Subject: Review: Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)

From: [email-masked] (pm agapow)
Date: 12 Aug 1999 04:56:39 GMT

[film] "The Phantom Menace"
A Postview, copyright p-m agapow 1999

An even longer time ago in a galaxy far, far away ...

Imagine a world different to ours.  Imagine a world where in the mid
90s George Lucas falls on hard times.  Desperate for money, he is
approached by a shadowy corporation.  The rights to "Star Wars" change
hands.  From their sweaty, crowded offices (based in a remote tropical
country for tax and legal conveniences), the new owners hatch their
plans for a quick buck.  Using evidence carefully accumulated over the
years (photos of adolesents, movies on no-one's resume), several A-list
actors are blackmailed into cooperating.  The cast is completed by
extras who are willing to pay to get into the film.  Large quantities
of special effects are ordered and shoehorned into the film, primarily
to cover up for the sullen acting.  Those who refuse to cooperate are
tranquilized and lead through their scenes.  The production takes a
single month.  Direction is done by members of the local cinema club,
editing by the corporate accountant.  Journalists are leant on,
critics bribed, fan groups lead along.  Anyone who asks for a
merchandising license is given one.  The whole world eagerly awaits
"The Fandom Menace".

A question: could this film be distinguished from the one that was
released in our world?

I doubt it.

The original "Star Wars" trilogy is a flimsy hero for all the
monuments that have been built to it.  The storyline is thin, the
acting only passable, the direction competent, the universe simplistic
(and, "Chasing Amy" jokes aside, astoundingly white Anglo-saxon).  It
contains nothing that has not been done before in SF/F. But that's
largely the point: if you're going to make a dumb swashbuckling space
opera, it had better swash and buckle.  For better or worse, that is
what the original trilogy did.  The passion of the most fanatic "Star
Wars" fans is inexplicable, but it is a durable piece of escapist
entertainment.

And then we come to "The Phantom Menace", which is not a terrible
film, but is terribly disappointing, banal and disjointed even by the
subterranean standards of fandom.  A movie only a marketer could love,
its central problem is simple: it is badly made.  The acting tanks,
the dialogue is terrible, the script (there is no other word for it)
sucks.  It is disorganised and careless, a dumb film trying to be
meaningful, an adult film unable to explain itself, a child's film that
is pretentious.

The plot is best left untold, lest the malevolent demons that had
apparently possessed the script-writers during production are invoked. 
At best it's pedestrian (about a tax dispute!)  and sprints from scene
to scene with hurried explanations.  At worst it becomes deliriously
stupid, a few gems being:

   * Anakin building, in his spare time from bits and pieces, the
   fastest podracer on Tatooine which he races and wins in, untested.

   * A sub-Duchovnian explaination for the Force, which sounds like an
   amalgam of the ideas that L Ron Hubbard and Wilhelm Reich rejected.

   * The virgin birth of Anakin, which is either a gobsmackingly wide
   Christ metaphor (which makes no sense) or a desperately lateral
   attempt to avoid mentioning sex and so get that family rating
   certificate.  (Actually I don't think anyone in the Star Wars
   universe has sex - the only person we meet who ever has is Darth
   and he's batting for the other side.  Which is to say, he's a
   figure of ultimate evil.  Go figure.)

   * Jar Jar Binks, a cringing Uncle Tom figure with an impenetrable
   accent who walks like he has a specific gravity less than cotton
   candy.  Even during the somber scenes, he's dancing about in the
   background doing pratfalls.  This demonstrates how advanced the
   "Star Wars' universe is: Instead of prejudice towards non-white,
   non-male humans (not that there are very many in "The Phantom
   Menace"), there is prejudice towards aliens.

Even those in the cast who usually turn in strong performances
(Neeson, McGregor, Portman) are terrible.  The suppporting cast is
hideous, especially the utterly resistable Jake Lloyd as Anakin
Skywalker.  (Or "Ani", as it's pronounced in Tatooine mallspeak.) 
With lines like "Yippee!"  and "But Mom, didn't you tell me the
problem with the universe is that noone wants to get involved?", I
don't wonder the Jedi don't want to train him.  He'd spend every
morning at Jedi High getting his head flushed in the toilet by other
students.

