I mean, Christ knows there's no defending the movie on the level of storytelling! For it is a truly, deeply batshit insane movie on that count. It's hard to forget the summer of 1999, when the film entered theaters on the heels of quite probably the most hype that any movie had enjoyed since Gone with the Wind 60 years earlier, and having the profoundly deflating experience of that opening title crawl: "Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute." We can go on about all the problems plaguing the prequels in terms of dialogue and unnecessarily gigantic plot holes and hideous racist caricatures in the form of CGI frog-men, but really, it needn't go any deeper than this. The prequels are, as a unit, predicated on the tedious minutiae of republican bureaucracy, and how one craven senator was able to manipulate the rules of procedure to secure the power of a tyrant for himself. That is what the whole trilogy is about. When certain misguided people try to get all sober-faced and defend the prequels, one of the things that they will often pull out is "these are kids' movies, after all, and the original trilogy was too, so get off your high horse". These are kids' movies, fine, and so was the original trilogy. The difference is that the prequels are bad at being kids' movies. Compare these two pairs of sentences.
"It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire."
"Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of mother fucking trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute."
One of those is vastly more appropriate for a kids' movie, and not just because I inserted a swear. "Civil war". "Striking". "Victory". "Evil". Star Wars is set in a blunt world full of Manichean representations. The good guys wear white and the bad guys wear black and everything proceeds to get more obvious from there. "Taxation". "Trade routes". "Dispute". The Phantom Menace starts off like an issue of U.S. News & World Report with spaceships, and it doesn't find its way back to cheap paperback pulp novels for more than half of its running time.
And that's just a first approximation of the film's content! The real sins The Phantom Menace commits in its storytelling are yet to be seen; it is a film with an unusual allergy to narrative clarity, in places where it took some real effort to be so damned murky Let's sketch out the shape of the movie in its essential details, from start to finish: two Jedi knights, Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) - the latter of whom is explicitly called a Jedi in the beginning and then explicitly shown to attain the status of Jedi only at the end, but let's not get into that level of nitpicking, or we'll be no better than internet nerds - go to the planet of Naboo to negotiate a truce between the planet's government and the interplanetary Trade Federation; when that fails, they help Naboo's human queen, Amidala (Natalie Portman) escape with her retinue, taking her to Coruscant, capital planet of the Galactic Republic, to sue for peace. On the way, technical issues force an emergency landing on the remote neutral planet Tatooine. On Coruscant, Amidala is advised by Naboo's senator, Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), to trigger a bureaucratic shuffle that has the effect of putting Palpatine accidentally-on-purpose in control of the Senate. The Jedi return Amidala to Naboo, where they fight off the Trade Federation and restore Amidala's sovereignty.
Astonishingly, in that bare-bones collection of plot points, I've managed to trip over two entirely different things that the film has decided need to be unnecessarily complicated. One is Palpatine's... everything. Something that has never been clear to me, not since 1999 nor in all the years since: what do we know about Palpatine and when do we know it, "officially"? Return of the Jedi never once calls the main villain "Emperor Palpatine", he's just "The Emperor". If we're watching the films in production order, presumably we can figure out that McDiarmid is playing the same character (and then be gobsmacked to realise he was only in his late 30s when he played the role in Jedi), but what if we're watching them in internal chronological order? Nothing in The Phantom Menace, in reference solely to itself, lead us to believe that Senator Palpatine and Darth Sidious are alter egos, and at no point in the trilogy is it "revealed" - it just becomes a thing we always knew. And McDiarmid does a splendid job of playing the two identities in a sufficiently different way that it's not obviously the case that they're the same actor, let alone the same character. Without that knowledge, the entire plot is utter nonsense: absent Palpatine's three-dimensional chess game there's no actual reason for the Trade Federation to kick-start the Rube Goldberg plot machine that makes him the Chancellor, especially since we never get any further clarification as to what's being disputed in re: the taxation of trade routes. Not that any reasonable person wold want that clarification.
