One of the worst Blu-ray transfers I've ever seen

The Phantom Menace was shot on 35mm film, yet the Blu-ray transfer has had it's film grain all scrubbed away (film grain is where the fine details reside), making the characters look like they are made of wax. It also makes the bad CGI characters (Jar Jar Bink, Watto, etc.) look even worse. Film grain at least gave them some texture which made them look not quite as drastically different as the non-CGI elements.

I saw this move in the theater in 1999 and it looked great. I watched it on Blu-ray last night and it looked horrible. I've seen a lot of shot-on-film movies on Blu-ray and none of them were so thoroughly scrubbed of grain/detail as this one. Not even the Blu-ray transfers of the original trilogy were this bad. In fact, Star Wars actually looked quite good, aside from the bad bluish color grading that Lucas insisted upon. The Empire Strikes Back was the worst looking of the three, but it wasn't scrubbed as bad as The Phantom Menace.

Someone on TheOriginalTrilogy.com is working on doing their own transfer of The Phantom Menace from a 35mm theatrical film print (4K scan, triple-flashed, on a modern, professional movie film scanner that costs nearly a million dollars), a project which will cost them over $2,000. That's actually a bargain, because they work in the industry and are using their connections. Normally it would cost $15,000 to $25,000 to have it done commercially.

So, that should be a good deal better than the Blu-ray, but not as good as if George Lucas didn't have such a bizarre notion of what looks good, and had authorized a normal Blu-ray transfer which preserved a proper amount of film grain (that would have been better because Lucasfilm has access to the original negatives and other sources with less generational loss than theatrical film prints have). Lucas is also the guy who decided to shoot Episodes II and III on 1080p video. Not only was HD video in its infancy back then (Episode II was the first major motion picture to have been shot on video rather than film), meaning its quality wasn't particularly good, but only being 1080p means they are stuck at that resolution forever. Sure, it can be upsampled to e.g., 4K, just like any resolution can be resampled to any other resolution, but that doesn't make it true 4K. Those two movies will never have a higher level of original detail than what's present in their 1080p master files.

On the other hand, all of the other Star Wars movies have been shot on 35mm film, including The Force Awakens (if you include Rogue One, it was shot on 6.5K video), and 35mm film negatives have a digital equivalency of about 4K to 6K.