

by Curtis Edmonds -- [email-masked]

The opening moments of Star Wars:  The Phantom Menace brought back some
memories for me, as it probably will for you.  I remember sitting in my
dad's beat-up Chevy station wagon and watching the first Star Wars movie in
the parking lot of Texas Stadium.  (They set up a drive-in theater in the
parking lot during the summer to make some money when the Cowboys weren't
playing.)  I remember using my toy light saber as a flashlight to read
comic books in bed.  I remember standing in line for the second and third
movies at the theater in the Forum Mall in Arlington, looking up at this
big Star Wars mural they had painted in the lobby.

But when I walked out of the movie, I was reminded most of this Pop Art
exhibit they had at the Dallas Museum of Art a couple of years ago.  There
were the requisite comic book panels, of course, but there were quite a few
paintings that were these big close-ups of brushstrokes, great big smears
of color that I enjoyed, in an abstract way.  (A little art humor there.)

What I really liked, though, was this Roy Lichtenstein sculpture of a
chair.  The sculpture was comprised of the same kinds of brushstrokes I'd
seen in the paintings, just as though they'd been lifted of the
two-dimensional canvas and given new three-dimensional life.  The sculpture
was dependent on the earlier paintings -- it wouldn't have made sense
without that context -- but converting the brushstroke images to actual
shapes caused the sculpture to transcend its origins and become a stronger,
better work of art.

Star Wars was a great movie.  Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is not a great
movie.  Instead, it's a sublime work of art that's based on a great movie,
that uses bits and pieces of the earlier movie to fashion a new visual
masterpiece.  Just as Lichtenstein transferred his imagery from painting to
sculpture, George Lucas has transferred his imagery from film moviemaking
to digital moviemaking.  All of the elements are present -- light sabers,
droids, the Force -- but they're just the frame for an awesome,
unprecedented work of art.

Star Wars:  The Phantom Menace is best described as an infinity of
dreamscapes.  To mix a sci-fi metaphor, George Lucas boldly takes us where
no man has gone before:  to the rolling plains of Naboo, the underwater
refuge of the Gungans, the twisted desert landscape of Tatooine, the
soaring towers of Coruscant, to a vast array of space battles and pod races
and laser swordfights.  The Phantom Menace offers us an array of sights so
wonderful, so gorgeous, so jaw-droppingly amazing, that it's almost
impossible to describe them.  (The people who do audio description for
moviegoers who are blind have their work cut out for them.)  The
backgrounds are lavishly illustrated and ornately detailed, and the
foreground is filled with exciting, hyper-kinetic action and impressive new
creatures from the Lucas alien bestiary.  This is a work of art to be
experienced on the huge silver canvas down at your local multiplex.

If you set Star Wars: The Phantom Menace next to groundbreaking special
effects movies like Titanic or What Dreams May Come, it emerges head and
shoulders above its competition.  It's a superlative example of the
emerging new genre of computer animated movies, and art directors will be
copying from it for years to come.  But The Phantom Menace is a Star Wars
movie, first and foremost, and it will ultimately be judged by the
yardstick of the three prior movies rather than on its considerable
artistic achievement.  And based on that yardstick, The Phantom Menace
falls slightly short of the mark.

The Phantom Menace starts off full of promise, with audiences cheering the
return of the classic logo and the initial plot crawling slantwise up the
screen.  Apparently, the peace loving planet of Naboo is being menaced by
the Federation, an alien race responsible for collecting taxes on Galactic
trade.  The Federation is what the Internal Revenue Service would be like
if it controlled a vast army of robots, and one hopes that nobody at the
IRS gets any ideas.  Jedi Knights Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and Obi-Wan
Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) are dispatched to the planet to rescue the Queen
(Natalie Portman), fighting duckbilled androids and giant fish and Dark
Lords of the Sith along the way.  The Jedi run across the young Anakin
Skywalker / Darth Vader (Jake Lloyd) at a pit stop on the desert planet
Tatooine, discover his innate Jedi abilities, and make plans to train him
in the ways of the Force.

The plot is not the problem with the movie, so I won't give any more of it
away than I already have.  And the action scenes are on a par with anything
in the previous movies.  What's missing here -- what's been lost in the
translation from adventure movie to work of art -- is the chemistry that
the characters have with each other and with the audience.

Neeson is fairly good as the elder Jedi statesman, but there's something
reserved in his portrayal of Qui-Gon.  Neeson is at his best when he's
playing characters that have a fierce inner spark of motivation (Oskar
Schindler, let's say, or Rob Roy).  That spark isn't really present here.
Neeson projects inner peace and Jedi self-discipline, but it might have
been more fun if he had some of the roguish qualities of Han Solo.
McGregor is given much less to do as Obi-Wan than you might think, although
one would imagine him to have a prominent place in the second and third
installments.  He's a student here, not a teacher, and he has a subordinate
and passive role most of the way in.

Instead of Luke and Leia, we've got two very good young actors in Jake
Lloyd and Natalie Portman, but they don't do much for the overall chemistry
either.  Lloyd, playing the six-year-old who is destined to grow up to be
Darth Vader, shows exceptional maturity and self-assurance in his role.
(If anyone out there is still interested in bringing Orson Scott Card's
novel Ender's Game to the screen, call this kid's agent.)  Portman has all
the gravity and imperial bearing a Queen should have and does a fine job
behind her ornate costumes and makeup.  (The dead-white makeup looks pretty
cool, but one hopes that it won't give Whoopi Goldberg an excuse to show up
at the Oscars in whiteface again.)  But both actors are pretty reserved as
well.  They don't bring with them any of the childish enthusiasm or passion
that made Star Wars so enjoyable.

Compared to their Star Wars predecessors, the characters of The Phantom
Menace seem stiff and lifeless.  Even Darth Maul, the much-hyped super bad
guy, can't hold a candle to any of the formidable Star Wars villains.
Additionally, the obligatory cutesy alien, a floppy-eared amphibian named
Jar-Jar Binks, doesn't do a thing to help matters.  Binks looks as though
he was designed by the same malevolent committee that allegedly built the
camel on Earth:  he's got an incomprehensible computer generated lisping
Caribbean accent, lame dialogue straight out of Wayne's World ("Ex-squeeze
me?") or worse, Full House ("How wude!"), and an innate clumsiness we
haven't seen since Martin Short stopped doing Ed Grimley.  I kept hoping
that Chewbacca would show up and pummel him.

These flaws exist, and they keep The Phantom Menace from being as
thoroughly fun and enjoyable as its predecessors.  However, it would be
wrong to call the movie a disappointment, no matter how annoying or
pervasive the hype has been.  The Phantom Menace is worth seeing, worth
marveling over, worth enjoying both as entertainment and as a luminous work
of art -- not to mention its considerable value as a passport back to
childhood.  (Where did I put that old light saber, anyway?)

                                 Rating:  A+

--
Curtis D. Edmonds
[email-masked]

"First, you show up.  Then you see what happens."
                            -- Napoleon Bonaparte