as far from those making sanctimonious comments about how puppets are just plain "better" than computer animation as you can get. Some people may yet try to add up other moments (or at least particular interpretations of certain moments) to reach a different conclusion. Just perhaps, though, I'm willing to think they're just plain wrong too.