Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace - Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm still writing about The Phantom Menace, the first chapter of the Star Wars saga. Or the fourth, depending on your point of view.

This is unambiguously the third part of my article, so CLICK HERE for part one and CLICK HERE for part two. No part four yet, sorry. I'm still working on it. Writing takes forever, especially for a two-hour movie. At 133 minutes this is longer than any of the Original Trilogy films, though it's actually one of the shorter movies overall. Later films hit the 140-minute mark and The Last Jedi is 152 minutes long. That's close to 700 hours!

There'll probably be a couple of SPOILERS here for the Original Trilogy, and I'll be going through Phantom Menace scene by scene so I'm definitely going to be spoiling that. I'll not be spoiling The Clone Wars or The Mandalorian or anything like that however. Actually I've changed my mind, I'll spoil that they're good and you should watch them. Maybe get a watch list for Clone Wars though.

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Previously, in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace:

The planet of Naboo has been invaded by the Neimoidian Trade Federation and Queen Amidala was on her way to Coruscant to get the Senate's help. Unfortunately, her ship took damage so they had to park on Tatooine for repairs, a planet where their money is worthless. Jedi Qui-Gon Jinn has a plan though, and he's entered a slave child called Anakin Skywalker into a dangerous podrace to win them the money they need. The fate of a world depends on this 9-year-old's success.

And now, the continuation:

Here's some trivia for you: the filming miniature of the Millennium Falcon built for A New Hope is about 5.4 feet long. I always assumed that they'd mostly switched to CGI by The Phantom Menace, but nope! The Mos Espa Grand Arena is a miniature as well, and it's 40 feet long. To give you an idea of the scale, the crowd was apparently made with 450,000 painted Q-Tips that were wobbled around with fans to add some life to it. There are tiny figures all over it as well, from Star Wars Micro Machines sets apparently. The level of detail on this thing is incredible.

Anyway, they're doing a race here.

George Lucas's passion in life was making cars go fast, to the point where it took a near-fatal crash to get him to stop street racing and push him towards making films. So it's not all that weird that he'd throw in an actual race as soon as the technology was there to pull it off. And by 'throw in' I mean 'make it the centrepiece of the movie'. This is going to take a while.

In fact in Lucas' original plan, this pre-race sequence went on for like six minutes, as it introduced seemingly all of the racers. Just endless drivers, each one a different bizarre CGI creation... except for the bizarre puppet creations and that guy in a three-eyed alien suit. He's a Gran by the way, and I totally didn't have to Google search 'three eyed star wars alien' to find that out.

Oh, also we're introduced to Anakin by his full name, Anakin Skywalker. I expect that a lot of new viewers come into this film without knowing the name 'Anakin', but the name 'Skywalker' is going to catch anyone's attention.

Fortunately, Lucas cut this sequence way back for the final theatrical release... and then put some of the introductions back in for the home video release. So now it's more like five minutes long.

He also added this scene of pit droids doing a Three Stooges routine.

The trouble with this movie isn't that it has comedy, all the Star Wars films have comedy, it's that this 1920s/1930s slapstick style of humour doesn't feel at home in this universe. It hurts the reality of the setting to keep cutting away to goofy things. I'm not saying that the movie needed to go full Andor, but these visual gags aren't working for me.

I mean there's literally a shot of an animal farting in Jar Jar's face. Do you know how many animals farted in Han Solo's face? I'm going to assume it's zero and I really don't want anyone to correct me if I'm wrong.

Oh no, Dick Dastardly has secretly sabotaged Anakin's podracer! Maybe he's getting revenge from that confrontation over Jar Jar earlier, maybe he just sabotages all the pods before a race, we don't know. I don't even know what this is going to do. He just pulled a bit off and went 'uh-oh'. And none of the 450,000 Q-Tips in the crowd saw a thing.

I was going to use this shot as an example of how ILM was much better at rendering metal surfaces than flesh at this point, but the more I look at it, the more I think that's a real engine prop they had out on location. ILM really was better at metal though.

Qui-Gon gives Anakin some Jedi advice, telling him to feel, not think, and to use his instincts. Hopefully, that's enough to turn his luck around, as he's failed in every other race he's been in and it's not like his podracer is any less sabotaged this time.

