fevered.earth

Tag: Film

  • The Cult of the Scan

    What is the best way to watch your favourite movie? As technology has progressed, the options have only grown more numerous. Having to go to a cinema used to be synonymous with seeing a film, before home television began its gradual but unyielding incursion into viewing habits. For readers alive for the same timespan as me, the progression from videotape via various discs to streaming has transformed film viewing in your lifetime.

    To the list of available viewing mediums we can add one you may not have heard of: the “35mm scan”, a digital file you download from an anonymous link that isn’t any official home release of the film. Instead, an enterprising fan has gotten ahold of a set of reels from when the film was shown in pre-digital cinemas. Armed with these, they have secured the use of a professional scanner used to digitize film, and have made their own version for home viewing. These scans are highly prized for their scarcity and their perceived proximity to seeing the film in the cinema.

    I will tell you up front: whenever I hear about one of these scans I bristle. The world of colour science, the nitty-gritty detail in how an image goes from being staged in front of a camera to being displayed on a screen, is a complicated and subtle one. Seeing a scan advertised on twitter via a slapped-together comparison of different frames in from different releases showing different colour tones as if it proves something sticks in the craw. Making a home release of a movie is always a process of compromise; the dialogue around 35mm scans erases this complexity.

    When people talk about having seen a film they do it just like that: have you seen the film? A single, unitary experience. But this cannot possibly be the case. Every viewing of a film is unique across a breadth of categories. Did you see it in 3D? In IMAX? On Bluray? On 4K Bluray? On streaming? Cropped to 16:9? The director’s cut? Which director’s cut? In HDR? In the daytime? In HDR in the daytime? And so on. An alien observing from orbit might conclude that no two viewings of a film are comparable, that every one is utterly unique. In practice people actually don’t really think about this, or if they do they decide for themselves whether or not their viewing of the film was sufficient. People may choose to supplement a film they saw on DVD with a trip to the cinema if it comes back around. People may consider that if they watched the airplane edit of a given film, they still need to see the real thing. Conversely, people may seek a censored cut out as a particular experience — ‘stranger in the alps’ and such.

    In the rough hierarchy of preferable viewing scenarios, cinemas and distributors have gotten wise to a few successful approaches. It’s not uncommon for a big action film to receive an ‘IMAX cut’, with some scenes shot for the full frame IMAX format — and when the time comes, with some scenes available to be shown pillarboxed at home. Of course there are 3D presentations also, and adventurous directors have pursued high frame rate showings. But the real prestige is being shown on film, real physical film. Tarantino ran a roadshow of viewings of ‘Hateful Eight’ in the 70mm format. Arthouse cinemas and megaplexes alike boast of special 35mm showings.

    Why is real film so revered? Is it entirely down due to the mystical draw of film grain, the organic distribution of structure in the chemicals that resolve into an image? By the time film stopped being the major format of distribution though, film stock was capable of having very little natural grain. And conversely, digital grain has been largely indistinguishable from the real thing for many years — some directors going so far as to have blank film processed and scanned so that a unique grain can be applied to a digital negative. One of the ironies of film production is that grain, which is so prized by the end consumer as a mark of quality, must be removed for the visual effects process to function. Individual elements cannot appear to have more or less grain, so for visual effects shots it all gets removed at the start of the process and replaced again at the end.

    I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 35mm on release, at an excellent cinema. It’s a great film, but I can’t say that the chemical medium enhanced the viewing at all. Simulated grain has long being indistinguishable from the real thing. Frankly, seeing any film in a proper cinema will elevate it — the controlled environment, the dark room, the commitment to not being able to pause the damn thing and compulsively scroll on your phone for a while.

    I suspect though that at the root of the question is the authenticity fetish: the analog film experience, joining the vinyl record and the manual gearbox car, is simply more “real”, more tactile, desirable for what it represents rather than any particular positive aspect of the experience it provides. Which isn’t to say that these things don’t have tangible appeals of their own — just that the cosmic first mover is the nostalgic impulse. As the slogan goes, 35mm film is ‘The Real Thing.’

    The dark cousin of the real film screening, the home viewing equivalent, is the phenomenon of the ‘35mm scan’. The news often flies round Twitter: some brave soul has unspooled a prized 35mm print of some classic movie and scanned it in, delivering a true unmediated experience of the film in question for the first time outside of a cinema and at home. Unmediated by what? Well, by the process of home release which — it is implied — goes beyond merely presenting a movie and into tampering with it, presumably with sinister intent. The print, by virtue of having laid untouched since the movie was released in cinemas, represents another level of purity of artistic endeavour — the original, before any revisions could be made.

