If there is one thing the Internet was created for, it’s argument. Take a trip through Twitter or any message board, and you will find an endless stream of negativity, cynicism and confrontation for the sake of confrontation. However, there seems to be one thing that everyone on the Internet agrees on: George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels are among the most horrible atrocities ever to be committed by mankind. People on message boards can crack endless jokes about 9/11 or the Holocaust, but if you were to post something like “Hey, I kinda like Jar Jar Binks” then a rain of endless fire is likely to fall down upon you, for you are a heretic. The prequels are terrible, because that is what the Internet says. It is consensus, therefore it is law.
This is part of the reason I have stayed silent about Star Wars in the recent weeks leading up to the 3-D re-release of The Phantom Menace: I don’t hate the prequels. I love and appreciate the original trilogy just as much as anyone, but the universal hatred of Episodes I, II and III has always struck me as a tad absurd. I agree that all three are inferior to the original trilogy, but the drop-off isn’t as precipitous as people like to believe. Yes, the dialogue and acting in the prequels is often incredibly weak, but have you seen the original trilogy lately? There’s a reason Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher didn’t go on to have Oscar-winning acting careers. As such, I have decided to devote the next six weeks to reevaluating the entire Star Wars saga, one film at a time. This is something I’ve wanted to do for some time now, but the re-release of The Phantom Menace gives me something of an excuse. Also, I can justify my watching with these blog posts. The goal will not simply be to tell you why the prequels are better than you think and the originals are worse than you think—I don’t believe that in the slightest—but if anything, I might just be arguing that they form a much more cohesive (and quality) whole than you may believe. But we’ll cross those bridges when we get to them. If there’s one thing I want to make clear, it’s that these will not simply be reviews. That would be the most pointless endeavor in the history of movie blogging. I hope to get much more in-depth than that. Will I succeed? Probably not, but let’s find out!
Another big reason I have stayed quiet about my less-than-hateful opinion of the Star Wars prequels: I haven’t seen any of them in a really long time. When The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, I was seven years old going on eight. And I loved it. I was far too young to quibble about its flaws; I loved it because it was freaking Star Wars. I had already seen the original trilogy, and at that age The Phantom Menace could have been a four hour snuff film and I would have been running to McDonald’s to collect the toys. (Though those would have been some disturbing toys.) I loved the action, I loved Anakin, and I loved Jar Jar Binks. That’s right, I said it. The eight-year-old me freaking loved Jar Jar. Ask my parents. I would run around the house saying such garbage as “exsqueeze me,” “me-sa” and “you-sa.” I rented the podracing video game from Blockbuster. The question was not what was wrong with The Phantom Menace, but rather what wasn’t wrong with The Phantom Menace.
There is one simple way I can justify this opinion: I was young. I’m not entirely sure writing had become a thing for me yet, and I was certainly a few years away from learning cursive. My greatest achievement at this point was starring in a production of the acclaimed 20-minute musical Wackadoo Zoo, in which I played a goat that stubbornly barked instead of braying. I did not have any speaking parts, and that would not come until I played Hairless Joe in a seventh grade production of Li’l Abner. (I quit the acting business soon after. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, kid.) In short, I wasn’t exactly a kid that had a well-developed sense of what makes good cinema. The Phantom Menace was in color and it made noise, so therefore it was the greatest movie of all time. I haven’t really sat down to watch The Phantom Menace since, so I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d get out of seeing it all these years later. Perhaps the nostalgia would win me over, or perhaps I would finally see the atrocity that so many others choose to see.
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| Matt Kraus: Founder of the Jar Jar Binks Fan Club. |
The answer wound up to be somewhere in the middle. Let me start by saying this: you were all right about Jar Jar. He’s the freaking worst. It’s one thing to create a character for the sake of comic relief—the droids mostly served that purpose in the original trilogy—but it’s another thing to make him so irredeemably annoying. I didn’t laugh once, and Lucas decides to use him at all the wrong points. Whenever the character is onscreen with such actors as Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor, they seem to be tolerating him more than they are enjoying him. (At several points the eyelines don’t match up either, but this is still the relatively early days of the CGI boom.) Back in my younger days I couldn’t wait for Jar Jar to show up. This time, I couldn’t wait for him to go away. At least I can rest assured that all future appearances will be few and far between.
I’m much less harsh when it comes to the rest of the movie, which is rarely great but never an absolute horror show. However, I can understand how Star Wars fans from an earlier generation may have been caught off-guard by the story presented here. The Phantom Menace was advertised as the beginning of the epic saga we had all fallen in love with. People stood outside for hours, lightsabers in hand, until eventually they sat down in their theater seats, ready for the movie. The Star Wars logo appears, and John Williams’ magnificent theme kicks in. Everything is going swimmingly, and then the opening crawl appears:
Turmoil has engulfed the
Galactic Republic. The taxation
of trade routes to outlying star
systems is in dispute.
Hoping to resolve the matter
with a blockade of deadly
battleships, the greedy Trade
Federation has stopped all
shipping to the small planet
of Naboo.
