Light & Magic (2022) Disney+ Documentary Review

 Hey everyone! How were your weekends? Mine was pretty good. It was actually pretty quiet as weekends go, but that seems to be the norm for me these days. Today I'm going to be talking about the 2022 documentary series that is on Disney+ right now, called Light & Magic. The six episodes cover key points in the history of visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, which George Lucas initially put together to work on the effects for Star Wars in the '70s. I'll get into all of that though. I'm not sure how long this review is going to be because I don't know how much I actually have to say about it given that it's a six episode documentary series about a visual effects company. Let's get into it.

I first discovered this a few weeks ago when I saw a trailer for it on Twitter. I didn't hear anything about it outside of that because I don't think anyone I follow on Twitter or interact with or are subscribed to on YouTube were talking about it. I was intrigued though because I don't know very much about the technical side of filmmaking and I know even less about ILM as a company beyond that it was created to handle the visual effects on Star Wars (1977), what they did on that movie opened things up for visual effects on other films, and that Pixar originally began as a division of ILM sometime in the mid to late '80s. I also knew the main people who worked on all of the Star Wars movies in the '70s through to the 2000s, but that's basically it.

As I said in the intro for this review, this series covers the key technological innovations created by ILM from it's inception in 1975 right through to the production of the first season of The Mandalorian (2019-) in 2018 and 2019. It focuses the most on the evolution of digital effects because that continues to evolve even to now in 2022. For example it goes over how the effect of the house imploding in Poltergeist (1982) was created as well as how the water creature in The Abyss (1989). The biggest sections were on Star Wars (1977) and Jurassic Park (1993). Mainly because they were the biggest leaps in technological advancement when it comes to movie making.

I'll be honest, I've never been interested in the technological side of movie making. For me it's always been about the writing and the creation of the fiction, as well as the people involved. This documentary series gives that to us. Over the course of the six episodes we learn about the people who worked for ILM including big names such as John Dykstra, Ken Ralston, Joe Johnston, Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren, Phil Tippett, Lorne Peterson, John Knoll and many many others with there being too many to list here. So learning about what inspired them to get into visual effects, and filmmaking in general, was quite interesting. Of course there was also a small section on George Lucas since he was the person who founded ILM in the '70s to work on Star Wars. 

What fascinated me about this documentary is that whenever it showed clips from the original Star Wars Trilogy they were from pre-1997 prints of the films as they feature the non-Special Edition effects shots and they looked like they were from the '80s rather than the current versions of the films that are on Disney+ and have been on home media formats since the first Blu-ray release in 2011. Which means that if Disney chooses to they can release the theatrical cuts of the Original Trilogy on home media formats because they have the footage and it's intact. They most likely won't but they can if they decide to do so. Which is pretty cool. 

Overall, this was a good documentary series. Each episode is an hour long, so you have six hours of content to watch with this show. I recommend it if you're interested at all in the history of visual effects from Star Wars until now. There aren't as many examples once you get past the making of Jurassic Park and Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) because those were the biggest leaps in digital film making that ILM did, with everything else just adding onto it, until you get to The Mandalorian and the leap it took that is now being used on the various Star Trek shows now too. 

That's going to be all for me for today my friends. I will be back all through the week with other blog posts including the full season 3 review for The Orville, as the season finale drops on Thursday and judging from the teaser that dropped earlier today it's gonna be fun. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.