

WARNING! This review contains SPOILERS.  You should probably not read
it unless you have already seen the film.  You have been warned.

In preparation for today's debut of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, I
re-screened the original trilogy on video.  It's amazing really how
bad the first three movies really are.  Particularly the original Star
Wars.  The film is clearly aimed at a juvenile audience and the dialog
and acting show it.  ("But I was going into Tashi Station to pick up
some power converters").  The characters are mere props, the plot
cliched and transparent.  The second two are much better, particularly
The Empire Strikes Back, with better acting and a bit more mature
themes.  But the target audience is still clearly far below the age of
majority.

Those screenings brought my nostalgia-tinged rememberences of the
first trilogy back down to earth.  That, along with the generally poor
reviews given to it by legitimate critics, had me braced for a letdown
when I went to see The Phantom Menace.  Perhaps my low expectations
were one reason I was so pleasantly surprised by the movie.  High art
it was not, but it was good entertainment.  And beyond that it was a
lot of fun.  Clearly much of the disatisfaction with this movie stems
from the letdown that is almost inevitable after the mega-hype it has
received.  True, nobody was cheering and whooping, but then again
nobody did that when I went to see the special edition versions of
the original trilogy either.

The good parts are fairly easy to identify: lots of action and solid
special effects.  Like the original Star Wars, this movie is somewhat
a throwback to the old westerns.  There are the Good Guys, the Bad
Guys, the Damsel in Distress, the Dispute over the Ranch, the
Gunfighters, etc.  This movie, however, was released in a far
different era than the original Star Wars.  Today political
correctness rules the day and post-modernism rejects all objective
truth, especially old fashioned notions of good and evil.  Almost all
of the pricipal characters were white, and with the exception of Queen
Amidala, male.  I don't suggest that this is a good thing in and of
itself.  But it interesting to see George Lucas resisting the urge to
create a PC multi-ethnic cast.  (Indeed, the Jar Jar Binks character
reminds me of an old blackface comic, something clearly out of step
with modern sensibilities). There are numerous minority characters in
supporting roles, and it looks like Lucas hired them because they were
right for the part, not to fill some quota.  As for good and evil, the
line separating them is razor sharp.  The good guys are very good, the
bad guys are very bad.

Of course the critics hate this.  The New Yorker called the movie
"crap".  Among its supposed sins was having all the big players be
male, and stereotyping the female queen as a damsel in distress.  (Of
course, later in the same review the New Yorker said this would be a
boys' film since girls know junk when they see it.  So much for
stereotyping).  Incidentally, I think the New Yorker is wrong about
Amidala, and that is not the only review I've read that makes me think 
the critic was watching a different movie from me.

The Phantom Menace is almost unrelenting action and/or battle.  This
endears it to me far more than its predecessors, each of which had
long, boring stretches where the characters frolicked with Ewoks in
the woods and such.  I just love a good shoot-em-up.  Good space
battles are so hard to find these days.  With the Prime Directive and
assorted BS, it's a rare Star Trek episode when the Enterprise gets to
fire up its phasers.  No problem with that stuff here.  The characters
in this movie walk through life with their guns and light sabres half
drawn.  It's enough to give Handgun Control, Inc.  a heart attack.
Long, long ago there were no trigger locks on those blasters.  People
had weapons and they were meant to be used.  Critics who want to blame
this for Americans' supposed infatuation with high tech, remote
controlled war can just shove it up their arse.  I loved every minute
of it.

The special effects were cool, but hardly upped the ante like the
original Star Wars did.  In fairness, special effects have gotten so
good these days that it's hard to tell they are effects.  After
Terminator 2, how much better can they get?  We do get to see plenty
of cool equipment and spaceships though.  And a number of interesting
planetary vistas, though I got the feeling Lucas threw these in
just to impress.  Most of the aliens had that same cartoon like
quality from the original series, but this was doubtlessly
intentional.

(WARNING:  Lots of SPOLIERS start here)

Two particular highlights were the light sabre battles and the pod
race.  I though the sabre battles were far superior to the original
trilogy and Darth Maul's double bladed sabre was super-cool.  The pod
race has been beaten to death elsewhere, but I thought I would second
the almost universal praise it has been given.

Many of the criticisms of the movie leave me scratching my head.  For
example, Salon Magazine complains that it is never made clear why the
Trade Federation would want to embargo a backwater planet like Naboo.
Well, could it be that Darth Sidious/Palpatine convinced them to do it
in order to engineer his ascension to the position of Chancellor?  If
he can shoot lightning bolts out of his fingers he can surely use the
Jedi Mind Trick on the two dolts running the Federation.  There are
some unanswered questions that might call for a pre-prequel - such as
where Darths Sidious and Maul got their powers and ambitions from -
but not nearly so many as this critic complained about.