While the congress of the
Republic endlessly debates
this alarming chain of events,
the Supreme Chancellor has
secretly dispatched two Jedi
Knights, the guardians of
peace and justice in the
galaxy, to settle the conflict.
So, uh, the taxation of trade routes? That’s ripe for thrilling science fiction, isn’t it? This is the first time we get a glimpse at one of the prequels’ greatest flaws: it concerns itself far too much with intergalactic politics as opposed to the physical and emotional journeys of the characters. Politics rarely came up in the original trilogy because the Empire was a dictatorship, and, frankly, dictatorships are a whole lot less boring. There’s a reason the History Channel shows nothing but Hitler specials as opposed to long documentaries about the passage of American legislation. However, I will give Lucas credit for making this pre-Empire government seem strangely plausible. Though it doesn’t make it any more exciting.
Outside of the regrettable focus on the Senate, one of the main reasons I still see value in the prequels is because the story is still pretty darn great. The tale of Anakin Skywalker is a great one that is made more resonant by our knowledge of the original trilogy. As weird as it may sound, when Anakin leaves his mother to go off with Qui-Gon Jinn, I got chills. I can’t explain it, and I wanted to punch myself for it, but that moment when he walks off into the desert was somehow quite powerful for me. As poorly as it is sometimes executed, Lucas is still able to create memorable characters and place them in a great story. As far as writing dialogue and directing actors goes… well, nobody’s perfect.
Speaking of the actors, a lot of people choose to crap on Jake Lloyd’s performance as Anakin in this movie. Let’s begin by remembering that he wasn’t much older than I was when The Phantom Menace came out, so it’d be a lot to ask for Oscar-worthy work from someone so young. I will admit that he’s distracting at times, and his acting seems to mostly be prompted by an adult standing just off-camera, but considering the lines he’s forced to spout out I’m not sure there’s a kid on Earth who could have been great in this role. Let’s also remember the director he’s working with, and how Lucas was able to take a cast full of actors like Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor and somehow make them subpar. The bad acting bug is not something that just affects Jake Lloyd in this movie. There’s plenty of stilted line delivery to go around.
Most of the prequels’ flaws are the result of Lucas’ changing priorities. Over the course of these six years, he fell so in love with CGI that he forgot to worry about his characters and actors. He has long been one of the technology’s biggest proponents, and—to paraphrase a line from Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park—he is more concerned with the “could” than the “should.” Everything now needs to be bigger and better, and eventually it will get to the point where your movie no longer has a soul. That said, watching any of the Star Wars movies (Phantom Menace included) you can’t help but be floored by the sheer imagination Lucas puts on the screen. I’m not sure there’s another person on Earth who could dream up all the planets, all the characters, and all the alien species that are on display. He has always been great at such things, and The Phantom Menace is no exception. The execution may be questionable at times, but most people who criticize him could never come close to creating such a fully-realized universe.
While I’m in the process of praising the film, I should note that there are two sequences in this film that remain completely breathtaking. The first is the podrace on Tatooine, which may be one of the best racing scenes I’ve ever seen on film. Period. Ignore the context and all the dead air around it; I dare you to watch that scene and not be impressed by the way it is put together. There is none of John Williams’ music, and no extra frills. It’s just solid, thrilling filmmaking. I also thoroughly enjoyed the final lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn and Darth Maul, a villain that is criminally underused in this film. Most inspired is the moment when the characters are trapped between several red laser barriers, and they are forced to stand in silence, waiting to resume combat. They may not make a whole lot of practical sense, but in the midst of a climactic fight scene it is both unexpected and surprisingly powerful.
Don’t get me wrong: the climax makes a million other mistakes that have nothing to do with that duel. The constant cutaways to the droid/Gungan battle undermine the tension, and having Anakin be the pilot that accidently blows up the control ship just doesn’t work. Both sequences are little more than extended setpieces of slapstick comedy, and that’s not what you’re looking for when you reach the end of a Star Wars movie. It’s decisions like that which derail what could have been a truly triumphant return. Instead, it began a steady stream of backlash that has yet to let down. Star Wars fans chose to ignore the good and instead focus on the glaring errors. I am not wholly defending Lucas, but overreacting to a so-so film with such anger is something I will never understand.
This anger also bled over into their reactions to the next two prequels, both of which are considerable improvements over The Phantom Menace. (I will get to both of those in the coming weeks.) However, even this film has some pretty incredible moments that you don’t get in most movies, and to discount all that is special about this series is a fatal mistake. To this day, there are few greater joys in blockbuster filmmaking than the first few seconds of a Star Wars film. If you’ll excuse the cheesiness: there’s a genuine feeling that the audience is about to embark on an adventure into a world they’ll never see anywhere else. Even when it’s not all clicking—and in The Phantom Menace, it usually isn’t—there’s still a feeling that you’re watching a great imagination at work. It may not be great filmmaking, but it’s still Star Wars.
Next week: Anakin falls in love, and that’s when the real trouble begins in Attack of the Clones.
P.S. – If you want to check out The Phantom Menace again, don’t bother yourself with the 3-D rerelease. The conversion is pretty terrible, and at no point did the experience feel like it was enhanced. Save the money and borrow a DVD or something.
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