It's the other arbitrary convolution that's much more irritating, even though it's less consequential (from a God's-eye-view, Palpatine's actions make sense in terms of who he needed to trick at what point; we're just not given that information in the appropriate way). Basically, what the hell is with the queen fake-out? For apparently a very large chunk of the movie, "Amidala" is actually the queen's handmaiden Sabé (Keira Knightley), and the handmaiden Padmé is the queen hiding in plain sight. Damn me if I know with confidence who is who in any scene in which Portman isn't visible and out of thick white make-up. It's confusing as hell - more confusing than the whole "elect a teenage queen as temporary supreme ruler" thing, which I'll buy on the grounds of Space Opera Logic - and there's no reason the twist had to show up at all. The best I can come up with is that Lucas was so excited to discover in that Portman had an apparent clone in Knightley that he wrote an entire pointless, baffling subplot around her.
And then we get to things like the random underwater city of deeply unpleasant frog-beasts, or the lack of an actual motivation in this story (beyond "hey, let's do some prequelling!") for spending so damn long on a desert planet watching an unbearably chipper boy, Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) interact with green screens - and let us not add retroactively to the hideous amount of bullying Lloyd suffered in his youth for this role; if you consider how much trouble the dialogue and production caused pros even as gifted as Neeson and Terence Stamp, it's no wonder that Lloyd ended up giving such an insipid performance - all those things that The Phantom Menace has on display that make it such a dire clusterfuck for its first 70 minutes or so. But I am running out of energy to parse the story woes of this movie, which are enormous and pervasive and have been well hashed-out in the years since the film was new, and we were all almost eager enough for a new Star Wars film to let this one slide by.
Besides, didn't I start out by framing this as a kind of defense of The Phantom Menace? Because it's turning out to be a really shoddy one. So let's switch over from the copious failures of writing, noting that even in the evergreen classics of the original trilogy, the screenplays were consistently the worst part of all of them, when what was really good was the spectacle and world building. And here? It's not as good, for sure, which has a great deal to do with the undeniable fact that CGI ages much worse than practical effects (though The Phantom Menace is closer to being the best-looking CGI-driven film of '99 than the worst, if I'm being fair). Also, that long stint on Tatooine invites us to take a long, thoughtful look at how much gaudier Lucas's tastes had gotten in 22 years, something I was able to avoid by pretending the Special Edition didn't exist when I reviewed Star Wars.
No denying it, though: The Phantom Menace is a pretty cool-looking movie, one in which Lucas's affection for the flourishes of midcentury pulp sci-fi is lovingly displayed on a scale that was barely even implied by the original trilogy. The aerial shots of Naboo alone are enough to make that case for the movie: the wacky geography and fanciful architecture are pure fantasy, but it's captivating, and the physical model is utterly lavish-looking in the midst of the film's hefty amount of variably-weighty CGI (but at least one point in favor of the inconsistent effects work: the CGI Yoda added into the later editions of the film is vastly preferable to the idiot clown puppet they had playing him in the first release). I have heard the argument - once upon a time, I was even known to make it - that the chrome-plated glossy design of The Phantom Menace feels too incongruous with the dented "used-future" world of the original trilogy, but the trade-off there is that The Phantom Menace is a gorgeous dreamscape of smooth lines and bold colors that are deeply pleasurable on their own terms. As a director, it is probably true that the Lucas of this period wasn't particularly good at knowing where the put the camera, and he was a disaster at knowing what to do with the actors in front of that camera - but my God, as an ideas man, he was in perfect form.
What this amounts to is a movie with many enthralling sci-fi vistas and conceits welded to an unbearably terrible delivery system. The pacing of the first half of the film is demented, racing like a mad animal to get away from Naboo and the A-plot, and then idling on Tatooine with no particular thoughts on what to do there before the pod race sequence, the first time the theatrical cut of the movie truly came to life and remembered what action movies in general and Star Wars movies in particular should be great at: speed and tension, both of them heightened by customarily dazzling Ben Burtt sound effects (Burtt doubled as the film's picture editor, along with Paul Martin Smith; it really only makes sense to acknowledge how much his work was already driving the films' rhythm by giving him that job). The home video cut knocks the sequence's pacing awry, sadly; it gets puffy in places I don't recall the theatrical cut doing, though I have not seen the latter in many, many years.
