Star Wars: The Phantom Menace review 1999

This review of the fourth Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace, ran in The Weekend Australian on Saturday June 12, 1999.

20/5/1999: Jedi Qui-Gon Jinn and Jar Jar Binks at the Mos Espa Arena in the movie Star Wars - The Phantom Menace. Films /actors

This review of the fourth Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace, ran in The Weekend Australian on Saturday June 12, 1999.

Space saga is a spent force

By Evan Williams

OKAY, I’ll lighten up. Nothing too solemn. It’s only a movie after all. Kids love it; my eight-year-old grandson loves it. So no pompous put-downs from stuffy critics. I’ve bought my abridged CD audio book, read the Terry Brooks novelisation, visited the official Web site for teaser trailers, studied Stephen J. Sansweet’s illustrated action-figure archive and Laurent Bouereau and Jody Duncan’s The Making of Episode 1 (collectors edition). And I enjoyed my KFC Star Wars burger. This review will be positive.

No, I’m sorry. That’s as unpompous and unsolemn as I propose to get. From here on this column will be honest: George Lucas’s Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace is a bad movie, but it’s bad for what it fails to do, not so much for what it does. And some things it does superbly: reviewing it in The Australian on the day of its release, Lynden Barber pointed out that there’s enough visual invention here for three movies. But none of it really surprises us the way other comic-strip blockbusters sometimes do - Starship Troopers, Terminator 2, The Matrix. And it doesn’t much charm us either. Somehow, after 22 years, the cuteness has worn off. In place of playful mayhem and carefree fun, it’s a self-conscious and joyless affair, with a fatal emptiness and incoherence - overlong, overloud and dreadfully oversold.

On reflection, I shouldn’t call it a comic-strip movie. I loved comics as a kid and what appealed most about them was the clarity, the boldness of the stories. In Star Wars - putting aside all the high-flown business about empires, trade federations, blockades and senate elections, which children find baffling - it’s never clear why the bad guys are so bad. The narrative has no moral or ethical foundation; why should we care if Princess Amidala is kidnapped or if Palpadine outwits Valorum? Why are the Knights better than the Siths? (And who or what, incidentally, is the Phantom Menace?) When a comic strip gets lost in impenetrable veils of verbal elaboration, there is nothing to engage the emotions. Here’s part of a plot synopsis:

Under order of the Pishah Emperor, House Atrieides is being sent from Calidan to water-starved Arrakis. There the geriatric spice is mined; spice upon whose youth depends the Guild’s critical ability to navigate the universe. The Atrieides are to hold Arrakis in fief-complete, replacing their mortal enemies the Harkommens. Allied with the desert people, astride an army of mammoth sand worms, Paul defeats the Harkommens, routs the great houses of the Landsraad, and brings both the malignant Spacing Guild Navigators and the Padishah Emperor to their knees. He is, indeed, the Kwashatz Haderach.

Lucas fans will immediately recognise that this isn’t from Star Wars. It’s from a studio summary of Dune, the 1984 David Lynch movie based on Frank Herbert’s prodigious writings. But substitute a few names and it could easily be a Lucas script; it has the same dogged incomprehensibility. Lucas has fooled a lot of people - including himself - into thinking that a succession of funny names and fantastic costumes, weird landscapes and relentless action sequences somehow constitutes storytelling. It doesn’t; the intricate sequential logic that leads a story forward and engages the young imagination is a hard thing to do, depending as it does on connections, timing, disclosure, character.

The Star Wars films - it has been said often enough - are full of cardboard characters; but this isn’t the problem. Westerns and gangster films are full of cardboard characters. But the Star Wars films have no characters at all; the hologram images of Nute and his battle droids, the computer-generated Jar Jar Binks, are no more or less real than the flesh and blood guys piloting the spacepods and swinging their lightswords. For all that the characters matter, we might as well be watching a video game.

I confess I was never a great admirer of the early films, which looked even clunkier when Lucas reissued them in remixed and digitally restored prints two years ago. But there were great things in them: Carrie Fisher’s hairdo, John Williams’s rousing score, Harrison Ford’s innocent, wise-cracking Han Solo, a general sense of happy-go-lucky excitement. But Lucas, like Spielberg, is taking himself seriously; he’s no longer purveying simple escapism for under-14s but an epic vision for his legions of cultists and worshipful believers. I liked Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon, the Jedi Knight upholding the best traditions of the Force. The calm dignity of his performance contrasts beautifully with the pandemonium round him. But none of the others engaged me: Ewan McGregor, as the young Obi-Wan Kenobi, rarely looks like a hero in the making and young Jake Lloyd, the nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker destined to become Darth Vader, is too cute to suggest the dire future that awaits him in Episode IV.

Everything in Phantom Menace exists in a bright noisy vacuum. The film’s more gorgeous and extravagant visuals - the planet-sized city of Naboo, the underwater glow of Otah Ginga, the dazzling galactic senate chamber - owe more to David Bouquet’s and Doug Chiang’s production design than to Lucas’s imagination. And this is where we part company with the great sci-fi spectacles of the past: Blade Runner with its deeply moving vision of a polluted and regimented cyber-future, 2001 with its haunting meditation on the nature of conscious intelligence, even something as lighthearted as Forbidden Planet (1956), MGM’s sci-fi version of The Tempest, with its glimpse of a future universe of depleted resources.

None of this would matter if The Phantom Menace were the best kind of escapism. But it’s not; and Lucas pretends to be more these days than a mere purveyor of slam-bang entertainment. He has set out to create his own visionary universe, an epic landscape with its own creatures, mythological kingdoms, laws and languages.

Those, like Lucas, who are brave enough to create whole mythical worlds must expect to be judged accordingly. And in these terms, the movies are crap - dull, empty and wearying. The common complaint about modern films is that somehow they trigger violence. But films like The Phantom Menace trigger something more sinister: a kind of blank passivity, a vague sense of bafflement and irritation (especially in young minds), a dullness of response. And in a world where storytelling still matters, that’s a worry.