    The phantom at the feast here is George Lucas, pioneer both of digital filmmaking and of tampering with films post-release. The phenomenon of the 35mm scan is presaged by the phenomenon of the ‘despecialised cut’, a decades-long effort by fans of Star Wars to wind back the clock on Lucas’s special editions and produce the authentic original Star Wars as seen in cinemas in 1977. Many expected the purchase of Star Wars by Disney to result in a release of these stolen treasures, but none has appeared — perhaps lending credence to the theory that the production of the special editions involved dismantling and repurposing all the remaining viable film elements of the original cuts. ‘Despecialised cuts’ proliferate, despite the stated goal being to return to the original truth of Star Wars. Fans cannot agree, it turns out, on exactly which elements of the special editions are authentic and inauthentic. Everyone can get mad at the cartoon dinosaur, but perhaps they don’t think the lightsabers should be white, or that matte lines on model X-wings deserve to be squirreled away. Despite years of effort, the single truth of Star Wars continues to elude capture.

    Some efforts are more authentic than others.

    There are different versions because there are different screens. Any TV whether in the past or today is fundamentally different to a cinema screen. Back in the day this was so straightforward and obvious that no-one questioned it: Your crummy CRT TV could barely display a TV channel correctly (especially if you were North American, suffering under the yoke of the NTSC colour system), let alone compete with the screen at the cinema. Before we even get to the quality of the image, for much of the history of the television the screen was a different shape. This makes a good analogy: much as pan-and-scan cut the physical size of the frame to fit the restrictions of TV, a similar job needs to be done to fit the superior contrast and colour of a 35mm image to what is possible on, and what would look good on, an average TV.

    The trouble is that while this need to reformat is now much less obvious — our TVs are bigger, brighter, more colourful than ever — it hasn’t gone away. Cinemas are (mostly) still projected using xenon bulbs, which give a quality of light totally unlike any display technology you’re likely to interact with. Cinema projectors can reliably reproduce colour in excess of the majority of home screens. One of the reasons that 35mm film continued as long as it did as the format of choice for directors was that it is capable of capturing dynamic range — contrast — well in excess of what the average video camera can capture, or TV screen can display. Every film pushed to home video or TV broadcast is reformatted to mitigate these differences. As screen technology advances, the change becomes more subtle but no less essential.

    Once you’ve accepted that every version for home viewing is an adaptation, a deviation away from the cinema experience — and that itself depending on the calibration and capability of the projector used — you start to understand what’s so pernicious about the phenomenon of the “35mm scan”. Because the implicit claim is that by going straight to the film print as a source of truth you’re avoiding all this inconsistency — but in fact you’re simply entrusting it to the hands of a well-meaning amateur. Someone still needs to handle how the dynamic range of film is mapped to the more limited range of video. It’s just either going to be the call of whoever prepares the scan, or worse still: the default settings of the scanning software.

    It’s a whirling vortex of uncertainty — to achieve the goal of adapting an accurate presentation of a specific 35mm print of a film for home video, you’re forced first to assume the accuracy of your scanner, then of the colour science of the scanning software, then of whatever tools you use to package the scan into a video. This is before you’ve considered whether there are any colour casts or degradation on the print itself that would need to be compensated for — if you had a reference to compare them with. With all that done, you can’t say anything certain about how the print looked when originally shown in a cinema other than that it was definitely illuminated with a bulb with a totally different tone to your screen.

    And of course, if you’re in the business of thinking that home releases are being chronically mis-coloured, you’re probably bringing your own biases to the table. The scanning software has tempting sliders for contrast and sliders for saturation and all sorts of other options. Let’s all hope your display is well-calibrated when you nudge the white balance a little warmer — after all, isn’t that how it was in the cinema? Most often when one of these scans turns up the argument from first principles is moot: the author has clearly jumped right in and tried to grade the film to their memory and preferences rather than the boring old scientific process that might not end up looking very good anyway.

    Well, why shouldn’t people make their own grades? It is after all a creative process, and there’s no more reason to believe that art cannot come from this process than there is to believe art can’t come from a re-cut or mash-up. I certainly think people should be able to do their own grades. What I can’t concede is locating in these efforts any authenticity, this fiction of a ‘perfect’ rendition of the film that is being denied to us by greedy corporations or fickle creatives. The truth is back where we started, with our alien observer: there is no perfect rendition, in fact there are no common renditions whatsoever. Every time a film is played is unique. The place, the time, the heat, the humidity, the age of your eyes. Much remains the same; more changes. A 35mm scan is no more able to take you back than a grotty old VHS.