Still, the pod race is an oasis until the action finally returns to Naboo, and The Phantom Menace finally decides to be a Star Wars picture. You can clock the exact second it happens: the Gungan army emerging from fog, like ghosts simply apparating into the world. From there on, the movie hits most of the right beats, and John Williams's music amasses energy that it had surprisingly lacked till then - this is the least of his Star Wars scores, though the score is still the best part of the movie (particularly his muted introduction of "The Imperial March" into his gentle theme for Anakin). At any rate, the film starts to build up momentum in the editing and on the soundtrack, eventually erupting into an action sequence that seeks to one-up Return of the Jedi's legendarily overstuffed finale by having no fewer than four concurrent plots: Padmé Amidala leading a group of soldiers into the palace of Naboo's capital city, the Gungan army facing down an army of droid soldiers sent by the Trade Federation, Anakin dicking around in a spaceship, and Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan facing off with Sidious's right hand, Darth Maul (Ray Park), for no special reason. Just to figure out who this red-faced devil is.
The four-way cutting isn't quite as effective as in Return of the Jedi, mainly because the Anakin thread is totally objectionable in every way. Of all the characters that The Phantom Menace can't make any sense of, Anakin is the most inanely conceived and has the worst dialogue (not that the notorious Jar-Jar Binks doesn't make both of those tight competitions, but really, does even that godawful scar on cinema have a single moment as unacceptable on every level as "I'll try spinning, that's a good trick!"?). The other problem - "problem" is a funny word - is that the fight between the Jedi and Darth Maul is so great that it tends to be irritating when we're not watching it. Williams, at least, seems to have noted this, and so he separates out that quadrant of the sequence with a totally different cue, "Duel of the Fates". Which is, indeed, part of what makes that portion of the movie so bloody good. It's the one piece of music from the movie, nay from the whole prequel trilogy, that was immediately iconic on the level of the "Imperial March" or "Binary Sunset", and it provides all the sense of drama and import that the actual script can't do. It's never clear why those three are fighting, really, and as is pointed out by the most unsympathetic critics of the prequels, the fighting choreography is really damn obviously choreographed - this is nowhere near the climax of Jedi, where it felt like Luke or Vader might behead each other at any moment. It is, essentially, a dance with swords - but, a dance to the sublimest of music, with beautiful interplay of colors and space. You can look at this sequence and claim that the makers of The Phantom Menace don't understand story; you cannot look at it and claim they don't understand cinema.
That's true of more of The Phantom Menace than it gets credit for: here and there throughout the film, a chain of images will come along that's simply dumbfounding in how perfectly it grasps the kinetics needed to do popcorn spectacle just right, and Williams is usually right there to guide it along. The podrace, the inside of the Galactic Senate, bits and pieces of the opening sequence before the Jedi arrive on Naboo's surface, most of the final 40 minutes (though not the wretched parade scene at the end, a blatant and ineffective parroting of the last scene of Star Wars) - when the film picks up, and the set design, creature design, sound effects, editing, music, and color all snap into place, the film is honestly great.
And then somebody opens their mouth, and the clotted dialogue brings us back to earth - though compared to some of the howlers waiting in the next two movies, all but the very worst dialogue in The Phantom Menace is poetry. As do the uniformly bland performances: Diarmid's faux-sincere politician is great (his growling Sidious rather less so), but he's the one and only actor up to the challenge of inhabiting the sterile sandbox of this weird blend of practical and CGI sets, with a weirder blend of practical and CGI characters. It's painfully clear that the live-action cast was given no help in interacting with visual effects: Neeson has an unattractive stiffness in his posture whenever he has to talk to Jar Jar (you'd think it would take a lot to be the worst Neeson performance of all time in the same year that he starred in The Haunting, but it's not even close), but he's still leagues better than McGregor's deer-in-the-headlights expressions. No Star Wars film was ever fêted for its rich, complicated characters, but with The Phantom Menace and its cornucopia of stilted almost-acting, coupled with the writing of characters who feel like an amalgamation of rumors the screenwriter has heard about what people do in relationship to each other, the franchise enters the ugly world of anti-humanism.
