The Phantom Menace
For one British fan, the struggle to
separate hype from anticipation,
nostalgia from hope, was doomed from the start.
Submitted by Will Brooker
7/20/99
Nineteen ninety-nine has already witnessed the world war which wasn’t a war: now we have the movie you’ve seen before its release. "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" has become the always-already-experienced, here and gone before it arrives. By June the British fan could have known every line off by heart from the published script, memorised the novelisation, collected every variant of the comic and amassed a full set of mini-action figures. The plot had been given away on internet bulletin boards; the film itself was available from market stalls. Why bother trekking to the cinema to watch the early adventures of Anakin Skywalker when you’ve become him countless times in the "Racer" videogame? While the trailers have barely started to run on British TV and the poster campaign has reached only scattered hoardings, there’s a sense of fatigue about the whole deal. Between the May opening in the States and the belated import to the UK for mid-July, the "Menace" phenomenon has almost become old news, yesterday’s story. Even "Sight and Sound" opened its review with a resigned "You know the drill" – and this some three weeks before the movie premiered.
The entire mediasphere around "The Phantom Menace" is saturated with over-familiar images and citations. Just as the movie’s striking icons have been reduced to visual cliché - the once-shocking visage of Darth Maul loses its impact when you see it repeated across plastic mugs, pencil cases and posters in every high street window display – so the journalistic discourse surrounding the film has to struggle to avoid repeating earlier reviews. "New York Post" reporter Thelma Adams must have patted herself on the back for opening with Obi-Wan Kenobi’s "I have a bad feeling about this": and so must Susan Wloszczyna, quoting the same line at the start of her review in "USA Today". It’s all been said and done before. You know you’re going to be vaguely disappointed. You know you’re going to hate Jar-Jar Binks. You know the drill. You know what to think, what to feel about "The Phantom Menace" before you even walk into the cinema.
And to a fan, there’s something awfully deadening and despondent about that feeling. To a fan, this isn’t just a big movie or a marketing vehicle, or even a cultural phenomenon: it’s history, personal history. "The Phantom Menace" may seem to take an unprecedented jump by flashing us back a generation, 32 years before "A New Hope"; but "A New Hope"e itself was released 22 years ago. Twenty-two years. Jimmy Carter was in the White House, James Callaghan on Downing Street. We had an oil crisis, a Cold War, a summer drought. "Jaws" was the biggest movie of all time; John Travolta was Top of the Pops. It was as if punk had never happened: and it hadn’t, barely. When my dad bought me my first action figure, a C-3PO, I was seven years old and having an appalling time at Charlton Manor Junior School. When I bought a new C-3PO figure in May – "The Phantom Menace" model Threepio, stripped down to the wires – it was to reward myself for landing a lectureship in Communication. Twenty-two years is a long time.
In 1977 Carrie Fisher was a petite girl of twenty-one with famous parents; now she’s a novelist and recovered junkie whose ex-husband sticks pins in a Princess Leia doll. In 1977 Harrison Ford was a carpenter with one major film role to his name; now he’s an ageing Hollywood stalwart. Peter Cushing, who played Grand Moff Tarkin in "A New Hope", died of cancer five years ago. Jake Lloyd, who now plays Anakin Skywalker, wasn’t born when "Return of the Jedi" was released. Twenty-two years is a long time, for all of us. If you live with a movie that long, it becomes a myth, part of your life. Some of us have waited sixteen years for "The Phantom Menace"; first expecting it in 1986, after the usual three-year interlude, then resigning ourselves and making do with Star Wars comics, novels and computer games for over a decade, and finally, hardly daring to believe the rumours after so long, beginning the cycle of anticipation in the lead-up to the film’s release. Never mind the marketing, the budget, the first-weekend box-office take: there’s more riding on this film, in terms of mass personal investment, than anything in the history of cinema.