    I think for lots of people the appeal of these scans is surely that of the cult: the insider knowledge, the initiation. Sure, you know The Matrix. But do you really know it? My carefully cultivated Plex library can show it to you in original cool blues instead of corporate-approved green. Original grades, open mattes, extended TV cuts: there’s something a bit “rare Pokémon cards” about it all.

    Directors are not immune to correcting against the vision in their memory either: later home releases have often “fixed” perceived issues with earlier ones, if not while introducing new ones. James Cameron is infamous for ramping up the digital noise reduction on his new releases to the point of parody. And of course George Lucas was making even special-er editions of Star Wars right up until he signed on the dotted line with Disney.

    It all speaks to the malleability of the experience, to the unique force of watching a movie over and again, discovering new things to love and new things to hate. Just don’t tell me that this one has the colours right.

    If you enjoyed this essay-length whinge, please watch my video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me here on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews. I also post regularly on Bluesky.

  • Release of the Ayer Cut

    This is an additional coda to Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’, my 2020 video essay about the movie Suicide Squad.

    17. (October 2021, ahead of announcement of a new Director’s cut for Suicide Squad)

    What are we?

    There is an importance to making art and art is important; making quiet, personal art, making large mass-market art. It’s the nature of the movie-making system that to paint on the largest canvas you have to compromise to commercial interests, commercial brands, ‘intellectual property’ — and the corrosive influence of that term has burned away more culture than any ‘modern mythology’ could hope to restore. But what comes out is still art, sometimes pop art, sometimes crass art, sometimes art we appreciate and sometimes art we don’t.

    Making art — making meaning — and showing it, or not showing it, saving it or destroying it. These are universal experiences. Showing art to each other is how we come to understand ourselves in relation to another human being. We cannot communicate directly, brain-to-brain. We only have words and images, and we use them to tell each other things we don’t even know we know.

    This goes some way to explaining the sense of natural justice to hearing that someone has prevailed against the machine and had their authentic vision made available, however much the nature of a collaborative artform means that the idea of any one ‘vision’ is illusory. It was right that the world got to see Blade Runner without narration, it was right that Ken Russell’s The Devils was liberated from the censors, and it was right that Zack Snyder got to release his Justice League. If this list is of films by directors with a fairly homogenous demographic, it is only because relief for this injustice, like so many others, is distributed unfairly. But that does not make any individual case less unjust.

    Which is all to say that it is as important that David Ayer gets to have his cut of Suicide Squad as it is when an indie musician releases a treasured album or a writer submits their first essay. It may not even be ‘good’, whatever ‘good’ should mean. It has probably come about as the result of some tedious bean-counting exercise; such is the world we live in. But we should celebrate that on the largest scale there is an affirmation that it is good for people to be able to create and release art for its own sake, and for the sake of creative integrity.

    I closed out my last essay by saying that “Suicide Squad is over, for now.” Somehow, against all odds, Suicide Squad has another attempt to explain itself.

    Editorial note: Contrary to rumour at the time, there was no announcement and Suicide Squad did not get another attempt to explain itself.

    Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’ is also available in written form.

  • Tár

    Spoilers.

    That’s Tár.

    Really loved this. Loved the confidence to open the film with an extended one-on-one interview with the main character to an audience, a move that could easily prove as cataclysimically boring as those events often are. Loved the inverted front-credits — the Avengers could never.

    Cate Blanchett dissolves into the character of Lydia Tár, a female trailblazer in a man’s world who not only resents both of those facts but also the question that prompts them. She furiously defends the practise of interpreting an artist through their life and their intent, but seeks to scrub every decision she herself makes down to a purely rational level. This culminates in two cataclysmic mistakes, wherein she seeks to avoid the appearance of impropriety by denying a promotion to her long-suffering assistant at the same time as she contrives an ‘objective’ route to seeing a talented young cellist granted a solo above more senior members of the orchestra.