Then we get introduced to a blatantly CGI Jabba the Hutt, looking a bit better than he did in the Special Edition of A New Hope two years earlier. Which is good because he looked kind of terrible in that. That's a young Bib Fortuna on his left, standing next to someone in a Slave Leia bikini, and that's Mrs The Hutt behind them. Actually, we don't know who the second Hutt is, they never speak or get referred to. Wait, is that Gardulla the Hutt, the one who owned Anakin and Shmi until she lost them to Watto in a bet? I need to do some research here.

Okay, it turns out that she is Gardulla the Hutt! I totally nailed it.

Jabba's job here is to start the race, though first they have to get all these flags off the track.

This used to be such a fast-paced movie.

There's also lots of design work on display here, with the high-tech podracers contrasted against a low-tech desert architecture. What's amazing about this shot is that I'm pretty sure most of it is real. They built some full-sized podracer props in England, shipped them down to a desert in Tunisia, fixed them up after a storm destroyed them, and then had real people carrying real flags in front of them. Though the real props didn't hover as far as I'm aware.

This is a bit like a chariot race I guess, except with massive floating engines instead of horses. Though Anakin's podracer is strangely tiny compared to the others. He does at least get a proper-sized flag of his own though, and C-3PO is the one carrying it!

Hey, it's Warwick Davis! The guy did a bunch of movies for Lucas in the 80s, playing Wicket in Return of the Jedi and the Ewok films, and Willow in Willow. Weird thing is, he was only 12 years old when he did Jedi, so when he filmed this 15 years later he was still in his 20s! Oh, plus he also plays Anakin's Rodian buddy Wald under a big green mask.

Okay, I've just done the research and it turns out that his character here is called Weazel. It also turns out that Weazel makes a second appearance in Solo: A Star Wars Story, which I had no idea about. And somehow his story between the two movies has never been revealed. It seems like every bounty hunter with two and half seconds of screen time in Empire Strikes Back has gotten their own novel or live-action spin-off series, but poor Weazel got nothing.

Jabba bites the head off of something and spits it at a gong to start the race, so they're finally off!

Everyone except Anakin, whose pod has stalled on the starting line!

Well, that's the end of the movie then I guess. Qui-Gon will have to give Queen Amidala's royal starship to a junk trader on Tatooine, Darth Maul's going to find and capture her a short while later, and Naboo will be signed over to the Trade Federation. Which I guess will resolve the Senate debate on the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems in some way.

The good news is that Anakin isn't last, as a guy called Quadinaros is also having problems with his quad-engines. This means that we get to see how another racer handles the problem compared to Anakin.

Four little pit droids come out onto the track, but they go straight to Quadinaros' podracer so I guess he can afford to bring a maintenance crew, unlike Anakin. On the other hand, Quadinaros is just wailing away at his dashboard in rage and frustration, while Anakin's flicking switches and trying stuff. Because he actually knows how a podracer works.

We see the race going on without them and Sebulba's not wasting any time eliminating the competition. He rams the Gran's racer hard enough for the cables to snap, sending his engines rolling across the ground in a fiery explosion of junk. So he's dead I guess.

I keep pointing out when the film is using a miniature or even a full-sized prop, but everything on screen right now is full CGI. They did explore other approaches, but with this much landscape flying by so quickly, it became clear that this was how it had to be done. They apparently created it a lot like they would today: by taking lots of photographs of real rocks and projection mapping them onto a mesh. They didn't have the photogrammetry cleverness back then to extract detailed 3D info from the images, they didn't even have the hardware to use detailed 3D models, but the camera's moving so fast it doesn't matter.

They definitely had some physics technology as when things get wrecked, they get wrecked beautifully. The pieces of shattered engine maintain their momentum as they unravel across the ground and even now it looks spectacular. It sounds pretty good as well, which is impressive considering that John Williams' incredible soundtrack is taking a break and letting the sound effects have the spotlight for a bit. It's all roaring engines and clattering debris.

And here's actor Jake Lloyd sitting in a full-size prop, being rocked back and forth by hand just like the X-Wing pilots in the Original Trilogy.

