on 17 May 2002
Photo © LucasFilm Ltd 2002
The only thing you really need to know about Mr Lucas’ latest fantasy, opening worldwide as you read this, is that, yes, they’ve made Jar Jar Binks shut up. Mostly.
Lucas recently told Time magazine the Binks backlash was created by ‘37-year-old guys who spend all their time on the Internet’, which seems a bit rich coming from a 57-year-old guy who’s spent the last three years making a film about a couple of fit teenagers trying to get off with each other while being attacked by sci-fi monsters. Anyway, the unpopularity of his first major CGI character hasn’t dampened Lucas’ ardour for computer-based production.
The new film was shot on DV, using cameras specially developed by Sony and Panavision, and producer Rick McCallum reckons not a single frame remained untouched in postproduction. Lucas, being the man who sold Pixar to Steve Jobs, ought to know a thing or two about digital animation. Whether he can pull off three-dimensional human characters is another question, but the real point, of course, is to show off the state of the art in movie-making toys.
First published in ‘Twenty/20’, MacUser, 17 May 2002
adambanksdotcom @Herring1967 "watching on screen"?! That's not a subeditor, it's a butcher with English as a third language