    A fun aspect is that despite everything, neither of these actions is strictly inappropriate: the cellist and the assistant both are talented! Some level of grooming them for success would not be terrible. But Tár lives in fear of others interpreting her in the same way she engages with the great composers, keeping her life so strictly compartmentalised she continues to work in an old apartment that she considers a terrible working environment, full of noise and distraction. She has a great, remote house with her partner and their child that would be better in every way, except that it would mean letting other people in. The compartmentalising isn’t just physical — the worst thing Tár does in the film, though it mostly happens off-screen, is ostracising one of her former mentees who is now stalking her. A partner or a friend would have been able to offer advice that could have helped them both. Instead, Tár becomes implicated in her student’s suicide, and not unfairly.

    The film as a whole treads a neat line in keeping Tár sympathetic while not excusing her. She is brash, unpleasant, cruel. She tells terrible easy lies, cheats on her partner, neglects their child. But she excuses all this in herself as she excuses it in her heroes: as incidental to the music. It builds to the beautiful moment where Tár charged Mark Strong’s character on the conducting podium, throwing him to the floor. It’s a completely outlandish moment, ridiculous even within the world the film has established. But you can understand it — despite everything it seems justifiable, and as if the film may have slipped into a universe where she can stand at that plinth and through force of will along inspire the orchestra to play. Tár finally identifies that true note of passion/betrayed that will allow her to conduct the perfect Mahler’s 5th. You really want her to be allowed to continue.

    The one part that felt slightly off to me was the sequence where, disgraced and out of Berlin, Tár goes back to what is presumably a childhood home and watches the old tapes of conducting that inspired her — a neat tie back to the cellist — who had the same inspiration but all different, and Blanchett deserves an award just for what her face does when the young prodigy says she doesn’t know who was conducting. As well though, she has a brief interaction with presumably a brother, who has a strong accent and notes that she changed her name from Linda to Lydia (the credits take this one step further and have him credited with the surname “Tarr”). As apropos as it is to Tár’s self-serving mantras about understanding the composer to understand the work, it’s too tempting to take this as the root cause of everything the character is. It goes too far, it’s too cruel, to try and take her name from her like this. For better or for worse — and the character does much that shouldn’t be forgiven — her identity is no facade.

    The actual ending strikes a more agreeable note, with Tár shipping out to East Asia and rebuilding, alone, applying her exacting methods to what turns out to be a concert of video game music. The sequence is constructed like a joke, with a punchline, and would be easy to understand as a ironic punishment for the unapologetically snobby maestro — except that she takes it exactly as seriously as she did the (unfortunate) climax of her Mahler sequence in Berlin. There’s no suggestion that she considers this pursuit in any way humiliating or beneath her. She is uncomfortable and unhappy — but that was also true in Berlin. No matter how unacceptable it seems, Tár is content so long as there is music.

    I’m currently reviewing Andor, piece by piece. How many reviews of Tár do you think will be written by people currently writing about Andor? Not enough, in my opinion. All links here.

  • Obi-wan (The Phantom Menace)

    Last time we tied up the Obi-wan series, pensive about the ways in which the new era differs from the old.

    Prequels are a fraught business; expectations are high and the scope for delivering surprises low. Further still, this is no regular prequel, this is The Prequel, the definite article. Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. It’s where we finally get to see where the Obi-wan Kenobi of A New Hope came from, with his vague anecdotes about the Clone Wars and folksy commitment to an ancient monastic order. Crucially intertwined too, the story of Lord Vader, the impassive man behind the mask — the war hero who became the Emperor’s right-hand man. Finally, the enigmatic story of Padme, mother to Luke and Leia, absent entirely from the original trilogy.

    Now as well, this is where we get to see the where the title character of Disney+’s Obi-wan came from. The origin for his principled non-intervention and familiarity with child sidekicks. And the origin of the pained, murderous Vader of that series and his red hot hatred of the noble Jedi Knights. The spectral figure of Leia’s mother, described to Leia as “wise, discerning, kindhearted” which really seem to be burying the lede even for this film.

    Finally, although there isn’t the space here to really dig into it, this is the film that crafts fully half of what we consider Star Wars aesthetic, and it looks really great. So much thoughtful design by so many artists went into creating a film that looks unmistakably Star Wars while throwing out an endless succession of new designs.

    The senate chamber is a particular triumph.

    What is first and most noticeable about The Phantom Menace is that it is a story about slaves. It is bookended with snippets of high drama and action mostly taking place on Naboo, with some laser fights in space and sinister dealings in a humongous senate. The real story however sits squarely in the middle acts of the film, the tale of how young Anakin Skywalker, who will one day grow up to be Darth Vader, was once a starry-eyed slave child. The film makes no bones about this focus — encountering Anakin for the first time, Padme exclaims “you’re a slave?” and Anakin shoots back “I’m a person”.

