Reviews Film / The Phantom Menace

Re-Evaluating a Complicated Legacy

Every Star Wars fan has a complicated relationship with the Prequel Trilogy. It’s, in effect, a Rorschach Test which tells you what kind of fan you are. In 2010, if I were to put my thoughts on this trilogy in writing, they would be entirely negative. At 20, with the breadth of the original Star Wars expanded universe at my fingertips and Red Letter Media’s infamous Mr. Plinkett reviews giving a wealth of fodder for criticism, TPM was quaint, awkward, and stupid – a half-baked origin story with baffling dialogue, lethargic pacing, and a tableau of CGI that comes unraveled immediately once your brain starts pulling the thread of all the shortcuts they had to take with a technology in its infancy. It’s *still* all those things, but in the 2020s, a generation after its release, I’ve grown forgiving of it.

The script is, well, weak. George gets Lost in Medias Res with a complicated plot about taxation of trade routes that *sounds* like it could be the basis for an interesting story if it was given the room to breathe, but instead we’re dropped right in and soon enough, that adult story is suffocated under the weight of whimsy. The dialogue is alternately hyper-formal and hyper-casual whenever the child Anakin and the bumbling Jar-Jar show up, and then we have an excursion to Tatooine, an introduction to its culture of podracing (read: chariot racing). It’s all too much too fast. There are places where this movie moves *fast* and others where the pacing seems stuck in the mud, sit-down discussion scenes juxtaposing action without really interacting with or reinforcing one another. Lucas’s direction doesn’t help; with more guidance, Jake Lloyd and Natalie Portman would have done better with what they had. Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor elevate the product by managing to craft good performances from shoddy writing. The political focus isn’t inherently bad and is a decent palate cleanser for all the whimsy, but it needed editing to make a cleaner narrative, and more focus to give it depth.

But despite all of that, this film has strengths. It looks at the original trilogy and craves to do something different. The visuals evoke bygone glory that the dirt, rust, and squalor of the originals never captured. We’re shown the metropole, rather than the frontier. We see a democratic government that the heroes seek to preserve, rather than a tyrannical one to be overthrown. The aesthetics of technology rises above the boxy utilitarianism of a container ship or a military vessel. None of this would be possible without CGI, but with new information about the production, we must put aside the myth that practical effects weren’t used – they were, and more frequently than in the OT. The CGI is stunning, even now, but even a cursory viewing shows places where the growing pains of new tech were evident – they never quite understand how to properly light people in a green screen environment, and there’s several instances of clipping or blurred edges where actors were composted against the background. However, it broke tremendous ground and moved the art forward. Modern CGI films are standing on TPM’s shoulders. Even Jar Jar needs to be singled out here – the CG work on him still looks good and Ahmed Best demonstrates a physical mastery of the craft of acting. He didn’t deserve to be mocked for playing a poorly written character. That’s on George.

Overall, kind of a mediocre movie if you view film primarily as narrative, but I appreciate what it was trying to do more and more with each passing year with respect to film as visual art. Let’s say, uh… 6.5 out of 10.