However, the worse thing about "The Phantom Menace" is its lack of
imagination, Lucas literally self-cannibalising from the original
trilogy: Anakin (Luke) flying in and destroying the robot control
station (death star) with the help of R2D2, the Gungan natives (Ewoks)
fighting a delaying battle as the Jedi try to shut down a vital
installation; the death of the old Jedi and passing of the flame to
the new Jedi.  Pop has not only eaten itself, it is smacking its lips
and clammering for dessert.  So eager is the director to connect to
the original story that it becomes almost autoerotic as old characters
are rushed by the camera: R2D2, C3P0, Jabba, Greedo, Yoda.  Even
Obiwan doesn't have any real reason to be in this film.  He spends
most of the film looking worried and doing the Jedi equivalent of
pumping his fist and shouting "Yeah - what he said!"

Is there anything good about "The Phantom Menace"?  Some of the sets
are impressive, for the scant seconds we see them.  Some action scenes
like the podrace and lightsaber fights come to colorful life,
unspoiled by brain-damaged dialogue.  It is interesting to note that
these scenes would have been under the control of the SFX director and
action choreographer.

How come "The Phantom Menace" is bad?  How did the most anticipated
and tightly controlled movie of all times get to be so bad?  For many,
the villian of choice is creator Lucas, guilty of fathering the
"blockbuster movie", the dumb, hyper-merchandised and rigidly
formulaic films that pollute our screens each year.  This accusation
seems hollow to me.  The marketing of any of the original "Star Wars"
trilogy comes nowhere near that as is now routinely practiced.  Even
if there is a direct causal chain from the "Star Wars" to
"Independence Day" and "Wild Wild West", it couldn't have been
foreseen.  The vast bounty that Lucas has made from Star Wars is as
much a historical accident as anything.  Conversely, it's difficult to
blame the makers of the over-hyped films that followed, the Emmerichs,
the Spielbergs, the Sonnefelds.  When the success of a movie is so
ruthlessly bent to marketing, can they be blamed for saying "I want
some of that?"

Similarly, it's very easy to accuse Lucas of just milking the public
for squillions of dollars.  No doubt he will do well out of TPM, and
certainly the hype and control exercised by him were extraordinary. 
But this falls far short of evidence for avarice on his part.  (And
realistically, just how much more money could he use?)  No, I think
Lucas is sincere and the juggernaut way he controls his creation is
just a mark of how much he cares about his product, how much he wants
to enthral people, to create a phenomena.

And he doesn't have the skill.  The lumbering script is evidence of
that.  The cannibalisation of everything he has seen, including his
own movies, is evidence of that.  The incoherent, leaden direction is
evidence of that.  Lucas is the reason "The Phantom Menace" is bad,
but this can't explain how it was allowed to become bad.

The culprits, I fear, are us, the audience.  We've allowed ourselves
to be fired-up by publicity, to be dragged along to see a "Star Wars"
film, no matter what it is.  We'll go and see a lousy movie, just so
we're not left out of loop of conversation.  This is why marketing is
everything and quality is nothing.  Ask yourself just how bad "the
Pahntom Menace" would have to be before you wouldn't see.  People
could be dropping dead in the aisles or driven blind by the sheer
badness, and most of us would still say: "Well, the death rate is down
in recent sessions, so maybe we'll wait until the weekend ..."

"The Phantom Meance" is crap, but then that's what movies are now, and
always will be.  At least while we keep going to them.  It may be a
futile gesture, it's unlikely to make you any happier, but skip the
next blockbuster, skirt the next load of hype.  It's the only
solution.  [*/misfire] and "like a thousands voices had cried out" on
the Sid and Nancy scale.

"The Phantom Menace"
Released 1999.
Produced, directed and written by George Lucas.
Starring Liam Neeson, Ewan Mcgregor, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd.
Based on an idea.

--
Paul-Michael Agapow ([email-masked]), Biology, Imperial College
"We were too young, we lived too fast and had too much technology ..."