Anakin's finally gotten his podracer started and now he's racing to catch up. Fortunately, this is a video game level and it has a catch-up mechanic so he's soon weaving between the stragglers as they head into the famous Beggar's Canyon. We've never seen it in the movies, but it's where his son Luke will one day fly his T-16 and practice the Death Star run.

Wait is that Aurra Sing on the right? Has she always been in the movie? I've honestly never noticed her before. Though I suppose I wouldn't have had a reason to notice her before I watched the Clone Wars series.

The podracers head into a suspiciously well-lit cave and one poor driver, Ratts Tyerell, slams into a stalactite and explodes, filling the tunnel with flame. Sucks to be that guy.

Deleted scene

Fortunately, they cut out the scene where we see Tyerell's family in the audience! We didn't need to know the man had a wife and kids.

According to Star Wars: Build the Millennium Falcon magazine, issue 51, his son Deland Tyerell eventually formed a foundation dedicated to exposing the dangers of podracing and got the sport banned in the core worlds. And according to a picture I found on Google, that's Sebulba's podracer that his daughter is playing with.

A bunch of Tusken Raiders are watching the race as well, and they decide to take shots at the podracers with their rifles. Perhaps because they're invading their territory? I mean these things drive pretty damn fast, 600 mph. They could be 30 miles away from the city by now.

Funny thing is, the Tuskens actually manage to get a few hits on them. In A New Hope, Obi-Wan points out that the attack on the Jawa Sandcrawler couldn't have been by Tuskens because the shots were too accurate, and only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise. At this point, I'm starting to think he's maybe got it backwards.

In fact, maybe the attack on the Sandcrawler was by the Tuskens. Maybe they're the ones who attacked Luke's aunt and uncle too! I'm joking, obviously... though it would definitely be in character for them. Oh man, is everything I thought I knew about Star Wars a lie?

There's a beautiful shot. It couldn't have been easy for them to make a mirage effect like that, especially as this was the 90s. They were still working on small CRT monitor screens, that's how long ago this was.

Quadinaros is still trying to get his pod started by slamming his hands down on the control panel, but it's not having the effect he wants. The effect it does have is to switch off the power coupling beam keeping the four jet engines from splitting up and flying off. So the engines fly off. Doesn't look like there are any fatalities in the crowd, but it's a close thing. Another podracer's taken out during a pit stop when a pit droid absentmindedly walks in front of the jet intake and goes right through. Lucas is just turning this into a Pixar cartoon right now, especially with all the weird alien drivers. Though on the other hand, the amount of annoying Jar Jar gags are at an all-time low.

The podracers are coming in past the stands but the race isn't over yet. Nope, this is just lap 2 of 3. This is the point where the audience realises that they're actually showing a whole race.

Meanwhile, Sebulba's keeping his lead with creative use of components, tossing something behind him into another racer's engine, causing it to explode. Makes me wonder if anyone cares that he's doing this. I mean a deleted scene shows him cooking a competitor with a built-in flamethrower!

Anakin narrowly misses the wreckage flying over his head, showing that he's right on Sebulba's tail. And in the original theatrical release he just carries on racing, everything's fine.

But in the later versions, there's an almost subliminal shot of some debris knocking one of Anakin's cables loose, which sends his car spinning wildly! The power couplings are keeping the engines coupled though and the pod's still facing forward somehow, so he's able to flick a switch to level it out and keep going.

Then he reaches out the side with a magnet on a stick and manages to grab the flailing cable with it!

The shot of the cable coming loose was CGI, but the shot of him connecting it back on is live-action, so this gives me a chance to properly compare the visual effects to a live-action prop.

This is the real podracer, with a real cable connected to it and real paint on the side. Lots of detail there that you're only going to glimpse for a moment. R2 did a good job with that paintwork.

And here's the CG version. It looks pretty good! But it also looks simplified.

Judging by the complexity of the other models in the scene there was nothing stopping them from adding more detail, but it probably wasn't worth the effort for such a quick shot. I mean has one single person in 24 years ever noticed it looks different?

Anakin's lost a few places due to his non-stop pit stop, but now he's back in the race and he manages to swoop past a few opponents in the canyon by being incredibly cocky and tilting his engines just enough to slip through. I'm starting to think he wasn't lying when he said this is the fastest podracer ever made.

