Review: Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)

Directed by George Lucas
Review Copyright © 1999 Aaron M. Renn

Conclusion: Excellent Action Scenes, Better Than Expected

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.

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