Seeing the Phantom Menace again for the first time in 14 years. My thoughts

Cafe Society
1

I was in line for Phantom Menace a couple weeks early and saw it twice opening day. Look, here is my ticket. I also own the DVD. I liked it, as did many, the first couple screenings. Gradually, it became clear that the movie was horrible. I still went to see Episode II and III, mind you.

I last saw the movie around 2004 and have really only seen reviews of it since then.

Anyway, I got a copy of the Blu-ray from the library and decided to watch it again. I know there has been a little surge of defenders of the movie and I wondered if maybe we’ve been too harsh on this movie. Hey, I have little kids now(ages 6 and 8) and I wondered if the movie is actually a good movie for kids.

My thoughts:

Wow, it *is *terrible. I’m being really open-minded, but honestly, the middle hour is astonishingly badly written and directed. It’s clear that no one said no to George Lucas and he needed critics in his organization. I was genuinely struck by how bad it is as a movie.

Things I noticed, good and bad:

Good:

  • The climax is pretty good and all of the lightsaber battle between Qui-Gon, Obi-wan, and Darth Maul is really good. Nicely done. It held up as it did in my mind.

  • The Gungan battle was not as annoying or bad as I remember. Only the “Anakin in space” stuff was stupid to me now.

  • The special effects took guts to attempt and I commend them. The CGI characters and ships don’t quite hold up now. I do think Empire and Jedi look better as movies, but I do commend Industrial light and Magic for attempting a big leap forward for effects.

  • I know the podrace goes on forever, but I liked it. It is an amazing sequence.

Bad:

  • Everything on Tatooine that isn’t the podrace. Nothing can save the dialogue or bad directing of the acting.

  • The effects look worse in HD on a big screen TV than I ever remember them looking in the theater. I know this isn’t true, but while I commend them for trying, I was very much struck by how unfinished the digital effects looked.

  • Natalie Portman looks as miserable as I believe she later said she was. Her worst performance. I had forgotten that she is almost as bad as Jake Lloyd in this movie. I place all blame on the director.

  • I know Ahmed Best can do other voices. I still can’t believe Lucas chose the voice he did for Jar Jar. It’s as bad as I remember.
    Anyway, just sharing some thoughts on a movie too many people have already attacked. I was hoping to report that it wasn’t as bad as we all said, but it sadly is really is.

Anyone else do a re-watch lately?

2

To get ready for Episode 7, I rewatched the first six… BUT, at my daughter’s insistence, I watched Ep.1-3 as one movie: the “un-sentimentalized” version on YouTube (not sure of the clip’s real name). Wonderful – it took out all the sappy scenes, voiced Jar-Jar in his native language, and cut a lot of Gungans. So the Darth Maul battle was uncut.

3

The only good thing about TPM was the brilliant Weird Al song.

4

It reminded me of quidditch from the Harry Potterverse. It was clearly written to give the awesome hero something awesomely heroic to do, by someone with no idea how sports and competitions actually work.

5

It was a copy of the chariot race in Ben Hur.

6

Weird Al’s best work IMHO, which covers a lot of ground. “Brilliant” is the exact word for it, and not in the ironic/sarcastic Irish way. “My my, this here Anakin guy…” indeed.

7

Except for the latter’s death, where this formerly whirling dervish whose reflexes had been shown to be finely honed to yes a razor’s edge, can only stand there motionless for half an eternity while Obi Wan slowlyyyy Forces his master’s light saber to leap into his hand so as to deliver the killing blow.

8

The prequels benefit tremendously from having read Darths and Droids. It turns out that Jar-Jar really is loveable… if you think of her as an eight-year-old.

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And the big battle scene was an melange of ***Spartacus ***and Cleopatra.

10

Good:

The battles with Qui Gon, Obi Wan and Darth Maul. Leading up the release, Lucas said this would be the first time you see fully formed Jedi going at it and this didn’t disappoint.

Duel of the Fates is a great composition and stands right alongside the other master works by John Williams.

Bad:

The incomprehensible trade embargo plot. I mean, really, who fucking cares? This was done in some need to explain everything which included the stupid midi-chlorians explanation as well as an allusion to Annakin’s immaculate conception.

The acting and dialogue are just atrocious. Lucas evidently surrounded himself with a bunch of ass-kissing sycophants such that not one person could step up and say, this isn’t working. Lucas was so consumed with the special effects I’m sure he believed that this would be the sole focus of the audience.

The movie is devoid of humor and wit. You can see how Jar Jar was supposed to provide comic relief but it was so ham-handed and infantile. Even the exchanges between C3PO and R2 come out flat.

One other thing to note is the impossibly high level of expectations. Leading up to the release, people were paying full price tickets to see movies that were featuring the trailers –multiple times- and then coming out and breathlessly proclaiming that it was the greatest thing ever.

I think people forget the tremendous hype leading up to the Phantom Menace. There was ubiquitous media presence and fan base had already pre-booked tickets to see the first, second, third, etc. showing. They came out dressed in garb and had set the bar impossibly high. There really was nowhere to go but down.

11

The thing that annoyed me most about the critics is they hated the idea of seeing Annakin as a child. I actually liked that idea.

It was just poorly executed in TPM.

12

Mmm. This is one of those “take it in a context, or take it as stand-alone” situations.

I am of an age, that when the first Star Wars came out, it meant a lot more to me than it ultimately ought to have done. In the forty years since, I gradually gained a greater understanding of George Lucas, and unfortunately, the only good that did, was to allow me to see even more of the problems with all of the films.

