From Star Wars to Star Wars: The Story of Industrial Light & Magic

I know : 1st « bad » production post 1000 reviews and i don't stick to my resolution to not write a review about it. The reason is mainly that i taped this documentary in 1999 during the whole night extravaganza about « episode 1 » and it was however good memories : 16 years ago, it was a new « star wars » movie and that means for me growing to kid to adult ! But it doesn't change that this documentary is poor : I have always found that Jackson is a limited actor and here, he is as usual ; Then i have never seen the point to do making-of to just say over and over congratulations ! And for sure, digital effects are the worst subject as it's technical and not really interesting to have the detailed report ! In addition, the documentary praises too much digital effects over mechanical ones and the choice of movies is not the best for ILM : « men in black » ? « dragon-slayer » ? « death becomes her » ? the pod race ??? For me ILM is also and foremost the classic trilogy, Star Trek and Indy movies, « Poltergeist », « ET »,...

From Star Wars to Star Wars shows a very interesting inside look to the famous special effects studio: Industrial Light and Magic. ILM has done effects for all the Star Wars films, Star Trek: First Contact and many other films. It was pretty neat to watch this. The inside look at Star Wars Episode I was the best part of all.

I am always interested in behind the scenes programs. "Star Wars to Star Wars: The Story of Industrial Light & Magic" gives a good behind the scenes look at Star Wars plus many other movies that ILM has been involved with over the years. It is fascinating to see the way special effects have evolved from the original models used in Star Wars to the modern computer generated images. It is also reasonably entertaining without being too distracting.

I do have one really big problem with this show. They showed special effects from many ILM movies (Star Wars, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Men In Black, Forrest Gump, etc...). However, they did not even mention the Star Trek movies. ILM have done the special effects for all but two of the nine ST movies. Their work has included special effects sequences such as "The Genesis Tape" from Star Trek II (1982), the fully computer generated Enterprise B inside the Nexus ribbon in Star Trek Generations (1994) and the space walk fight with the Borg on the outside of the Enterprise E in Star Trek First Contact (1996). According to "The Art of Star Trek", the Genesis Tape was "the most spectacular use of computer-generated imagery yet to appear in a movie". This sequence took ILM six months to create, yet it was completely ignored by this show. Surely Star Trek deserves at least a mention in this program when it is about Industrial Light & Magic, not just Star Wars.

If they had at least mentioned Star Trek along with these other movies I would have rated it higher than the 5 out of 10 I gave it.

I love all these behind-the-scenes docs, and was looking forward to this when it was aired on TV. But alas I was disappointed. It didn't spend as much time on the Star Wars films as I had hoped. But then, it was supposed to summerise ILM's involvement in many major films over the last three decades, and not concentrate on only a few.

Worth seeing if you're a big fan like I am, but I'd recommend 'The Making Of Star Wars', which will probably never be shown on TV again, or 'SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back'. They're both quite hard to find on VHS, but I managed to obtain copies.