Review Detail
8.2 8 10
(Updated: September 10, 2012)
Enjoyment
7.0
Review by Waslah — April 7, 2011 @ 2:14 pm
I took a look at this film just the other day and decided I would share my thoughts.
The Edit is very very well done. I don’t remember any hard cutting, or jumping around, or any of the various strange visual deals you get from many fan edits. On the other hand, I did think that some of it while very well done made for a film that moved just a little bit too fast. By cutting so much out the pacing does seem to become very very frantic in some cases. Some minor changes here and there might fix that.
The new invasion of Naboo is excellently done, and really adds weight to an otherwise danger-less film and I greatly appreciated that. Many of my problems with Episode 1 is that at no point did I ever feel like any of the characters were ever truly in any danger, and that just saps the excitement right out of a film like this. What’s done here, by eliminating the heavy handed and out of place humor that often overtook Lucas’ original version of the movie, goes a long way towards making me care about the situation and the characters in them. A massive improvement in my opinion.
Touching upon the footage of the “Nabooians” fleeing the droid army and federation invasion…it does feel out of place. I might suggest perhaps you could look at something like Star Trek Insurrection which may have something that at least looks a little closer to the Star Wars universe to take from that wouldn’t feel so out of place.
The audio work is my one big problem with this film. It may just be a technical problem on my end but it did often feel like the dialogue and sound F/X were very quiet while the music itself was incredibly overwhelming and often drown out said dialogue and sound F/X. There were also moments where the dialogue did not line up with the video, giving that rubbery dub look when some of the characters spoke. While this only happened now and then it did happen on occasion and I did find it slightly annoying.
The whole concept though, with Jar Jar being the only Gungan, and the re-dubbing of the Nemodians and Jar Jar, is a brilliant one and actually made me like both much much more. The trade federation is finally a villain I can take seriously and Jar Jar is now a character that I enjoy watching and feels a lot more in line with tone of the original trilogy.
Overall I’d say this plays a lot like a rough draft to a great story. There’s a lot of brilliant ideas at play here, and with some tightening up it could be a version of Phantom Menace that I’d happily place into a regular viewing rotation.
7/10
I took a look at this film just the other day and decided I would share my thoughts.
The Edit is very very well done. I don’t remember any hard cutting, or jumping around, or any of the various strange visual deals you get from many fan edits. On the other hand, I did think that some of it while very well done made for a film that moved just a little bit too fast. By cutting so much out the pacing does seem to become very very frantic in some cases. Some minor changes here and there might fix that.
The new invasion of Naboo is excellently done, and really adds weight to an otherwise danger-less film and I greatly appreciated that. Many of my problems with Episode 1 is that at no point did I ever feel like any of the characters were ever truly in any danger, and that just saps the excitement right out of a film like this. What’s done here, by eliminating the heavy handed and out of place humor that often overtook Lucas’ original version of the movie, goes a long way towards making me care about the situation and the characters in them. A massive improvement in my opinion.
Touching upon the footage of the “Nabooians” fleeing the droid army and federation invasion…it does feel out of place. I might suggest perhaps you could look at something like Star Trek Insurrection which may have something that at least looks a little closer to the Star Wars universe to take from that wouldn’t feel so out of place.
The audio work is my one big problem with this film. It may just be a technical problem on my end but it did often feel like the dialogue and sound F/X were very quiet while the music itself was incredibly overwhelming and often drown out said dialogue and sound F/X. There were also moments where the dialogue did not line up with the video, giving that rubbery dub look when some of the characters spoke. While this only happened now and then it did happen on occasion and I did find it slightly annoying.
The whole concept though, with Jar Jar being the only Gungan, and the re-dubbing of the Nemodians and Jar Jar, is a brilliant one and actually made me like both much much more. The trade federation is finally a villain I can take seriously and Jar Jar is now a character that I enjoy watching and feels a lot more in line with tone of the original trilogy.
Overall I’d say this plays a lot like a rough draft to a great story. There’s a lot of brilliant ideas at play here, and with some tightening up it could be a version of Phantom Menace that I’d happily place into a regular viewing rotation.
7/10
W