On the other hand, there were a number of legitimately annoying elements
to the movie, most of them only of interest to Star Wars geeks.  Here
are several in no particular order:

-- The movie suffers from the same bad dialog and flat characters
   as the first trilogy.  All of the major actors in this film have had
   much better roles in other productions.  Again, the plot is
   transparent and the film mostly predicatable.

-- Qui-Gon Jinn is just a little too close to Qui-Chang Caine for
   my taste.

-- The immaculate conception of Anakin Skywalker and this mysterious
   prophecy are pure fantasy elements that don't belong.  Plus, if
   Anakin really has no father, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru can't
   really be related to Luke by blood.  Indeed the Star Wars web site
   confirms they adopted him in cooperation with Obi-Wan in order
   to hide him from Vader.  If so, why are Uncle Owen and Obi-Wan
   on such bad terms?  It could have been a ruse or some falling out,
   but an inconsistency in the plot is more likely.

-- Speaking of Anakin, the piloting abilities of someone that young
   are simply not believable, Force or no Force.

-- Why is Qui-Gon so interested in this prophecy and the restoration
   of "balance"?  What balance?  It looks like the good guys are
   in charge.  Balance could only mean more bad guys.  Maybe we'll
   find out more about this later.

-- Obi-Wan meets and spends time with R2D2 in Phantom Menace.  Why
   didn't he recognize R2 on Tatooine in Star Wars then?  He claims
   he doesn't remember owning a droid, which might be strictly
   true, but something tells me he should have reacted differently.

-- How come no member of the Jedi Council can sense that Palpatine is
   a bad guy?  The Force seemed to let them down.

-- How can an apprentice Jedi like Darth Maul be so effective against
   both Qui-Gon and Obi-Won?  They should have easily shredded him.
   Maybe the dark side is more powerful after all.

-- Too many scenes lifted directly from the first trilogy. "I've got
   a bad feeling about this", the medal scene at the end, the
   light sabre fight around the huge shaft, Obi-Wan's last moments
   with a dying Qui-Gon, the canyon in the pod race.  And did we 
   really need to go back to Tatooine again?

-- Samuel L. Jackson had little more than a cameo appearance.  This
   was very disappointing.  I hope he is more prominent in the next
   films.  I seem to think he should be a bad guy somehow.  Maybe
   he's turn out to be evil in the next film.  He'd be a lot more
   fun that way.  I miss his pony tail from Jackie Brown too.

-- Why did they have to kill off Darth Maul?  We learn nothing about
   him except that he goes around searching for and attempting to kill
   Sidious' enemies.  Though he looked more clown like than menacing,
   I still thought he had great potential as a bad guy.  I also
   wonder how they Jedi Council was able to determine that this person
   was one of the mysterious Sith.

-- Speaking of the Sith, it was interesting to see this taken back
   from the spinoff novels, but we learn little about them in this
   film.  This is intimately bound up with the origins of Darth
   Sidious, which is one of the things we learned nothing about.
 
-- Darth emerges as a type of title or honorific.  One presumes it
   means something like "Lord" as that is frequently used as an
   alternate.  But IIRC in Star Wars Obi-Wan addresses Vader as
   "Darth".  It seems unlikely to me that Obi-Wan would address
   Vader with the equivalent of "my Lord".

-- Jar Jar Binks has been rightly criticized as hyper-annoying.
   He speaks with a thick Carribean accent such that you can't
   understand half of what he's saying (assuming he's even saying
   English words in the first place).  He's supposedly there for
   comic relief, but I think he's really there to keep the seven
   year olds entertained.  Since I'm not seven old Jar Jar made
   me want to punch George Lucas in the mouth.

-- In Empire Obi-Wan says that Yoda trained him. However, it appears
   in this movie that he was trained by Qui-Gon.  Obi-Wan also 
   laments in Jedi that he took it upon himself to train Anakin
   in place of Yoda.  However, in this film Obi-Wan trains him
   with the (admittedly reluctant) blessing of Yoda.  It does not
   appear that Yoda is in charge of training young Jedis.

-- Anakin is a child and we are told he is too old to be considered
   for Jedi training.  It also appears one is not fully a Jedi
   knight until early adulthood.  This makes about a twenty year
   training regiment.  But Luke was able to get his Jedi training
   in a matter of weeks.

-- To travel to the Naboo from the underwater city they supposedly
   go through the "core" of the planet, but it looks like they do
   little but pass through the oceans to me.

-- The movie was about 10-15 minutes too long.

Lots of nitpicks aside, I had a fun time watching this.  When the
opening weekend madness passes, I will definitely be seeing it
again at least once.  Until Episode II, may the Force be with you.

-- 
Aaron M. Renn ([email-masked]) http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/