# Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)

### reviewed by
Wallace Baine

    The Force not with "Phantom Menace"
    by Wallace Baine
    Santa Cruz Sentinel

One of the enduring truths in the `Star Wars' cosmos is that the Force cannot be manufactured. It's either with you or it's not. You can take steps to attract it and manipulate it. But the Force defies mortal control. In the filmmaker's lexicon, the Force is that ineffable magic that separates mere entertainment from the deeply satisfying stories that strike something deep in the collective psyche. That cultural `aha' moment is the Force and, I'm sad to report, `Star Wars: Episode 1, The Phantom Menace' just doesn't have it. Granted, expectations are impossibly high for the most hyped pop culture event since Moses dragged the stone tablets down from Mount Sinai. But in between the predictable reactions sure to follow from both the Skywalker idolators and the resentful grumps with the light sabers aimed at George Lucas is this one inescapable truth: For all its technical wonders, `Phantom Menace' -- which opens on 2,500 screens nationwide a minute after midnight on May 19 -- is severely lacking in the human appeal that burned the original `Star Wars' into our imaginations 22 years ago. In this case, the ghost in the machine is missing the ghost. Let's weigh the successes against the failures, but first a bit about the story: As everyone over the mental age of six knows by now, `The Phantom Menace' is the first chapter in a planned trilogy that precedes the original trilogy in history by about 30 years. A trade dispute between a giant, malevolent organization called the Trade Federation and the proud queen of the planet Naboo results in the Federation's de facto invasion of the small planet. Two Jedi knights from the governing Galactic Republic are sent to mediate the dispute only to find that the Federation has no plans to talk to them. Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and his young sidekick Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) quickly become fugitives. With the help of Jar Jar Binks, a clownish outcast from the bizarre Gungan tribe, the Jedis find the planet's queen (Natalie Portman) and spirit her away to Corsucant, the planet that serves as the Republic's capital. Problems with their spacecraft, however, lead the heroes to the out-of-the-way desert planet of Tatooine. There, in an effort to score spare parts, Qui-Gon happens upon a nine-year-old slave boy named Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) who, the older Jedi believes, is the `Chosen One' of Jedi mythology (He is, in fact, the future Darth Vader). Qui-Gon shrewdly wagers with the boy's owner, a pot-bellied hummingbird-type creature named Watto, to win both the spare parts and the boy's freedom. With the boy in tow, the Jedis and the Queen's retinue finally make it back to Corsucant where the Queen pleads for her planet's safety to the Senate and Qui-Jon tries to convince the skeptical Jedi Council that young Anakin is the Chosen One. Eventually, the action shifts back to Naboo where the stage is set for combat between Republic and Federation forces and between the Jedis and the film's dark lord, the evil Darth Maul. The good: While George Lucas hasn't directed a film in 22 years, his animators at Industrial Light and Magic has been honing their chops for about as long in dozens of lesser movies with hopes of producing something transcendent in new `Star Wars.' Under the Lucas's supervision, the wizards of ILM have created no less than four magnificent worlds: the white deserts of Tattooine; the claustrophic, super-urbanized, vertically oriented cityscapes of Corsucant (imagine a futuristic Tokyo that covers an entire plant); the lush Xanadu of Naboo; and, perhaps most spectacularly, the underwater world of the Gungan, a series of warmly lit, fairie kingdom bubbles hidden under the surface of an otherwise anonymous lake on Naboo. Many of the more stunning effects are, in fact, grace notes to the film's central themes. For instance, in a too-brief sequence when Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are cruising the waters of Naboo in search of an underground passage to the planet's other side, they are pursued by a number of mind-boggling sea creatures. Just when it looks like the ship is about to be snapped up by some disturbingly ugly serpent so big it makes a whale look like a bath toy, here comes another even more immense creature to dispatch that creature. `There's always a bigger fish,' says Qui-Jon wryly and indeed, the sense of scale of the underwater monsters is convincingly rendered. `Jaws' will never scare you again. The film's computer-generated animatronics, virtually non-existent in the first `Star Wars' triology, takes a giant step forward. Instead of actors in wooly Chewbacca suits, Lucas this time opts for alien