It's the lifeless non-characters that really end up doing The Phantom Menace in. More than one dipshit screenplay has been salvaged by great spectacle (admittedly, only around a quarter of the whole film can be plausibly defended as great spectacle, but that's still a lot). Even with drab one-note characters. But not with actual corpses, as we basically have here. The humans really are the worst - Jar Jar is almost comically easy to hate, and nothing is quite as horrifying as that moment barely two minutes in where you realise that yep, Lucas really intends to have the Trade Federation talk like yellowface Chinese characters in a '30s movie. But the spectacular wretchedness of these characters is soothing in its fury. The absolute soullessness of the main cast, there's just no exit from that: Neeson tries, McGregor tries much less, Portman is too hamstrung by a bizarre part to even try, and they all end up giving the exact same performance. There's no point in having a gloriously designed and colored alternate universe if you can't even scrounge up a satisfactory human surrogate to carry us through it.
5/10
Reviews in this series
Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)
The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, 1980)
Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983)
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (Lucas, 1999)
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (Lucas, 2002)
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (Lucas, 2005)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015)
So 5/10 for some good and occasionally great spectacle. (Sounds like a BBFC ruling!) This is a problem I recently encountered trying to reassess On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I consider the pass mark for a film 6/10 - hardly unreasonable. So when you have a film where the strengths and weaknesses both exist to such a degree that they basically cancel each other out, what do U do? Rate it 5/10 as a near-miss, or 6/10 as a deeply qualified success? (Incidentally I gave it 5/10 in the end as I couldn't justify nearly 50 minutes of sustained boredom.)
ReplyDeleteMy favorite parts: Amidala: I'm going to cause a diversion and then send all the pilots in an uncoordinated attack on the boss ship while me and twenty guys storm the palace against thousands of Droids."
ReplyDeleteQui-Gon: "A well-formed plan. But there is much risk."
How is that a well-formed plan at all?
Also: Jar-Jar! Use-em de boomba!
Me-sa no have-a no boomba!
Here! Take-em dis one!
Tim, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the introduction of Midichlorians to the canon with this film. Kind of takes away from the mystical aspect of the Force, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteTitle crawl notwithstanding, I could not have been more excited about the newness of burying a lightsaber hilt-deep in a vault door.
ReplyDeleteAnd then the rest of the film happened.
Concise Statement- 6/10 is my cut-off too, and for me the difference comes down to whether I spend time in the hours after the movie dwelling on what I like, or dwelling on what I don't like. With OHMSS, I tend to of the ending, the score, Telly Savalas. With Phantom Menace, I think of "yippee" and, well...
ReplyDeleteBrian- ...oh, that "meese no have-a no boomba" scene. So definitely the nadir of Gungan-speak in the movie, and there are nothing but objectionable lines of Gungan dialogue.
Zach- Officially, I'm staying out of the prequels' tinkering with canon, because everybody knows all of that already. Unofficially? Midichlorians are steaming, runny bull-crap, and there's not a better scene in the whole movie to demonstrated how badly Lucas failed to understand why his fans were his fans. It's the prequels' version of the Architect scene from Matrix Reloaded. Or the other way around, I guess.
Chris- Exactly one of the bits and pieces I had in mind! And the really sad thing is that even 16 years later, I still watch that shot, and I think to myself, "man, there are some really cool ideas in this movie", like a total dope.
"You can look at this sequence and claim that the makers of The Phantom Menace don't understand story; you cannot look at it and claim they don't understand cinema."
ReplyDeleteI dunno, you make a pretty solid case for it in the same paragraph. The cross-cutting *itself* isn't bad, but what it's cross-cutting *to*... And I say this as someone who, when I went to go see this at age 17, was briefly convinced that TPM was awesome based pretty much solely on that fight scene, because it really is that good.
I appreciate your generosity toward TPM, and I'm the last one to gainsay brilliant production design. (Or costume design! at least as long as we're focusing on Amidala and Maul, and nobody else, *specifically* nobody else's hair.) And yet, of all the prequels, I think it deserves anyone's generosity the least: as kind of bad as they all are, it's the one that's most *blatantly* broken.
(Oh, and I meant to mention this when you covered Return of the Jedi, but I'm the unicorn for whom that is (or was) his favorite Star Wars movie. However, I don't know if I can say that now. The last time I watched the OT, I found myself coming around to the "Empire is best" consensus; but I was watching the Special Editions, which for my money degrade Jedi even more severely than Star Wars.)
Wondering what you'll think of the other two. The Phantom Menace is truly awful, but I still consider it much the best of the three prequels because it still makes an attempt to function as an adventure yarn of some fashion.
ReplyDeleteAttack of the Clones is the one that I most actively loathe sitting through because it is so dry, so devoid of anything resembling life.
