STAR WARS: EPISODE I—THE PHANTOM MENACE

STAR WARS: EPISODE I—THE PHANTOM MENACE. George Lucas, dir., script (auteur). USA: Lucasfilm (prod.) / 20th Century Fox (dist.), 1999. Industrial Light and Magic, SpFx. 131 min. Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd, Ian McDiarmid, Pernilla August, Ahmed Best (voice), featured players.

Significant here for introducing the "'droids" C3P0 (with "his" wires exposed) and R2D2 and for the large numbers of CGI robots replacing the Imperial Storm Troopers of the initial trilogy (q.v.); apparently, Imperial technology over fictive time moves away from literal robot warriors and toward roboticized men. In RETURN OF THE JEDI, the Imperial Storm Troopers are opposed by the central human heroes and the fuzzy, teddy-bearish Ewoks; in TPM, the corresponding opposition allies against the robots the primate heroes and humanoids of amphibian evolution: fuzzy vs. plastic has given way to CGI frog skin vs. metal, but the point seems the same, and important enough—in terms of some value system—for Lucas to repeat. Note also the capital world of the Republic: like I. Asimov's Trantor in the Foundation series, it is a city-planet, totally urbanized (see Prelude to Foundation, cited under Fiction).