Image Quality
This movie was shot on fine grain 35mm film stock and used anamorphic lenses, as such there are moments throughout the film which are slightly out of focus and you get scenes where the central portion of the image is more detailed than the left and right, or in some cases where a character on the left side is in focus and the character on the right side is a little out of focus, thats just normal for anamorphic shot films, whats not normal is some of the edge halo's which are prevalent throughout the films running time, thankfully they are much milder than what was seen on the original DVD release, this is still a
sign that a lot of filtering has taken place and the finer detail has been removed, edge sharpening isn't going to get that back, indeed i can't believe in 2011 that a prestige release such as this has edge enhancement,
it makes the film look processed and not at all film like.
There is softness visible in many scenes where there is heavy CGI, this could be a limitation of the technology and this is where adding grain would help hide the issue,
the fact grain removal has been applied actually makes it worse and the softness in these scenes sticks out more, now i'm not sure if those scenes were always soft in cinema's but i do think additional noise reduction has been applied and i thought it made the image very soft and undetailed in places.
As just one of many examples of edge enhancement, check out the night scene when Darth Maul lands on Tatooine, you can see a sharpened unnatural look to the rocks in the background, then check out the end of his first fight scene with Qui-Gon, you see him from behind watching with his lightsaber in hand as the spaceship takes off into orbit, the edge halo around his black outfit is all too obvious, there are examples like this which run through the whole film.
Its not all negative, i thought there was good quality detail in a handful of shots, these include closeups of the fighter pilots during the end space battle scene and some scenes with Senator Palpatine when he discusses becoming the Chancellor with the Amidala decoy, mostly though i felt there was a lack of fine quality detail, too many edge halo's and a positively unfilmlike look to the proceedings, thats not due to all the CGI and green screen use but i highly suspect it is
due to some quite heavy handed filtering which has removed a lot of the higher frequency fine detail that exists on images shot on 35mm film stock, a compromised image and all because they wanted to eradicate the film grain.
I felt
the podrace was one of the scenes which to my eyes seemed to look soft and filtered, another such scene was the Gungans fighting the robot army, now some of this may be due to the quality of CGI used but i still suspect the degraining job done by Lowry as the issue since it affects both real life humans and the CGI creations in the podrace ( and other ) scenes.
In the aforementioned Gungan/Robot army battle there is a scene at the beginning of the battle showing a field of grass, it's just before the battle droid transport vehicles appear at the top of the hill,
the grass in that particular scene lacks any detail, it really is a mess, there are various other examples all the way through the film showing this lack of detail.
I think much of the problem is George Lucas wanting this prequel to look like the other two prequels which were shot on high definition digital camera's, unfortunately they still cannot degrain 35mm shot films without side effects and without removing detail, no matter what Lowry or Lucas claims,
this film suffers as a result of degraining and then sharpening up many scenes,
only a handful of scenes are left looking good. This is not good enough for one of the biggest blu ray releases to date.