Sebulba and Anakin are almost neck and neck as they go into the final lap, but Sebulba forces Anakin onto the service ramp, allowing him to jump right into first place to the amazement of at least half of the announcer.

The two-headed alien commentator is called Fodesinbeed Annodue, and it seems like each head has its own personality. It's hard to enjoy their banter though as one of them speaks Huttese. The other one is blatantly comedian Greg Proops and they actually tried filming him in elaborate alien makeup with the intent to give him a computer-generated body, but they got better results going with full CGI. 

There's nothing CGI about this crowd though, this is a bunch of extras suffering in a desert in Tunisia. That place was hotter than I can even imagine and some of them had to wear rubber masks the whole time!

It's around this point that Sebulba's forward planning pays off. I thought his sabotage was the reason Anakin's podracer stalled earlier, but nope. The piece Sebulba damaged finally falls off and one of Anakin's engines bursts into flame! You can tell this is a serious concern as the music finally comes back.

Anakin closes the flaps and starves the fire of oxygen, then takes some fuel from the other engine and balances their tanks. I don't know how, maybe the cables double as pipes, or maybe it's an electric charge sent through the power coupler. All I know is that the whole thing is done without a word, with the dashboard screen telling the story. The important thing is he got the other engine fired up and now his podracer is racing again.

One thing I like about the podrace is that Anakin always has to go through the process of resolving these complications when they come up. The guy has problems but he also has solutions; he's not just a kid pressing buttons at random and winning by accident.

Okay, I think that's about the halfway point! One more hour to go. Of the film I mean, not the podrace.

Star Wars: Episode I - Racer (N64)

Anakin has to catch up to Sebulba again, but that's no problem for the fastest podracer ever built. He's right on his tail as they come out of the Corkscrew through the Devil's Doorknob, a gap so narrow they have to turn their podracers on their side to get through. See, I'm doing my research.

Sebulba keeps trying to slam into Anakin's podracer, the same way he does to anyone who drives close to him, but it backfires this time as the two podracers get entangled.

Man, that does not look like a healthy place for Anakin to be. I'm pretty sure the recommended amount of jet engines pointed towards your face at close range is roughly 0.

The films cuts back to the crowd going wild and Shmi wincing. Things are so tense that Jar Jar's right there on screen and he doesn't do or say anything dumb.

The two racers wrestle for a bit until the struggle causes two of the rods on Sebulba's racer to snap off with a spark.

It's a blink-and-you'd-miss-it moment (the shot is less than a second long) and it's framed so tight it's hard to make out what you're looking at, but that's what happens.

I guess Anakin notices this and he pushes the throttle to max, which causes the exact same two rods to snap off, just from a slightly different camera angle. The shot's only on screen for like 6 frames though so it's practically subliminal.

Anakin breaks free and Sebulba's power conduit fades away, meaning there's nothing keeping his engines from flying apart.

This leads to a beautiful shot of Sebulba's left engine being demolished by its impact with a rock before tumbling across the ground. Well okay technically it starts coming apart a frame before hitting the rock, but if that bothers you then you should probably stop watching films one frame at a time. Sebulba actually survives this somehow, skidding to a halt in a real-life miniature, but Anakin's now in the lead. In fact, he's probably the only person left in the race.

He crosses the finish line and it's over! The podrace took over 9 minutes in total, a quarter of an hour if you include the bit where they're introducing the racers, but now it is done. And it was possibly the best part of the movie so far! For a few minutes Lucas's obsession with speed outweighed his fascination with slapstick and we got a tense, beautifully directed, well edited mini-movie. That was proper cinema that was.

It was also a properly-earned victory. Anakin deserved that win. Though now he has to hand the movie back over to Qui-Gon and go wash his face. Seriously, he looks like he's been staring into the back of a jet engine or something.

Warwick Davis got a lot to do in this scene, as we get a shot of a pissed-off Weazel and a shot of Wald dancing in joy. And Jabba the Hutt just fell asleep. Meanwhile, Maul's probe droid flies past, still looking for Amidala.

Watto accuses Qui-Gon of swindling him, which he did a bit. He used the Force to change his dice roll so that he'd win the podrace superstar instead of his mother. Watto bet heavily on Sebulba all by himself though, that's his fault. And he is getting most of Anakin's winnings here, so he should quit whining.

