Star Wars: Episode I— The Phantom Menace Release Date: November 2, 2002 Starring: Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson, Jake Lloyd, Samuel L. Jackson, Terence Stamp, Warwick Davis, Ray Park, Anthony Daniels Directed by: George Lucas, Frank Oz (Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, $29.98)
George Lucas’s greatest accomplishment with this prodigious double-disc set is not just the extras, which, at more than six hours, are comprehensive, even seminal; and it’s not the audio commentary track, on which he delegates explaining the thousands of digital-effects shots to producer Rick Mc Cal lum, sound designer and editor Ben Burtt, and Industrial Light & Magic wizards Rob Coleman, John Knoll, Dennis Muren, and Scott Squires, and confines himself to telling us about the story and character motivation. It’s that Lucas makes you care again. You’ll find yourself watching this DVD repeatedly—even if it’s just the pod race and the spectacular lightsaber duel at the film’s finale.
The clarity of the images on this first-ever Star Wars film on DVD is so stunning that you can almost forgive Lucas for some of the plot’s deficiencies. And even those who groaned about midi-chlorians, virgin births, Jar Jar Binks’s tomfoolery, and Jake Lloyd’s whiny acting will find themselves restored to the fold. Episode I is a sumptuous marriage of digital-visual and -sound effects, and the numerous making-of documentaries genuinely help you to fully appreciate that fact. In many cases, the only thing that’s real on any given set is the actors: The foregrounds, the backgrounds—everything is digital matte paintings or miniatures. The line between what’s “real” and what’s not gets blurrier with each film.
Disc two has seven deleted scenes—three of them from the pod race and one of them a choice moment in Mos Espa where little Anakin gets into a fistfight with young Greedo (the same Greedo that Han Solo kills in a Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars), but, in truth, they add relatively little to the story. The best extras come from Jon Shenk’s candid, hour-long documentary The Beginning, culled from more than 600 hours of footage compiled during four years of following Lucas, from writing the script, through casting and preproduction, right up to the movie’s release. To give just one example: When Lucas takes Steven Spielberg on a tour of the set and they play with a battle droid, you see them not as two filmmaking titans who changed the blockbuster and science fiction film as we know it, but as two little kids playing with their toys. And when it works, Episode I brings out that little kid in all of us.
—Cheo Hodari Coker
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