characters created wholly from ILM software. The goofy Jar Jar Binks, a tall, floppy-eared, horse-faced sidekick whose exaggerated gait suggests a drunk marionette puppet, is convincing enough to blend in with the backdrop of his human counterparts. Also impressive is Watto, a grubby, gambling Tatooine junkdealer whose fluttering little bee wings labor to keep aloft his bowling-ball belly. In the race to create wholly artificial live-action characters, `The Phantom Menace' is a significant advance. Also, this prequel gives `Star Wars' fans glimpses of those moments that form the basis of the `Star Wars' mythos: We see the point when the famous droids, C3PO and R2-D2, meet. When Qui-Gon introduces Obi-Wan to the boy who would become Darth Vader, the moment will give you the thrill of fate enjoined. The not-so-good: The failures of `The Phantom Menace' seem niggling in isolation. But taken together, they point to a frustrating lack of that undefinable something that made the original movies -- particularly the first `Star Wars' -- such a cohesive whole. They are, in the end, failures of writing and serve as strong evidence that suggests Lucas is more talented at marketing than storytelling. For starters, the plot is built around an arcane dispute over trade policy, not exactly a subject known for its sexiness. As a result, the reasons that the Trade Federation moves in on Naboo are never clearly spelled out. The planet's stately queen, bedecked like a kabuki diva, intones about the suffering of her people, but we see none of that. More importantly, the story sorely lacks the kind of swaggering appeal and defiant humor that Harrison Ford's Han Solo gave the first trilogy. Han's rough-and-tumble cowboy ethos, which served as a nice counterweight to Luke's boy-scout earnestness, is nowhere to be found. Both male leads carry the erect, humorless bearing of seminary students. Ewan McGregor, the wild-eyed and charismatic indie-film star (`Trainspotting'), is particularly gelded in his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi. He is left as a weak, me-too lieutenant to the older Qui-Gon, who himself is Jedi nobility personified (read: dull). So many of the thematic elements of the original are missing in action -- the sexual tensions, the loyalties, the relationships, the this-is-never-going-to-work desperation -- with nothing to compensate but stiff political posturing and quasi-mysticism. Even the evil is a pale comparison: the horned nemesis Darth Maul, whose satanically painted face makes him look like a comer in the WWF, is given hardly any screen time to really scare you. His menace is measly compared to the labored, artifical breathing under the black mask of Darth Vader. Ultimately, however, this is the boy's story and young Anakin is given a chance to strut his Jedi fighter spirit in a prolonged set piece called a `Podrace,' a no-holds-barred drag race through the desert vistas of Naboo. The race predictably leads to Anakin's first combat mission (an accidental one, actually). It is here where the `Star Wars' cosmology gives way to adrenaline-soaked, video-game sensation that quickly becomes tedious and, I suspect, a stand-in for any kind of grand design. Then there's Jar Jar Binks who is clearly meant as the film's comic relief. The character's braying pidgin English and exaggerated mugging never get beyond annoying and the cast, as if sensing the thing is a flop, don't seem to get anywhere near him. Finally, I think, `The Phantom Menace' is hurt by lazy thinking. The reach into religious allegory is more than a little ham-handed. Young Anakin is not only tabbed the `Chosen One,' he's also the product of a virgin birth (born as a slave in a dry desert landscape, no less). What's more, the Lucas worldview seems tainted by, if not racism, at least ethno-centrism. Is it a conscious decision that the `Chosen One' is a tow-headed white boy with nice Americanized vowels? The boy's grotesque owner, who speaks an Middle Eastern-sounding dialect, is a fat slob with a lust for a good bet. Offensive to Arabs? The strange pidgin spoken by Jar Jar and his fellow Gungan sound suspiciously like native Asians trying to master English. Offensive to Asians? George Lucas, the lord of Skywalker Ranch, clearly has a God complex and, considering the astounding deference given him the last 20 years, who can blame him? But George is as human as the rest of us with the same amount of hours in his days. In the four-plus years since `Episode 1' has been in the works, he has supervised the effects, controlled the marketing and publicity as well as having written and directed what will be another triology. Something had to give. `The Phantom Menace' shows the fruit of his hard work and how he spent his energy. Unfortunately, it also shows what he neglected. This time, the Force wasn't with him.

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