The Revenge of the Sith is handily my favourite of the three. Not because it's better than the other two, lord no; it's failures just combine with its operatic ambition to produce a truly hilarious funny-bad film. All three are funny-bad, but only ROTS has "FROM MY POINT OF VIEW THE JEDI ARE EVIL ;( "
For the longest time, I thought this was going to get a 4/10 from you, Tim, simply judging by our nods to it's problems over the years. So I'm kinda glad to see that 5/10, though I get the impression it's a rather weak 5/10. We viewers normally don't debate that difference within the scores for the weaker ones, but there you have it.
ReplyDeleteDid I love it as a young lad? Of course. Can I still enjoy it now? Yes, but I'm aware of every problem it points out. Still, as a positive person, I try and focus on the good stuff. And my, do I love the four-way battle at the end. Not nearly as much as the three-way battle in Jedi, but it's really fun when the movie really needs it. It says a lot that the lightsaber fight is so great that it papers over exactly where they're fighting, and why it looks that way (much less why the red shield doors open and close when the fight demands it).
And for nothing else, I'm at least glad it stayed as a kid's movie, and didn't regress into "hard" sci-fi, even if it wasn't especially effective. I'm not kidding when I say my biggest worry about The Force Awakens is that it will be too hard, dark, and gritty, and not the way Empire was, but the way every film seems to be these days. The news of the PG-13 rating is expected, given how that gets slapped on everything these days, but I hope the movie will be more fun then dark. Anyone agree with me?
So yeah, that's my two cents. Clones is a worse film to me, so I won't object one bit to seeing a 4/10 rating there, Tim!
Midichlorians - a hard-science explanation for the Force, followed immediately by the knowledge that Jedi believe in prophecy.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite explanation of them is - "Midichlorians: the answer to the question that no one asked".
DeleteYou were right about one thing, Master
ReplyDeleteThe Negotiations were short
My main problem with the film is that it did away with the spiritual aspects of the original trilogy. The Force is now something only jedis who hit the genetic lottery have, not this divine presence that permeates all the universe. You even feel the Force's absence in this film. Forests no longer have that kind of mystic quality, and the original Star Wars had an "used future" look because it wanted to emphasize how the Force divinized nature and how technology was taking that away. That is completely absent here because Lucas only cares about CGI eye candy to make money.
ReplyDeleteUnpopular opinion: The Phantom Menace is the most successful film in the prequel trilogy by a country mile.
ReplyDeleteWhy? Because it's the only one that succeeds at what it intends to do. George Lucas clearly intended to make a feature-length, big budget version of an 80's Saturday Morning cartoon. It's all there--the stereotyped villains, the annoying "comic relief" sidekick, the silly anachronisms, and the humor that no one above the age of five could possibly find funny. The two-headed race announcer clinched this idea for me. Lucas plainly created Jar Jar Binks to be the movie's Orko, not realizing that nobody really liked Orko in the first place.
It's pitched at the same level as an episode of Masters of the Universe or Thundercats, with more impressive visuals to boot. On that level, it's a success, even though I've only revisited it once since I saw it in theaters and likely will never do so again.
On the other hand, the other films in the prequel trilogy try to portray adult emotions and fail miserably because Lucas has a tin ear for dialogue and can't coax a decent performance out of any member of his cast. The Phantom Menace is incredibly shallow, and that suits Lucas's skill set much better.
groudon202- Hell, as recently as last week, I was going to give it a 4/10. It was better than I remembered - maybe even much better, but 6/10 was a bridge I wasn't ready to cross.
ReplyDeleteI think that the stink of Attack of the Clones actually makes The Phantom Menace seem worse, as we'll talk about this time next week.
And I'm way curious to find out what I think of Revenge of the Sith. It's the only one of the six films that I'd seen only once before this retrospective, and I liked it at the time, but in retrospect, all I ever think about from it is Ed Woodian dialogue. So R.J., I might even end up joining you on that unpopular opinion.
I love love love the costume design in the prequels. I would go as far as to call that an area of overall improvement over the OT. The OT has plenty of justly iconic designs (though even those have things like Vader's lightbox muddying up perfection), but in its dedication to the used future aesthetic it never really taps into space opera's tradition of gaudy pomp that the prequel costumes luxuriate in very effectively.