Obi-Wan gets to work installing the parts into the queen's ship, while Qui-Gon goes with Anakin back to his house to show his mother how much money they made selling his podracer. Incidentally, Shmi's busy doing technical stuff, hinting that she may have been the one that taught her kid the skills he uses to make droids and podracers.

I'm not really sure why Anakin sold the podracer and gave up his podracing career, as he's surprised when Qui-Gon reveals he'd been racing to win his freedom. It comes as a bit of a shock to his mother as well. Shmi had asked if Qui-Gon could help him and now that he actually has she's clearly torn about it. He can take her son from this miserable planet and give him a new life with the Jedi, but it's a life she'll be shut out of. 

Qui-Gon gives Anakin a choice, warning him that being Jedi is difficult and not everyone succeeds. So there must be a lot of Force users in the galaxy that flunked out of Jedi school. Damn, I hope they give him a lift back to Tatooine if he fails.

Anakin jumps at the call to adventure immediately, unlike his son in A New Hope. It's only after he says "Yippee!" and goes to get his things that he wonders about his mother, and Qui-Gon has to break the bad news to him. He really doesn't want to leave her here, but she doesn't have to do much to convince him to go off and pack. 

Qui-Gon actually takes a moment afterwards to check whether she'll be alright, which surprised me. He's definitely a top-tier Jedi when it comes to basic human kindness and respect. Well, except for when he mind-controls people to acquire their stuff and cheats at gambling.

Anakin's also extremely thoughtful and compassionate in this movie, without even a hint of darkness... but he doesn't really give a damn about leaving C-3PO behind. He comes into his room, grabs his favourite things, and tells him "I'll make sure Mom doesn't sell you or anything. Bye."

Incidentally, this is a very interesting shot as it's from 3PO's point of view. It seems like his giant golden photoreceptors give him normal human vision! Which makes sense, as Lucas was experimenting at the time with the idea of shooting digitally instead on film, so he had a high opinion of digital camera sensors. He did test a camera during reshoots, but it wasn't until Attack of the Clones that he got to film an entire movie without actually using film.

Aww, Anakin runs back to give his mum a hug.

He says he doesn't think he can do it, but this time he changes his mind before she even says anything. The music's saying that this is a big emotional moment, at least as emotional as Luke staring at Tatooine's twin suns yearning to get out into the galaxy, but I'm not sure it quite gets there. I have a suspicion the scene resonates more with parents, who can feel how much his mother is holding back as she tells him to be brave. It's the opposite of Uncle Owen keeping Luke on the farm one more year.

Anakin promises that he'll be back to free her and the other slaves, which makes me wonder... could he have freed them if he had stayed? He did say he was working on a scanner to find the hidden transmitter.

Meanwhile, Darth Maul gets a report from one of his probes and drives off a cliff on his hoverbike. Just plummets off the side. It's really hard to get a good screencap of someone driving over a cliff though, so here's a picture of lightsabers instead:

Qui-Gon and Anakin are running back to the ship when suddenly Darth Maul appears! Why were they running? There's a deleted scene that shows Qui-Gon slicing up one of Maul's probes and realising that they need to get out of there fast, but in the final film they're just eager to get to Coruscant I guess.

This means we get an actual lightsaber fight! A really brief lightsaber fight, shot mostly in close-ups. I noticed that the fights against the droids were kind of filmed like that as well. They didn't want to spoil the big fight at the end. 

Obi-Wan has the ship fly overhead to let Qui-Gon jump on board, and then they're able to finally make their escape from Tatooine. Learn how to Force jump, Maul!

This gives Qui-Gon the opportunity to finally introduce Anakin Skywalker to Obi-Wan Kenobi! The first meeting of two Star Wars legends.

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)

It goes better than their last meeting.

Alright they've got the parts, they've got Anakin, and they're finally on their way to Coruscant! I think if I was going to split Phantom Menace into a 25-minute-per-episode sci-fi serial, this is where I'd end episode three.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART FOUR

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COMING SOON

Man, I could write about Star Wars all year. I mean, in a worst case scenario.

Thankfully, I'm pretty sure I can get this movie done within the month. So come back soon for the penultimate chapter of my Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace review!