Essentially, Lucas is an impatient, sentimental, and nervously sensitive genius, who wanted to recapture a sense of thrill and wonder that he enjoyed in his youth, by creating a large and involved romantic adventure story line. The genius shows up in his dedicated energy to bring his stories to the screen, as close as possible to how he imagined them. The impatience shows up in the many many story details that he smudged his way past, which in turn led to his making other contingent bad decisions in other parts of the saga.

TPM, and the two entries which followed, were really only created in order to fulfill Lucas’ original goal of building a six-film saga. I imagine that’s both why he put off making them as long as he did, and why he rushed them through to release. And their story content was built backwards from episodes four through six, which also made for problems, especially given Lucas’ nature.

From what I can see, he is very much as many of us who want to create stories can be, in that he knows where he wants things to end up, and what he wants his audience to feel at the end, but the details which are needed to accomplish that, aren’t as easy to work out. So his choices are often rather clumsy, just as his direction of human interactions tends to be crude and lacking in proper emotional backstory.

One other thing I didn’t mention earlier which bears on all this, is that from the beginning, Lucas wanted to copy the movie serials of his youth, fairly well across the board, including setting up a basic formula for every film to follow. Every film introduced a set of characters which included a primary hero, a spunky damsel to be rescued, a primary villain, a comedic sidekick or two, and so on. Oh, and a chase scene of some sort, to act as a sort of roller coaster ride. In TPM, he was the most careless and rushed in tossing all the elements in, because all he really cared about, was establishing that Anakin was once a cute kid who was supposed to be the bringer of Holy Resolution.

13

Thinking back today again, I think the effects are the thing that I noticed the most.

You know those videos where they show you the “layers” of CGI character creation? Like this one that shows how Davey Jones was created for Pirates 2.

Phantom Menace today looks like it needed one more finishing layer where they finished the surface textures to make things look less rubbery.

Part of that is that it was a major step forward for digital effects. Another part is that Lucas insisted the movie come out May of 1999. I know that the behind the scenes teams, especially ILM, were pushed to the max to finish the movie.

I haven’t re-watched Attack of the Clones in 14 years either, but I would not be surprised if things look better.

14

I believe that, as a general rule, prequels are hardly ever a good idea.

Partly this is because, when you make new films in a series or franchise, you want to up the ante: a bigger world, more momentous events, better special effects. But that makes things go from bigger to smaller within the internal chronology, which often doesn’t fit or is unsatisfying,

And partly it’s because, when you’re writing a prequel, you’re constrained to have everything and everyone end up in a way that matches the situation of the earlier-released but chronologically-later work, and this can interfere with your storylines and characters evolving naturally and going where they want to go.
I had actually never gotten around to watching Episode III, so a few months ago I (re)watched I-II-III. I enjoyed The Phantom Menace more than I thought I would, because my expectations were so low. And overall I felt kind of so-so about all three films: didn’t love them, didn’t hate them, and personally thought they were a lot closer together in quality than their reputations would suggest.

15

Obligatory must-see: Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans.

The thing that disappointed me about TPM was all the kissing.

16

I still don’t like it. If it was supposed to be a combat or a death sport then all the jocularity around it was in very poor taste. If the crowds are there to see crashes and death, why is the course set up so everything happens away from the spectators? Anakin’s pod is so fast he catches up after the start, but not fast enough to pass them and keep going.

It just don’t add up.

17

He hadn’t seen the film when he did the song. He worked out the rough course of events
in the movie from the trailer and plot hints on theforce.net.

18

If you look at the films as a homage to the films Lucas was inspired by, they’re brilliant. Lucas loved hammy sci-fi swashbuckler type films which had really cheesy dialogue and romances…And he basically made that sort of film with AAA production values. I mean, even going back to SW 1977, listen to some of the dialogue without the lens of nostalgia - the dialogue is cheesy there too.

The George Lucas helmed SW films (prequels, and ANH) are basically cheesy B movies with big budgets.

19

While TPM is a turd, it’s also early enough in the story that I feel like it doesn’t do that much to screw up the mythos that already existed (or at least had been name-dropped or known about in the OT). Stuff like the Clone Wars, Yoda fighting with a lightsaber, Boba Fett’s backstory, Anakin and Luke’s Tattooine family, etc. So in a way, I dislike it less than I dislike AOTC or ROTS.

20

  1. The casting of young Anakin was terrible. I’m not sure who thought that kid could act. I’m not sure why anyone insisted that he act like he had no real emotion. He’s the focus of the whole damn movie: the very young Darth Vader. I recall feeling in the theater watching it the first time that his performance was a disaster. Every time I watch the movie again, I’m convinced I was right.

  2. The plot is fairly stupid, but then the focus isn’t on the plot, and as movie serials plots go, it wasn’t that bad. It did accomplish its goal: introducing us to the main actors in the drama of How Darth Vader Went Bad.

  3. At the time, the CGI was fairly good, as I recall. I refuse to let myself be affected in my opinion on this by current CGI abilities. After all, I recall what sci-fi movies looked like before there was CGI.

  4. Jar Jar Binks’ accent and speech pattern was blatantly based upon a silly stereotype, as was the accent of the trade union officials. I was offended then, and I’m still offended. It made the movie feel like it was from the early 70s.

  5. The chariot race, er, that is, pod race was too long, almost completely irrelevant to the plot, and silly in the extreme. It was also devoid of any real sense of suspense, since you knew that Anakin had to win. The only question was when Sebulba was actually going to get his just comeuppance.

  6. George Lucas should have hired good science fiction writers to write the plot of the three prequels and the basic screenplays.

  7. The final light saber battle was epic. Still is epic. Of course, no one ever explained what the hell the stupid force barriers were about, or the bottomless pit, or … But for a serial-type story, that’s just window dressing anyway. :smiley: