Predicting
The Future:
Five Different Outlooks On What
"The Phantom Menace" Has In Store
And The Resulting Impressions Of The
Film
The Ferrett:
Cynic who wants to believe
Expectations Prior To Seeing The Film
5/17/99
I’ve been waiting for this since the summer of
’77.
I remember buying those godawful poster magazines as a kid, where you got a poster folded up into a magazine — one side had the poster, the other had eight pages worth of pictures and articles. And in one of them, it said that Lucas had eight more Star Wars movies planned and this was simply the first of a long string of Star Wars movies.
I couldn’t wait. New Star Wars movies? All as good as the first one? My gosh! Being a kid, I kind of assumed there’d be one out every year for the next eight years. And next year seemed like an eternity.
Well, it’s twenty-two years later. And I’ve waited. And the kid inside is just about clobbering the jaded cynic who’s been saying the new Star Wars movies are going to suck.
I have read no spoilers. I have thrown away magazines with Star Wars articles in them. I don’t want to know. So completely blind, here are my predictions.
- The New Movie Will Still Pale In Comparison. Come on, I’ve had twenty-two years of anticipation. Can anything live up to that? I think not.
- But It Will Be A Worthy Successor, Making Us All Obsolete. A friend once said, "So what’s the worst that can happen if Phantom Menace sucks? So you’ll have a bad sequel around." And I said, "No, the worst thing would be if everyone talks about the sequel in the same hushed tones that follow Highlander II." Having seen the trailer and heard advance comments, it’ll stand on its’ own — but the old fans will still like the old Star Wars a little bit better. And the younger fans who watched the new Star Wars movies for the first time will like them better. And then, much like the way that fans of the old Kirk-based Star Trek seem like dinosaurs to Picard fans, it’ll rapidly cause a schism in the Star Wars community. Basically, the clock is ticking towards the time that anyone who likes the old Star Wars is a fogey.
- But I Won’t Be Surprised. Again, with twenty-two years to mull over every possibility, Lucas is hard-pressed to pull out something astonishingly unthought of.
- Darth Maul Will Be A Kick-Butt Villain. That dual lightsaber bit is just too rockin’, and I fully expect to have to have someone put my dropped jaw back into place after I see the lightsaber battles in Phantom Menace.
- But Jar-Jar Will Become The Next Ewok. Casual fans will love him. Die-hards will despise him. Much fan fiction will be written wherein Ewoks and Jar-Jar are killed in horrendous accidents.
- The Political Aspects Will Be Even Better Than Star Wars I. Anyone who listened to the radio drama tapes (and you should) knows that there was a heck of a lot of political trickery leading up to the boarding of the Tantive IV. I really liked those. (So did Jody — see her preview.) I think I’ll really love these here.
Reactions After Seeing The Film
5/19/99
The question everyone’s going to ask: Is The Phantom Menace better than Star Wars?
The question is inherently flawed. The Phantom Menace is trying so hard not to be Star Wars that there is no effective comparison. Is Star Wars a more enjoyable movie? Absolutely. The Phantom Menace has more awkward moments, some floating plot points that don’t get resolved immediately… and it has Jar Jar.
Oh God, it has Jar Jar.
But here is the difference that’s going to drive critics berserk: TPM is not a movie. It’s the first part of a three-act play.
It’s a fine first act. It has great moments and more subtlety than I had ever imagined Lucas was capable of. But like any first act, the real satisfaction isn’t going to arrive until you see the entire thing. As such, I can’t review TPM any more than I can review The Fellowship Of The Ring on its’ own.
I can review where I think it’s going, though… and as such I can heartily approve. Because although TPM is fun, it’s also subtle. It takes time to understand. It needs to be watched at least twice.
And it does not suck.
And the biggest surprise of this whole movie is, astonishingly, Anakin Skywalker.
Anakin surprises everyone by turning up as a perfectly likeable – dare I say adorable? – kid. Sure, you know the whole point of the next two movies will be how he becomes Darth Vader, but Phantom Menace plays it brilliantly by not letting that future color the past. At this point in the film Anakin’s an innocent prodigy, born into circumstances which no one should be in, and you want the best for this bright-eyed child. I cheered when Anakin triumphed, more than for any other character in TPM. I have a feeling that I’ll be very sorry indeed when Anakin takes the fall.
Lucas has said that if he does the prequels right, when Vader steps through that door in A New Hope and strangles Captain Antilles, you should feel sorry for him. By playing it straight with us, he’s halfway there. That alone is worth the cost of admission.
Which is good, because a lot of the other character development is going to take at least another movie to pay off. Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan is set up perfectly as Anakin’s ultimate tutor, but we won’t get to see that until the next movie. Padme, the Queen’s handmaiden, is played marvelously in a subtle performance that really requires two watchings to appreciate fully. She and Anakin hit it off marvelously, and my gut feeling is that this will pay off more than we can imagine. Palpatine is well-played (and again, without the movie heavily winking to us on the side to say, "See? This guy becomes the Emperor!") as a scheming Senator, but we’ll need time to see exactly how his plans work out.
