Word: jedi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...high-tech polish to the rustic hardware, a kick to the old eldritch machinery. Alas, a decade later, everything new in Lucas' films seems old again. There is a shroud of inevitability, of why-bother, about Willow's chase through the forest (done better in Return of the Jedi), the impromptu ride down a mountain on a warrior's shield (done better in The Living Daylights), on the whole tussle of light and dark. The only twist here is that the crucial tug of wills is between two women, the good witch and the bad, over a female messiah...
Their efforts produced some stunning footage for Lucasfilm, including a 37- second hologram of a planet floating in space in Return of the Jedi. There was also a memorable one-minute sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan of a barren, moonlike sphere being transformed into a living planet, complete with computer-generated mountains, oceans and blue-green atmospheric haze. But in the end, even Lucas balked at the cost. "I don't want to be in the R.-and- D. business," he said earlier this year. "It's just too time consuming and expensive." Enter Jobs...
...play it again in Casablanca, Charles Foster Kane muttering his dying "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane. The memorable screen moments of recent years are more, well, eye-catching. A fleet of rebel spaceships enters the Death Star for a climactic battle against the Empire's forces in Return of the Jedi. The shards of a stained-glass window are transformed into a sword-wielding knight in Young Sherlock Holmes. Runaway mine cars career at a breakneck pace through hairbreadth twists and turns in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom...
...such objects as the spaceship from Cocoon and the De Lorean car that flew through time in Back to the Future. The creature shop is the birthplace for most of the monsters and other grotesques that populate Lucas' fantasyland, from the Rancor Pit monster in Return of the Jedi to the yet-to-beunveiled Howard the Duck...
...added to the scene. The pastry creatures that came to life in Young Sherlock Holmes, for example, were hand-manipulated rod puppets, each shot individually and added one by one in as many as twelve layers. For a brief shot of a space battle in Return of the Jedi, 63 layers were required. This and other complex scenes are made possible by a computer-driven camera developed by ILM that can repeat the same motion over and over so that new elements can be added with great precision...