Which explains why, at 5.15 on the 15th July, I was walking back from the Odeon in Cardiff trying desperately to rationalise my feelings about "The Phantom Menace". I was trying to find a way of categorising the film as not-"Star Wars", keeping it apart from the trilogy of my childhood. I was trying to work out what was wrong with it. I didn’t feel as if I’d seen a "Star Wars" film for the first time – I’d got far more of a rush, been knocked back in my seat, from my first sight of the trailers on RealVideo which I’d downloaded off the internet onto a five-inch viewing window. Yes, when that yellow logo, unchanged since 1977, filled the black screen again, and the audience of teens managed a few whoops, it was just like coming home. But by the end, I hardly felt as if I’d seen a new film at all. Maybe not even a film, in the sense of a narrative with character-identification, emotional involvement, logical psychological progression and satisfying closure. If anything I felt like I’d seen a polished-up montage from the Special Edition trilogy of 1997. I really had seen it all before, and I think I would have felt that way if I’d managed to avoid all the publicity, all the toys, all the teasers.
Again, a paradox, because "A New Hope" was never anything new. Part of its power was the distillation of cinema’s first seventy-five years into a single package, a non-stop collection of greatest hits from the samurai to the western and the war film; and beyond that, its drawing on myths, fairytale and folklore from every cultural tradition Lucas could lay his hands on. In that sense, "The Phantom Menace" succeeds. Like "A New Hope", it presents the familiar as strange, and vice versa. Battledroids are elongated statuettes out of African art, a city covers an entire planet, fighter pilots wear long Italian coats: and all this is treated as everyday, casual background rather than something to stop and gape over. The urban vistas, from Naboo’s Renaissance splendour to Coruscant’s take on a 22nd-century New York – even the rows of mud dwellings on Tatooine, glowing from inside as we rise above them at night – are simply a series of wonders, and you lap up all the establishing shots you’re given: there’s surely room for a book on "City Architecture in Star Wars", sourced to its various inspirations and lavishly illustrated. The film looks fabulous, and that’s not ILM’s special effects, it’s Doug Chiang’s design. Anyone can make a ship cruise over a forest and skim down to land; it takes a visionary to make that ship a shiny dart of silver, and then style the Queen’s blaster to match.
Another paradox – another problem for me to tussle with as I pick apart my own disappointment – lies in the fact that "The Phantom Menace" is explicitly, unashamedly built around repetition and parallel. It’s an echo-chamber, foreshadowing Episode 4 in particular; and that’s right and proper, as the symmetry of the Star Wars universe demands and as myth requires. There must always be a master and an apprentice. One must die and one must graduate. This is the way of the Force, and the way of Vladamir Propp’s scheme of folktale narrative which so clearly informed "A New Hope": and so we have a young Queen, a Wizard, a Helper, a Villain. Some of these roles seem inadquately filled this time – Jar Jar Binks, the lamentable alien clown, is no Chewbacca, while Darth Maul is a taciturn mercenary played by a martial artist, and never approaches the complexity of Darth Vader. Nevertheless, if "The Phantom Menace" prefigures "A New Hope" in its character types and setting, that was only to be expected.
At its best, then, "The Phantom Menace" walks the difficult line deftly. Everything is the same, except for the fact that everything’s completely different. A trooper yells "close the blast doors" and a Jedi murmurs "I sense a disturbance in the Force." Jar Jar owes Qui-Gon a life-debt, as Chewbacca did to Han. Anakin leaves his Tatooine home to join the resistance, as his son will decades later. There are, of course, moments which are played to the hilt for the resonance of an old friend returning – "thank you…Artoo Deetoo," says Amidala, pronouncing the unfamiliar name for the first time as the audience grins – and others which carry grimmer irony, such as Anakin watching the ceremonial Jedi funeral pyre, and Obi-Wan’s cry of "No!" as his mentor is cut down. When Senator Palpatine, flanked by blue guards, tells Anakin "we will watch your career with great interest", his oily smile inevitably calls up the memory of "Return of the Jedi's" Emperor Palpatine leering with Vader at his side. Lucas apparently wants viewers to feel sorry for Vader when they first see him throttle Captain Antilles at the start of "A New Hope"; it’s a worthy, challenging ambition, and he’s on his way to achieving it.
