Star Wars Saturdays: Why "The Phantom Menace" Is Good, Actually
May the Fourth Be With You for Episode I's 25th Anniversary
Because of the laws of bad puns, today - May the Fourth - is ‘Star Wars’ day. This weekend also marks the 25th anniversary of EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE, the divisive first installment in George Lucas’ sequel trilogy (also now re-released in theaters nationwide). So starting today and continuing for nine Saturdays, we’re going to go through the entire STAR WARS saga in episodic order, a series that will include a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). Let’s start today with the birthday film itself, and share some thoughts on why the much-derided PHANTOM MENACE is actually pretty good. Enjoy…
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
1999, Dir. George Lucas
Composite of an excerpt published September 18th, 2011 and notes written May 29th, 2022
Despite the wildly overheated vitriol that has long fueled its infamous reputation, The Phantom Menace is a good movie, and at times a great one. It is not perfect, but then, few films are. And instead of talking about those imperfections – which have been dissected and exaggerated to death over the past 20-plus years – I want to discuss everything I love about the film, because at its best, The Phantom Menace is a monumental feat of world-building that expands not only the internal diegetic world of Star Wars, but actively redefines what Star Wars is, was, and could be.
In particular, I love every last moment with Qui-Gon Jinn or Obi-Wan Kenobi. Their relationship is fully formed and three-dimensional from moment one, giving us a powerful idea of what life was like for Jedi at the height of the order. Qui-Gon, the calm, efficient, and brilliant master, who seems to have a solution for every problem and is endlessly competent; Obi-Wan, his headstrong but wise and loyal Padawan who is clearly on his way towards becoming a great Jedi master himself. Separately, both are the best of the best, but together, they form something else entirely, something that transcends a master/student relationship. Their trust in each other is portrayed so subtly that it seems telepathic, as though the two have been through so much, and believe in one another so implicitly, that they need not communicate verbally to get the job done. I love the understated nature of this relationship; the subtlety gets us invested in the characters, and once Darth Maul arrives in the final act, we see the full culmination of this partnership in what is easily the greatest lightsaber duel in the Star Wars saga; during the battle, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan’s effortless harmony is a wonder to behold, and this, more than anything else, illustrates the might and gracefulness of the Jedi order at its best.
As for the performers portraying these characters, I’ve come to the conclusion that God gave us Liam Neeson so he could one day don the iconic robe, take up his green lightsaber, and play this most powerful of Jedi masters. Anakin’s downward spiral feels all the more tragic when we get a full glimpse here of the one person who probably could have prevented it; as wooden and inexpressive as Jake Lloyd’s performance is through most of the film, Neeson is able to pull a real nuance and vulnerability out of this Anakin in their scenes together, and throughout, he lends the narrative the same sort of gravitas and warmth that Alec Guinness did as Obi-Wan in the original Star Wars. And with Neeson filling that narrative capacity, Ewan McGregor has greater room for creative freedom in playing the actual Obi-Wan, here the learner instead of the master, and I love how his performance as Obi-Wan respects Guinness’ work while adding his own unique, wonderful touch to the character. McGregor, who has by now established himself as one of my favorite actors, is simply fantastic in the film, taking things as seriously as Guinness or Neeson, and having the same talent for breathing life into a character and making him feel vibrant, real, and three-dimensional.
As long as we’re talking about the performances, we cannot forget Ian McDiarmid, the MVP of the entire Prequel trilogy. McDiarmid is one of the only returning actors from the Original Trilogy, and sixteen years after Return of the Jedi, he has not lost a single beat as Darth Sidious. He doesn’t yet have any material quite as creepy as his verbal sparring match with Luke from Episode VI, but he is still a delightfully maniacal villain in the short glimpses we get here, and more importantly, McDiarmid also gets to introduce us to Sidious’ alternate ego, Senator Palpatine. I really respect how Episode I never explicitly connects Palpatine to Sidious; at the end of the movie, if you had never seen the Original Trilogy, they could still be separate people. Palpatine could trick the audience too, because all his motives appear pure on the surface – it’s only on subsequent viewings, or if you know this man is Sidious and are watching closely for evil machinations, that you start to see how every move he makes winds up giving the Sith Lord more power. It’s a fascinating, dual-edged performance, and for all the criticism of the Prequel Trilogy’s writing, this is an area where Lucas never gets enough credit, both for the truly smart subtleties of Palpatine’s behind-the-scenes political manipulations, but also because of how clearly he trusts his actor to perform the story and its myriad layers.