The political aspects are also well-done, but they are subtle and will require multiple watchings. The senate battles in the background are well-fleshed out, as is the more-distanced Tatooine politics, and TPM’s strength lies in the fact that it’s not an obvious movie. I liked TPM the first time, and the second time around I started to love it. I think it’ll grow on people more than they realize.
Is it all character development and politicking, though? Hell no.
Two words: Lightsaber battles.
TPM has the hands-down, best, most kick-butt beyond my wildest dreams of fanboyism, lightsaber battles I ever hope to see. Darth Maul is the single creepiest villain since Darth Vader – Boba Fett who? – and his three-way battles with Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon are exactly what I had hoped. Okay, he has no character development. I admit this. But as an excuse to have martial arts showoffs beyond anything Jackie Chan could ever hope for, I say hell yeah. Suffice it to say that not only did my jaw drop, I cried with happiness. It’s not all lightsaber battles and some of the space scenes are great as well, but… oh, I remember Obi-Wan’s blade flashing desperately against the dualsaber of Darth Maul, and show’s over, folks.
And as for Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon, Lucas sets the tone just right. Too many of the SW books make Jedi either completely invulnerable, or wiped out by the slightest attack. TPM does its’ job well by playing the Jedi Knights as downright scary people, but vulnerable to the right kinds of attacks. You can understand why a bunch of trained Jedi would be the kind of thing that would take some effort to exterminate – and as such, how much of an effort Vader’s ultimate crusade is going to be.
Which brings me to the one truly unfortunate flaw of TPM, and its’ name is Jar Jar.
Was Jar Jar bad? Well, let’s put it this way; as I was sitting in the theater, I was trying to count the letters in jarjaristheantichrist.com to figure out whether it was a valid domain name.
Jar Jar is the epitome of everything that loyal fans feared that the new Star Wars movie would be. SW1 cheats the audience by bringing in a character with no motivations and literally no reason to be there. Or anywhere. Jar Jar doesn’t care about anything. He has no desires, expresses no real emotions other than fretting worry (done much better by Threepio in Star Wars: A New Hope) and a vague curiosity which only shows up for brainless fart humor, never for anything related to the plot.
I thought I had hated the Ewoks before. But in retrospect, the Ewoks were given character in that one scene in Return Of The Jedi where one of them is shot dead… and the other Ewok drops in his tracks to mourn for her. They care about each other. In that moment you might not like the Ewoks, but you have to deal with them as real people.
Jar Jar has no such moment.
And the frustrating thing about SW1 is that they have that moment to give Jar Jar some real emotional depth on Naboo, one real boffo setup punch… which never follows through, leaving Jar Jar adrift in a narcissistic, pathetic burst of nonhumor. Jar Jar is an aberration in the Star Wars universe. ‘nuff said.
So that’s most of my original predictions. By and large, I was right. The last is also true.
One of my original predictions was that, much in the way that fans of the old Star Trek hated the Next Generation, people will hate The Phantom Menace. And they will. And it’s exactly in the way that fans hated TNG.
Why?
Because both the old Star Wars and Star Trek were about action first, and characterization second. Sure, you had Jim Kirk and Spock being buddies, but if it came down to having a good conversation or a raging battle with a cloaked Romulan ship, it’d be Scotty swearing into the intercom every single time.
Star Trek: The Next Generation was about characterization, and the battles came second. As such, fans hated it. It’s easier to be entertained by ships blowing up than it is to make a conversation interesting, and even when ST:TNG did have explosions they were always less interesting. As such, it took time to understand what Picard was about, who Data was becoming, what Geordi wanted to be.
But as time went by and the show was allowed to deepen, to be freed from its’ ancestry and be accepted as something on its’ own… it was then and only then that fans took to it with all their heart.
I’ve already heard TPM called boring, a big letdown, not really that exciting… which was everything Star Trek: TNG was called when it first came out. I think there’s going to be a tremendous TPM backlash. And eventually, with repeated watchings of the movie, we’ll find that the new Star Wars movies are good in a different way.
I grant you, there are flaws. There are some awkward, badly-acted moments, but weren’t there some in the original as well? And some of the action setpieces just don’t gel nearly as well as they did in the first Trilogy, because they’re not staged properly. But when all is said and done…. I give TPM an A rating.
Pending, of course, the next two movies.
(The Ferrett has made a career out of diatribe. He can be counted on for a rant on almost any subject, the Old Faithful of cynicism. You can read his opinion of subjects other than Star Wars if you email him for information about his website and you're over the age of 18 since there's no editor there to tone him down <g>)