I finally got round to watching my copy of Episode 3 that I got through last Monday. I thought I should share my thought’s on it. This is not a review of the movie, but rather of the transfer and the features.

The Movie Disk

• Artifact’s in the star’s on the intro scroll, but no real artifacts elsewhere in the movie
• Sound very good in 5.1EX, little lacking in 2.0, the fight and battle scenes work well and are well down mixed.
• The digital stunt-men, although good are still easily distinguishable from real people, this seems to be emphasised even more so on the small screen .
• Some of the droid and creature effects are great, others are awful, ILM seem to be slipping off the ball (with all of the prequel star wars episodes), but I have to let them off slightly due to the number of digital FX in the movie.
• R2D2 is still one of the best non talking characters in any movie, even if he is a little too ‘digital’ at times.
• The ‘Storm Troopers’ are still not very natural in there movement and look more like dressed up C3PO’s rather than human clones.
• The Directors Comments are decent if a little boring.

The Bonus Disk

• Deleted scenes :- Interesting to see the bit’s missed (including the scenes that were used in the game). Some of the subplot’s that were removed in there entirety are good, and a shame they were removed (the forming of the Rebel Alliance). Some of the scenes are not finished with very basic graphics and some green screen still visible. It is nice to see Mon Mothma and Admiral Akbaar though. All in all it is nice to see what was removed from the movie, and why.
• The Stunts feature is very good and well worth the watch, putting the faces on the stunt men is very clever.
• The ‘Within a Minute’ feature is an eye opener, it shows one of the lava fight scenes and breaks down everyone that went into making it happen.
• The becoming Darth feature is nothing new, however nice to have it all together in one piece of work.

Overall the transfer to DVD is very good, but you would really expect this as it’s filmed in HD Digital anyway. Some point is the movie in the dark / black scenes there is some JPEG style artifacts but these do have to be looked for, plus with the audio tracks etc on the disk it would be difficult to have the movie in 9Mbit/s which is the only way to stop those sorts of issues (bring on HD-DVD/Blue Ray!).

All in all not a bad DVD, even if the movie’s (first 3 of the series) are not quite what they should be.

[rate 6] Movie 

[rate 7.5] - Extras