The Phantom Menace is not at all concerned with recreating the structure of the Original Trilogy – compare this to J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens, which is structurally a remake of A New Hope, and you’ll see how clearly The Phantom Menace differentiates itself – but there are still nods here to those earlier films, and I generally enjoy them. R2-D2’s heroic origin story is delightful, and if Anakin building C3-PO feels a touch too contrived, it is worth it to see the moment these two droids meet; it warms the heart, knowing we’ve witnessed the birth of a beautiful robot friendship. I’m not a huge fan of the pod-race section of the film – it’s an impressive display of visual effects and production design, but way overlong as an action set-piece – but I do love the brief, playful cameos by Jawas and Sand-People, and moreover, the surrounding Tatooine material is a strong expansion on the culture and horrors of a location we really only got brief glimpses of in the Original Trilogy.
John Williams’ music, meanwhile, is as strong as ever. Maybe even stronger. His work on the Prequel Trilogy is some of his all-time best, and if I wanted to be particularly provocative, I might even say that of his three sets of Star Wars scores – Originals, Prequels, and Sequels – the Prequels are his greatest musical accomplishment. He has a huge foundation of themes from the earlier films to work with here, but he largely eschews direct usage of them, working in and recreating motifs in subtle and surprising ways, while building a new musical vocabulary along the way. The entire score is fantastic, but the iconic “Duel of the Fates” – the theme to the battle with Darth Maul – is a cut above, an impossibly rousing piece, haunting in its sheer scale, that is very real contender for the title of ‘best Star Wars track ever.’
And you know what else I love? Jar-Jar Binks.
Well, kind of – let me justify that. Jar-Jar is in many ways an appalling abomination with uncomfortable echoes of minstrelsy and racial caricature, but he is also such a wildly ridiculous self-parody that I cannot help but laugh my ass off every time he appears. Jar-Jar may very well be one of the great comedic masterstrokes of our time, a bombastic combination of all the worst traits shared by all of cinema’s most annoying, useless ‘comic-relief’ sidekicks. He plays no important role in the movie, literally stumbles in and out of scenes screaming gibberish and tripping over everything in sight, and is never capable of playing a single moment ‘straight.’ Whether intentional or not, Jar-Jar is always a joke. All the parodies, jokes, and jabs at Jar-Jar fail to do the character justice because, in truth, he’s worse than any spoof. No joke about Jar-Jar is as cruel as the joke Jar-Jar himself creates; he seems to be less a calculated part of the film than a practical joke a drunk ILM animator played in post-production, inserting the most over-the-top cartoon he or she could invent into every other scene. Both in execution and in personality, Jar-Jar transcends clumsiness, and in that way, I find him gut-bustlingly hilarious, and maybe even weirdly subversive. At the very least, he’s a Gungan who knows how to keep things interesting; part of me loves him for it.
Another thing I love, legitimately and without a hint of irony, is the film’s opening crawl. There is an (at this point) old episode of The Simpsons that satirizes The Phantom Menace and the public response to the film, and its in-universe parody film, “The Gathering Shadow,” starts off with an opening crawl gag reading:
It is a time of uncertainty. The empire’s ambiguous tariff statutes mandate close reexamination of galactic export quotas. Interim Princess Agoomba has co-chaired a subcommittee to draft amendments to existing trade policies.
This is funny, no doubt, but what’s amazing is that it still isn’t as funny as the actual opening lines of The Phantom Menace:
Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star system is in dispute.
These two sentences amaze, fascinate, and amuse me to no end. There is not a funnier piece of writing in all of Star Wars than George Lucas opening his decades-in-the-waiting Prequel Trilogy with the line “The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.” It’s perfect. It cannot be parodied. It is almost resistant to mockery, because it zags so ludicrously where we expect it to zig.
And to be clear, I don’t think Lucas was ‘out of it’ in any way here – in addition to being funny, I also think this is flat-out one of the smartest pieces of writing in the entire Star Wars canon. Compare the first lines of The Phantom Menace to the opening crawl that started the original film from 1977 (“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire”). Both are short, 2-sentence paragraphs, with the first sentence establishing some kind of chaotic situation, and the second explaining how that came to be.
But the thing about the Prequel Trilogy is that throughout, Lucas is consciously avoiding any replication of the structure of the Original Trilogy, something that puts these films in stark contrast to the Disney-produced ‘sequel’ films. Love the Prequels or hate the Prequels, Lucas is trying very hard to make these films differentfrom the movies that started it all. And that opening crawl in The Phantom Menace, and the way it compares to the words that kicked everything off 22 years earlier, is a crystal-clear statement of intent. In the original Star Wars, turmoil was caused by a big black-and-white conflict between heroic freedom-seeking rebels and a villainous empire, an organization clearly labeled as ‘Evil’ in the second sentence of the story. That first film is painting in broad pulpy strokes, like the serial media that inspired it.