    There is a dramatic structure entirely local to Anakin’s story. You could make three episodes of Obi-wan out of it, were you inclined:

    • Episode 1, A mysterious cloaked man comes to town and meets Anakin, a precocious young engineer who works for a grumpy alien named Watto. Caught in a sandstorm, Anakin offers the man and his friends refuge, and realises that the man is a Jedi Knight.
    • Episode 2, the mysterious stranger enlists Anakin to race a pod competitively to win the parts to repair his ship — and the price to free Anakin from Watto. Against all odds, Anakin wins.
    • Episode 3, a freed Anakin must pack his things and leave his mother, facing up to the reality that his new friend cannot or will not end slavery on Tatooine. As they finally go to leave, the Jedi is attacked by a horned demon with a red laser sword and barely escapes. Anakin looks forward to his new life as a Jedi Knight, swearing to one day return and end slavery once and for all.
    The plight of the droids, a slave class to the slave class, is ever-present, from Padme thanking R2D2 to Anakin promising to have Shmi not sell C3P0.

    Anakin talks of little else other than his desire to free the slaves, to free his mother, to free himself. He transparently believes that becoming a Jedi will grant him the power to do this, even though the Jedi Order would never allow it. From the moment he catches glimpse of Qui-gon’s laser sword it’s clear that the idea has gripped him. Conversely Qui-gon is fascinated by Anakin, and Neeson does a good, subtle job of portraying him as a man being led on by his instincts against his logical judgement. He reluctantly probes Anakin’s abilities with his mother, he double checks himself by testing Anakin’s blood. Qui-gon wants to be absolutely certain in his supposition when he goes before the council to claim that Anakin is the ‘chosen one’, a myth regarding a figure who can bring balance to the force.

    Qui-gon is positively callous in his refusal to assist — telling Anakin’s mother outright: “I didn’t come here to free slaves”. He almost sounds like he’s trying to persuade himself. The force tells him one thing and his Jedi training tells him another; Qui-gon ultimately splits the difference and frees half the slaves, frees Anakin whose route to freedom while tricky is still catered for in the Jedi ideology. Freeing Anakin’s mother would mean contending with the Jedi council’s doctrine of non-attachment and separation, so for Qui-gon it’s ultimately easier to not think about it too hard. In the end he is crucially incapable of seeing slavery as an evil in and of itself worth destroying, and in this failure he dooms the Jedi order.

    The return of Qui-Gon.

    Qui-gon is an interesting figure from the perspective of the original trilogy: a new addition to the cast, unnamed beforehand, who is formative for all three of our trilogy of protagonists. He trains Obi-wan, teaches Padme to trust the will of the force, and inspires young Anakin. Crucially, he also fails all three: he cannot free Anakin’s mother, he hurriedly concludes Obi-wan’s training to take Anakin as an apprentice, and he abandons Padme once they reach Coruscant to the manipulations of Senator Palpatine. He’s positioned as the best of the Jedi — he is, after all, the one we’re given to follow for the bulk of this film, and the council are a bunch of old fuddy-duddies who can’t see the Sith Lord right under their noses. Qui-gon is our introduction to the functioning Jedi Knight.

    Our three protagonists grouped together at the end of the film, set under the gaze of the malevolent Chancellor Palpatine.

    Obi-wan’s dubious training is heavily hinted at in the final scenes of the movie, trapped as a forced observer behind a series of red force fields as he watches the sinister Darth Maul slay his tutor. Obi-wan’s rage on the death of Qui-gon is non-too-subtly coded as a reaction of the dark side, the red glow over his face making him a mirror of Maul. His stance behind the force field, tense and anxious, recalls Maul more than it does the quiet meditation of Qui-gon. Somewhat interestingly, Obi-wan’s defeat of Maul is echoed in the final conflict of the Obi-wan series, as Kenobi is thrown by his opponent into a pit, which he is able to channel his intense emotions into vaulting out of.

    To some frustration, Qui-gon’s return in Obi-wan amounted to a cameo of a few incoherent sentences. It really would be fascinating to hear his ghostly perspective on how subsequent events to his death played out. The show was unwilling to provide them. Apparently he appears in the Lucas-governed animated series which I haven’t seen.