ReplyDeleteAlso while Duel of the Fates is the best bit of music introduced in the prequels, I can't ignore the fact that it's essentially another one of Williams's variations on Dvorak. (In general I think The New World Symphony has been too frequently pillaged for movie scores. The fact that movement 4 covers the themes from both Jaws and LotR in like 15 seconds is ridiculous.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4WF28MODQM
My defense of Menace: The Duel of Fates is awesome and the movie is better than Attack of the Clones. The end.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to note that this is the only one of the six movies (I'm pretty sure) that not only passes the Bechdel test but also lets its female lead drive a good portion of the narrative. Padme is actually leading the entire attack force at the end. Then in the next movie she's dropped down to the status of baggage to be rescued/follow along on the adventure, and by ROTS she's literally nothing but an incubator and a startlingly convenient death.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if this is another example of the trope in which the backlash against a terrible movie is blamed on "nobody wants to see a girl hero" yet again?
Jar-Jar is so universally hated, I feel almost duty-bound to defend him. The whole point of Jar-Jar (besides to appeal to kids and sell toys) is the fact he's an idiot caught up in something he can't possibly understand, and he becomes a (semi-)hero: the jack becomes a king. I even liked the bit in the second movie where he somehow becomes a senator and winds up casting the vote that creates the clone army...nice job, genius. And I even chuckled when he showed up during Padme's funeral procession, which RLM rightly called "a f*ck you to the audience".
ReplyDeleteAh, Jar-Jar, we hardly knew ye...luckily.
*Sigh* I'll admit it...I liked Jar-Jar. And I was 17 in '99.
ReplyDeleteMainly because without a comic relief, however juvenile and Unfortunate Implications-y, The Fandumb Megamess (as Mad Magazine called it) would've been so. Bloody. BORING. Especially in its first half. I wouldn't want to see a whole movie with him as the main character, but again, Megamess needed something to at least keep people awake during all the trade discussions. I also liked the two-headed announcer for the podrace, though at the same time I also see majorly gimmicky pandering to the kiddies.
I'm with R.J. Ward: SW from the getgo has been a swashbuckling, youth-oriented franchise which appeals to our adventurous inner children. Lucas probably aimed for a lower target age with TPM than with the original three, but succeeded in keeping it mainly at the level of a Saturday morning cartoon. As we've mentioned, where it falls apart is where he tries to realistic and adult. I understand what he was trying to do; show the mundane roots of the conflict that would eventually consume the galaxy, but George just couldn't mesh the real and the fantastic. Pity, because the story of Darth Vader's origins should've been as compelling as the original trilogy.
And hey, TPM also gave us one of Weird Al's better songs. "The battle droids were broken..."
And the Jedi I admire most
ReplyDeleteMet up with Darth Maul and now he's toast...
@Brian Malbon - Attack of the Clones also passes the Bechdel test, I don't remember if Revenge of the Sith does or not.
ReplyDeleteDamian - I stand corrected.
ReplyDeleteI still stand on my assertion that each successive movie is worse on Padme's character until the point where she barely exists at all
^No argument there.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that has always bothered me, according to this prophesy, Anakin is meant to destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force. Sure, fine, whatever. Except in the exact same scene it's mentioned that the Sith have been extinct for millennia, so what the hell do they have that prophesy for? It'd be like if we had a prophesy about some guy who's gonna destroy all the Vikings!
One review and 23 comments in, and no one's commented on the budding romance of a boy with a single-digit age and a teenage girl? If the genders were reversed, Lucas might've had to move in with Roman Polanski, heh.
ReplyDelete17-year-old me liked Jar-Jar and the two-headed podrace announcer (including that "postmodern" Nerf-herder-esque line, "I don't care what universe you're from, that was amazing!") and even he was thinking of Padme, "She's not seriously gonna start dating that kid, is she? Is she seriously Luke and Leia's mother?"
Yeah, a few years passed between TPH and Clones, and feel free to call a Hikaru Genji here but seriously, as bad as Hayden Christensen was, why couldn't Lucasfilm be bothered to find an actor to make this relationship look less...statutory? Doesn't exactly help that in Clones obviously Anakin is a teen but Padme doesn't look much older. Talk about immersion-breaking there.