But The Phantom Menace isn’t doing that. Instead of laying out a big pulpy space adventure in that first paragraph, its explanation for the ‘turmoil’ is “the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.” And that plants us firmly in the world of politics, not of pulp heroes.
It is one of the key gestures of this film, and of the entire trilogy to follow, because the Prequels are a story much less about individual heroism than broad political movements. This is a trilogy where the lines between heroes and villains are blurry and indistinct, and the main characters aren’t even sure of what’s going on until they’ve already lost, utterly and completely, at the midpoint of Revenge of the Sith. The Prequels aren’t a grand, rousing adventure about the struggle between heroes and villains, but a story about the fog of politics, wherein the protagonists spend most of the trilogy unknowingly doing what the villain wants them to do. All their victories are false, and the absolute worst-case scenario – the collapse of democracy, the destruction of the Jedi, and the rise of a fascist dictatorship – comes to pass.
“The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems” being in dispute is exactly the kind of bureaucratic space in which the fascist forces of the Sith play, the place they lay their plot for the crumbling of democratic society – because they know that’s the place that no one is looking. If your eyes glaze over reading the line “the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute,” well, that’s the point. That’s absolutely George Lucas’ intent, because that’s the reaction that allows a clever fascist to dismantle your society through the administrative state while you stand on the sidelines waiting for heroes to come save the day.
The Jedi are a bit like us in this equation. The end of the opening crawl gives us their perspective: “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....” In short, the democratic process isn’t working, so the Jedi are going to go in, armed and ready, to clean it all up on their own. This is because they are hypocrites; they think no one can outsmart them, that their gung-ho heroism must be an unalloyed good that could never be redirected towards nefarious ends.
And if “the taxation of trade routes to outlying star routes” sounds boring, good news! Sheev Palpatine, this nice old man from Naboo, has a solution for you. Just give him all the power, and you'll never have to think about it again.
That’s why democracy dies with thunderous applause.
The world where one never has to think about “the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems” is the world of the Original Trilogy – an authoritarian Empire that does all the thinking for the people, and leaves the population with two options: Be supplicant, or start fighting back. The Phantom Menace immediately establishes a very different world, or at least a very different point in that world’s history. It is one of the smartest pieces of writing in the entire Star Wars saga, an instant jolt to the viewer’s sensibilities and expectations, a subversion that tees up everything these three films will be about – and why large swaths of fandom will reject them on sight. Because if you look at that crawl and roll your eyes at mentions of taxation and are baffled by Lucas bringing politics into your laser sword adventure...well, you’re implicitly saying you'd prefer the world of the autocracy, right? The world where those issues are off the table and firmly out of your control. As funny as “the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems” is, it is also a direct challenge to the viewer – an inversion of the established language of Star Wars used to broaden the definition of Star Wars, and to open the viewer up to let their interpretations of Star Wars change and grow.
Compare this to the opening crawl of The Force Awakens, the first of Disney’s ‘sequel’ films. What does it tell you about this world, or this film’s relation to the series’ history, or the thematic intent of this new trilogy?
Luke Skywalker has vanished. In his absence, the sinister FIRST ORDER has risen from the ashes of the Empire and will not rest until Skywalker, the last Jedi, has been destroyed.
It tells you Luke Skywalker is cool.
Or, to damn the film by giving it slightly more credit: It tells you Luke Skywalker is cool, the world is a very dark place without him, and we have to go find him and get him back in order to restore the light. It tells us that our real-world nostalgia for Star Wars is more important than any theme or plot point that could ever happen inside of Star Wars. It crafts the image of an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, where Star Wars is not a series housing a living, breathing world open to dynamic change and growth, but a closed loop, a delivery system of the Star Wars ‘you’ (defined narrowly as people who grew up watching the Original Trilogy) remember and expect.
The Phantom Menace says “there is more to Star Wars than what you thought you knew.” The Force Awakens says “the boundaries of Star Wars are exactly as strict as your own limited nostalgia.”
That’s the difference. And that’s why The Phantom Menace is, in its own way, great.
We also devoted an entire episode to THE PHANTOM MENACE on The Weekly Stuff Podcast a few years back, so here is that episode again for posterity’s sake:
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