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

Rewatched 5/7/24 (theater)

In today’s franchise-first, IP-ad-nauseum industry, it’s easy to undervalue the pure go-for-broke mania that Lucas went after with the prequels. They’re more than ever a predictive, if-seemingly-accidental impetus for so many of the greed-fueled Mary Poppins Returns’, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’s, and Hobbs and Shaw’s of the last few decades. If you wanted to get really bleak, you could call Phantom Menace the Anti-originality pill that Hollywood swallowed without thinking for a second of the unfettered addiction that could and would come.

I do believe Lucas’ prequels set us up for a lot of the problems that modern popular moviemaking is wrestling with. And I do believe they are quite guilty of a variety of storytelling flaws on top of the original accusations. That being acknowledged, there is also such a respectably subversive and giddily personal streak to them that I would feel remiss in not mentioning the merits of what I believe can be summed up as old-fashioned, unabashedly-enthusiastic Lucas power every time they come up.

The guy did it first with Star Wars in ‘77, cementing the fantastical blockbuster as something of a cornerstone for the next half a century. Awkward lines, a predictable plot, unknown movie stars, and a surfeit of visual panache and world-building…and his world was our world all of the sudden…still is. Even without the prequels, Star Wars would still remain the pinnacle of franchise filmmaking. It was the first lightning strike that opened Pandora’s Box. Somehow Lucas knew his classic myth of uncompromising heroes and villains doing battle with great stakes and clear sides would be the all-powerful antihero when pitted against the complicated ‘70s character pieces being pumped out like sausages at the time. This year saw the release of such complicated films as Rolling Thunder, Sorcerer, and Close Encounters. Think of the brutality and murky morality of those films and then think of how different Star Wars must have felt.

Enter 1999, when George Lucas had then deprived people of the movies for 15+ years, growing fat off the toy merchandising, novels, and magazine subscriptions that Star Wars reaped the benefits of for all those years in between. People want what they can’t have. And if they couldn’t have more of those movies, they took whatever came in their place. You make them wait the better part of two decades and then you give them their next movie. Finally. The hype will be there.

The buildup is so big that you can afford to take a creative swing. And you do. You decide to make this new trilogy in the vein of another Greek story archetype, the tragedy. Not only will it be a tragedy, directly in contrast with the soulful hero’s journey we first witnessed, but it will explain how our story’s most iconic character, Darth Vader, became who he became. Had movies ever really gone backward like this before? Was such a zag ever zigged? Not really outside of Godfather Part II, but that’s very much presented through flashbacks amidst Michael’s continued journey. This full-on prequel was a brand new formatting for a story in a brand new age of virtuosic digital technology, and George Lucas decided he would make a cutting-edge trilogy exactly in the ways he wished to cut the edges.

Then jump to ‘99. Man I really wonder what I would have thought had I been this age then. I have such an appreciation now for the dense, po-faced setup of trade negotiations kicking off a space opera—what balls this Lucas guy had, weaving his anti-establishment oomph into not the subtext but the blatant foreground of almost the entire first 131 minutes of this trilogy, excusing a pod race, lightsaber duel, and some droid battles to make it big-screen worthy. I have a feeling that he knew numbers two and three would return the franchise more to its bombastic sci-fi roots and he could afford to really kick it off on his own terms. What a wild subversion to have its inception of conflict be bland, real-world politics. In all seriousness, if that isn’t a true evil to root against, I don’t know what is!

And does he jump the gun more often than not by rushing Anakin’s turn to the dark side over the next couple movies? Yeah! Does he write some really crummy dialogue and poorly-motivated/executed pivotal moments for Anakin later in the trilogy? Yeah! But it’s such a gutsy conceit to make blockbusters where evil wins that I still will always have a special spot for these in the modern Hollywood conversation. Lucas always cited Dune as a major influence, and it’s quite obvious that he took the right things away from Messiah and applied them here. One man with too much power is pretty hard to restrain. He can spin out of control, even with the best of intentions. I have to imagine Herbert would be proud of his successor—and I remain fascinated by the insanely personal decisions Lucas chose to make for this trilogy. When he knew his movies would be commercial no matter what they portrayed, he decided to show people show something completely fresh and clearly very important to him. It was nice to have this director who got cart blanche to make unrestricted blockbusters about the dangers of monopolization…and ironic in an era where this franchise has been sold to and stripped by Disney, of all places, still carefully nursing the sore Star Wars thumb on their franchise infinity gauntlet, waiting to create more completely risk-averse, creatively-strained content. Lucas was such a thought-provoking, risk-taking talent; it’s too bad the ride was so short.