    Love that goofy puppet-mouth though, a good choice for a villain who is literally a puppet.

    Phantom Menace is not without flaws; it’s hard to begrudge someone finding the use of accents for the Trade Federationists distasteful. By all accounts Lucas was attempting to address the issue head-on by some dubious means during the design of the characters but the consensus since is definitely that polishing specific cultural indicators off your Fu Manchu villains does not liberate them from being Fu Manchu villains. I found it easier to digest Watto, the slaver who seems to barely live better than his slaves. Watto always struck me as more of a hard-nosed New York guy stereotype than anything else, like Bob Hoskins playing Super Mario — but then I am hardly an appropriate judge to deliver this verdict.

    The “I’ve been wondering, what are midichlorians?” conversation is a notable clunker, dialogue-wise. It has the feeling of a late addition, interjected to explicitly explain to audiences that the Jedi can measure the mechanical aspects of using the force via science. This is one of the most interesting and disruptive elements that the prequels wrote in over the top of the original films, making a mockery of Yoda’s airy pronunciation that we are all luminous beings, that the Jedi are a religion of universal spirituality— the Jedi Knights were cracking out the calipers when things got really serious.

    The elements of The Phantom Menace that have been much derided in years since the release of the film did not hugely bother me — Jake Lloyd is perfectly competent as child Anakin, certainly by reference to child Leia and child Luke from the Obi-wan series. He’s endearing and filled with childish glee. The ‘yippee’s are a bit much but hardly a cardinal sin. Jar-Jar similarly is a coherent component of the film as the cartoon rabbit who steps in the animal dung. No complaints.

    Surprised they never went back and re-rendered Jar-Jar with some more modern materials. He mostly looks acceptable with some occasional dips into ‘unconvincing’ but he’d be a good candidate for a special edition.

    The most notable reflection for Obi-wan in The Phantom Menace is the metamorphosis from a story concerned about general evils to a story concerned about a specific evil. Palpatine announces to Padme that “the Republic is not what it once was,” that the system that governed the galaxy has lost its power and its way, setting the stage for his ascension to the Supreme Chancellorship, and thereafter the Empire: The Empire is an answer for this chaos we see, manufactured though some of it is. Palpatine has manoeuvred the Trade Federation, to be sure, but the Senate’s inability to decisively resolve the conflict is authentic. Their inability to tackle slavery on Naboo is authentic. It is a failing government, and the Jedi are papering the cracks for it, pressed into the nakedly corrupt position of being sent out as the Supreme Chancellor’s enforcers at the start of the film.

    Obi-wan’s focus on the Empire as a state oppressing the Jedi is completely alien to this film. It is unthinkable. An untrained Jedi child is no more threat to the Empire than is Sebulba — Anakin’s force sensitivity could easily be left to rot on the vine to no large calamity, and the possibility of doing so is seriously considered by all involved. Being ‘force-sensitive’ is treated with all the awe of being found to be ‘maths-sensitive’, an advantage in many fields but really only an indicator of potential. The decision whether or not to train him is what will make the difference. This butts uncomfortably against Obi-wan’s ingrained notion of the Jedi identity, rescuing Jedi children, the rebellion helping prevent the Empire from rooting out unknowing Jedi. That story simply is not this story.

    The Empire, lurking.

    Furthermore The Empire itself, even here, is the Republic’s dirty secret. Qui-gon, Kenobi and Maul push from the picturesque halls of the Naboo palace into the back rooms and find the Empire waiting there for them, gleaming floors and bannister-free walkways aplenty. There is continuity between the gilding of the dying Republic and its Jedi enforcers and the Empire — and this first prequel is unconditional about this. When Anakin, defeated, tells Obi-wan that he is not responsible for creating Vader, Obi-wan has created the entire Empire, insofar as every Jedi created the entire Empire. To ‘rebel’ against it from this position is incoherent: the Rebellion should scorn all Jedis.

    Anakin ends the film in the traditional garb of the learner Jedi.

    Ranking, best to worst:

    1. The Phantom Menace
    2. Flashback recap of the prequel trilogy
    3. Obi-wan: Episode 5
    4. Obi-wan: Episode 3
    5. Obi-wan: Episode 1
    6. Obi-wan: Episode 6
    7. Obi-wan: Episode 4
    8. Obi-wan: Episode 2

    If you like my writing, please subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews or watch Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’, available on Youtube now. Previously I watched and wrote-up season 1 of ‘Invincible’, in reverse order.