ith the latest installment of the Star Wars saga quickly approaching $400
million in ticket sales at the U.S. domestic box office, it's a sure thing that the public
will be interested in the minutiae of the film. LucasArts' Star Wars: Episode I - Insider's
Guide was created to satisfy that intense curiosity. Jam-packed
with on-set details, production notes, thousands of photographs and a host
of video and audio clips, these discs will let Star Wars fans relive their favorite
moments from The Phantom Menace as well as learn a few things about how those
moments were created.
The CD-ROM uses a straightforward navigation scheme that's broken down
into various categories and split between two separate CDs. Through a series of
interconnected and well-illustrated virtual pages, users can explore the
various characters, technologies, vehicles and locations that appeared in
the movie. In addition, the can read the illustrated screenplay of the film, complete with detailed
notes on its revision history. These are just the goodies on disc one.
Disc two holds a healthy collection of behind-the-scenes video clips. It's
in these all-too-brief snatches that fans and students of Star Wars will be
able to catch fleeting glimpses of the creative personalities behind the camera.
The second disc also includes a brief
synopsis of each episode in the Star Wars saga, with some information about
the work that's already commenced on Episode II and III. If that's not
enough to whet the appetite of
every diehard Star Wars fanatic, then the preview glimpses of the upcoming
Episode I toys in the Expanded Universe section surely will.
Tying all this expansive and authoritative information together is a
meticulous 400-question trivia game that will absolutely confound even the
most researched Phantom Menace buff. The guide all but comes with a
guarantee that ensures users will be able to
beat George Lucas in a game of Star Wars Jeopardy.
Who's Anakin Starkiller?
The most rewarding elements of the Episode I - Insider's Guide can be found
while traversing through the scene-by-scene illustrated screenplay.
Comparing passages from the final shooting script against notations from
earlier drafts of The Phantom Menace is a revelation.
Readers will learn that at first Lucas had written a draft where Obi-Wan
Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn meet much later on in the movie. By skimming
through the sidebar notations, browsers will also discover that the original
location for the opening of the film was Utapau--a throwback to early
drafts of Star Wars: A New Hope, when "Skywalker" was still "Starkiller."
As ever, the pre-production artwork necessary to create a movie of this
size is both voluminous and revealing. Rather than telling art director
Doug Chiang exactly what kinds of designs he wanted for the film, Lucas
would charge his artists to go off and experiment using only a few key
words and vague esthetic guidelines as their inspiration. In the guide, the
still astonished, wide-eyed Chiang boasts that this led to more than 3,000
completed works of art for The Phantom Menace--mountains more than any
other film he's worked on during his successful tenure at Industrial Light
& Magic.
By digging through the discs, readers can uncover suggestions of entirely
new directions the film could have taken, such as the early character
renderings of an older Obi-Wan Kenobi who looks suspiciously like Ralph
Fiennes. Meanwhile, the mind bristles at the thought of Darth Maul
outfitted in an all-white costume. How subversive!
While the information available in the Episode I Insider's Guide cannot be
dismissed, the actual technology employed in bringing this content to the
computer screen is sorely outdated. The guide's movie clips are absolutely
butchered by the compression inherent in CD-ROM video. Indeed, the free
clips that have been available on the Stars Wars Web site have been of
similar or superior image quality. Watching scenes from what is arguably
the most visually arresting film ever created reduced to pixelated mush on
a computer monitor feels like sacrilege. It's hard not to think that this guide
would have been better suited for the DVD marketplace.
Despite its technological shortcomings, however, Star Wars fans will find much to revel in here.