Pivoting to the minute-to-minute of the actual movie, Phantom Menace boasts such an arresting oeuvre of locales and sound designs that the set pieces are able to make lasting impacts through sheer creative singularity even when their action hooks and choreography lack depth. The initial escape from Naboo’s capital is a prime example. Such a unique setting and rousing music more than make up for the fact that we just get close zoom after close zoom on Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor cutting droids with the same two lightsaber moves set to awesome John Williams music. Follow that up with an all-too-brief but undoubtedly never-before-seen droid repair sequence on the outside of the ship as the heroes blow through the Trade Federation blockade. The movie successfully presents novelty over craft almost every time excepting the pod race and the Darth Maul three-way duel, which both manage extended, imaginative, intricate thrills on a level that would make Lucas’ close collaborator, Steve Spielberg, proud. To end the movie with such an uproarious, unforgettably-directed sequence as the duel of the fates is the strong, sweet aftertaste that makes the overly salty parts of this so much more palatable.

A couple notable things I noticed seeing this in the theater tonight that I hadn’t really noticed before:

-The pacing/editing is extremely choppy, and even the musical cues are affected to the point of coming off strange some of the time. No scene lasts more than a couple minutes before a screen-wipe or cut to a totally separate POV. I found myself wondering for the first time if this was a lack in directorial/editorial skill or a move to control to keep the younger audiences’ attentions. If it’s the latter, it makes Lucas’ ridiculously performative, 9th-grade dollar-word vocabulary that much more understandable? Maybe? I respect a person that can channel their inner-kid… It keeps us young.

-Anakin and his mom both have anti-escape bombs in their bodies, Escape from New York-style.

-The actual pod-racing stadium is low key one of the coolest things ever thought up in one of these movies. And the sequence of the racers being introduced is a king shit piece of world building even despite the Jar Jar potty humor. The revving of the engines is just expertly tuned for the big screen.

-Man the pod race is already so fucking good just imagine if Lucas had let Spielberg direct it. Shit.

-Qui-Gon is such a piece of shit for taking Anakin away from his mom, goddamn.

-Obi-Wan takes such a back seat in this it’s incredible how drastic the pivot is in 2 and 3 with how much trust they put in McGregor to carry those. I wonder if Lucas planned that from the start or just got overwhelmed with the all of the introductory aspects of this one. I am almost thinking they realized really late in this one that Obi-Wan needed more to do. And that got us what I still think is the best directing Lucas has ever done in the lead-up to and execution of post-Neeson Kenobi v Maul.

-Feel like we coulda done a lot more with the uber pilot guy on Padme’s ship. He had the riz. Left a lot on the table there.

-The politics of Chancellor Palpatine’s ascendance is just the silliest thing in these movies. So, so mindlessly broken. None of it is set up, none of it detailed. A completely juvenile, hilarious plot point that, if explored more thoroughly, could have been a touchstone of fictional wartime politicking, but is instead one the movie’s most ludicrous shortcomings. Honest everything on Coruscant is yada-yada’d so frickin hard it’s wild.

-There has yet to be a movie, not even Dune: Part Two, that successfully conveys the scale of a planet-wide conflict. It is always summed up in one battle, here with Naboo. I wonder if anyone will ever truly pull it off convincingly. Maybe Dune: Messiah? I feel like it’s pretty tough to pull off without ar least 5 hours of runtime. The final 35 minutes of this remain a standout Star Wars finale. They just rip. Four different fights cross-cutting… It’s a feat of the medium even if it still doesn’t touch the galactic scale these movies have always grasped for. And the laser walls, what a fucking masterstroke of tension.

-Despite (almost) being a 21st-Century prequel film, this one really admirably avoids goofy fan service. Pretty much every easter egg has a place in the story.

7.25/10