Yet challenge is exactly what "The Phantom Menace" lacks, for the most part. The four-way finale involves a Jedi duel, a space dogfight to knock out a central shield generator, a guerilla struggle led by the female protagonist and a land war between militaristic cannon fodder and a comedy alien tribe. Qui-Gon approves the resistance plan as "well-conceived"; for anyone who’s seen "Return of the Jedi", it’s ludicrously over-familiar. It’s an identical copy in the structure, even in the detail – those of us who cringed at the sight of Ewoks hitting themselves with bolos will despair at Gungans doing exactly the same – but without characters to care about. Qui-Gon is a nice enough guy, solid and thoughtful, but he’s more a prop, a Proppian function, than a person; he serves the role of wise mentor that Obi-Wan played in "A New Hope", right down to his last scene. The young Obi-Wan is a follower with none of Luke Skywalker’s naïvety or guts. Jar Jar is at best a distraction and cypher, at worst an annoying stereotype. So for a great chunk of the film there’s no team here, no banter or sexual innuendo as there was in "A New Hope". The two Jedi wander around peaceably like bored samurai, wiping out droids by the score with a flick of their fingers, and there’s no conflict or interest around their scenes whatsoever. In "A New Hope" we had a pirate who didn’t want to be there, and a farmboy in love with a hologram, and a princess who didn’t want to be rescued, and they all bickered like the kids they were. It was fun and vibrant. For way too much of this movie we watch a master and servant calmly undertaking their duties; and for too much of the rest, we’re watching computer graphics beat each other up on a big screen. Where are the humans, I scribbled in my notepad, yawning. Bring back the humans.
Thankfully, there are humans. When Jake Lloyd and Natalie Portman meet, he asks "are you an angel?" and you’re reminded, after what feels like an hour of the movie, what it is to be surprised. She’s been slammed for her performance here by critics who don’t realise it’s just that, a performance of being a Queen by a young girl. When she’s inhabiting her gowns and headdresses, Amidala talks with the stilted American English of a 1940s starlet – inventive enough – but when she’s in civvies, she’s a completely different person. She has a genuine spark with Anakin, and it’s intriguing to watch this teenage girl flirting, despite her better judgement, with a boy four years younger and several feet shorter than her. He does have power, we realise that, and she’s attracted to it. When the young actors are under the quasi-parental guidance of Liam Neeson and Pernilla August in the domestic Tatooine scenes, you finally get to see good ensemble performance; something quiet and promising, and far more interesting than watching ten thousand computer graphics march across a field.
August, as others have said, acts beyond the call of duty, and creates the film’s only touching moments from her scenes with Jake Lloyd. In turn, he’s more than subtle enough to hit lines like "I can’t do it, mom" home to the heart; he’s got a winningly straight delivery, telling Qui-Gon "I saw your laser sword…I had a dream I was a jedi" with the voice of the confident child-fan meeting a famous actor. Maybe I just found my own seven year-old self in him; but if Jar Jar is for the under-fives and Maul for the teens, perhaps it’s fitting that we adults have a child to identify with.
So it’s a bit of a mess; you think you’ve seen it all before even when you haven’t, and when it diverges from the pattern of the first trilogy it’s usually worse. The shield is destroyed by pure fluke rather than through Force skills; the battle droids collapse and afford the Gungans victory after they’d conclusively lost. The parade and party at the end not only conflates the ceremonies from "A New Hope" and "Return of the Jedi" but feels entirely undeserved. There’s a flatness to it all despite the scope and detail of the worlds we’re shown. You don’t want to see another alien or another firefight. If this is "Star Wars", you’re sick of it.
To paraphrase Obi-Wan and Yoda, however, this was not the only hope: there is another. From the signs here, I’m personally optimistic about Episode Two. Portman, calm, small and strong, is an exciting character in a way that Boss Nass and Sebulba could never dream of being. Even if Jake Lloyd is too young for the sequel, his character is about to enter its most interesting phase, when the sweet young padawan turns to the Dark Side. Though we can only guess the reason – he promises he’ll see his mother again, and it’s hinted that his fear at her loss will destroy him – the fact that I even want to guess is testament to Lloyd’s craft and the character’s promise. Finally, Obi-Wan Kenobi only comes into his own at the climax, pacing like an animal and fighting like a demon; without Qui-Gon to guide him, this rash Jedi will himself become a more complex figure.
The wait of sixteen years is over, then, as it probably had to end; in an unhappy compromise. There are the seeds of something better here, though. The next wait, of three years, has begun.