One of the great dangers of shooting so much footage against green screen is that interior scenes can seem flat and arid. The worlds of the original trilogy were often dirty and scuffed up: From the dark corners of Yoda’s swamp home to the cables that ran between rooms in the rebel base on Hoth — we understood that these were places that were lived in. With a few exceptions, the interior scenes of PM had none of that immersive “realism.” Even the exteriors seemed smaller than life: the courtyard scenes on Naboo look like they were shot during an afternoon at Busch Gardens.
WHAT OTHERS SAID:
“…The Phantom Menace may strike even some kids as excessively cartoon-like, but then, as a director, Lucas remains the greatest exponent of the theme park aesthetic… If Naboo City is a gussied-up Victorian vision of ancient Rome, the Gungan underwater civilization seems modeled on a Bowery lighting-fixture emporium. Most hideous is the galactic capital—a nauseatingly dense combination of Manhattan and L.A. in which every interior is furnished like a Reno carpet joint and every window reveals a sky in whirlybird gridlock.”
— J. Hoberman, The Village Voice, May 18, 1999