"Did you see him hitting on the queen/Even though he's nine and she's fourteen..."
Andrew - There is absolutely nothing that 9-year old Anakin does that wouldn't have made just as much sense with a teenager. He could have been the sane ashe as Padme,lost that creepy little-brother feel that the movies were never really able to overcome, the two of then might have had a chance to build up some chemistry instead of trying to force it in Clones. Plus it would have made more sense for the council to be leery about training him, since a teenager who's set in his ways is harder to teach than a little boy who's doing his best, and the final battle would have aviary been really great, if Anakin's jumping into the fighter and taking off been a conscious spice of a brash kid with everything to prove rather than the idiot happenstance of "whoops I accidental launched myself into space and blew up a space station! "
ReplyDeleteIf anyone here has ever read The Secret History of Star Wars, the author makes a really good case that Phantom Menace was not a story that needed to be told. (I mean, you could probably say that about all the prequel movies, if you were feeling snarky.) Lucas's original notes don't mention a Qui-Gon at all, Obi-Wan is the full protagonist of the film, and Anakin is a teen.
ReplyDeleteI can confirm that Revenge is a movie that you enjoy when you watch it, but a week later all you do is think about what you DIDN'T like.
ReplyDeletefranklinshepard - The Machete Order bears out that hypothesis quite well.
ReplyDeleteThe Duel of the Fates fight certainly is cool and easily the most fun thing to watch in this godawful mess, but I maintain it's still not a very good scene because the characters and motivations remain so sketchily drawn by that point that none of it feels significant and the fight so choreographed that it never seems like anybody is in any real danger, even if it does lead to the death of a major character. It's cool only in the way a really cool youtube video is cool, but as a piece of cinema it is lacking in too much for me to deem it great. And who the fuck is Darth Maul anyway and why is he fighting these guys and what exactly are the stakes for everybody here? As far as I can tell Darth Maul seems to be a villain because he looks like a villain. Also he goes out like a punk. That music is epic though.
ReplyDeleteThis is my least favorite of the prequels because Anakin. I'll take a hundred sullen glances and whines from Hayden Christensen over 1 fucking YIPPEE!
I was 9 in 1999, and the only thing I remember that perked me up in my chair at the theater was the pod-race sequence.
ReplyDeleteI'd give credit for the set design and world building though too. Naboo has this cool mix of idealized greco-roman or southern renaissance art, in this kind of space-age fantasy way, with these cool sleek star-fighters. the naboo star-fighter was probably my favorite spaceship design for awhile. It kind of fits the overall chronology of an older republic heyday before the degenerative used-universe feel of Empirical rule in the original trilogy, I'll give it that much I guess. it's just so boring to watch now. not enough trade negotiations.
@Francis Shoup: I'm with you there. Also, after all these years of desert planets, ice planets, swamp planets, and forest planets, we see a planet that doesn't seem to be single-biome, and features a (gasp!) temperate zone.
ReplyDeleteI was 10 when Phenace came out; I remember we went to see it at one of the larger-screen theaters in my city. And even though I blandly accepted a lot of it--cried at Qui-Gon's death, loved Amidala, even bought one of those behind-the-scenes production books with lovely pictures--something felt wrong.
ReplyDeleteI cannot wait to read your dissections of the next two. I just watched the Machete Order (which marked the first and only time I've ever seen Revenge of the Sith), and I have MANY opinions on what could have been.
Plot centered around trade negotiations? Fine by me.
ReplyDeleteJar-Jar? I can live with him.
Terrible dialogue? It's a Star Wars movie, you get what you get.
The thing that drives me insane about Phantom Menace---and I'm surprised that nobody has brought this up yet---is Anakin's character arc. Or lack thereof. The whole point of the prequels is explaining how Darth Vader becomes Darth Vader, yes? As far as I can tell, they don't even hint at how little Ani, a cute little boy who only wants to do good in the world, has it in him to become a monster. He's an angelic moppet in the first movie, whiny and sullen in the next, and there's NO REASON FOR THE CHANGE.
It's the reverse of what Chekhov said not to do. The gun goes off in the second act, but it was never on the mantelpiece in the first.
Star wars the phantom Menace was the most dissapointing thing since my son.
ReplyDeleteStar wars the phantom Menace was the most dissapointing thing since my son.
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