Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)
“Your focus determines your reality.” – Qui-Gon Jinn
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, or Episode I, as most of the promotional and tie-in material from 1999 simply called it, represents both the beginning of a new era in filmmaking and Star Wars fandom, and the end of an old one for the two intertwined histories as well. In the intervening 16 years between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, Star Wars as a phenomenon faded and then regained momentum. It was an interesting and fun time to be a Star Wars fan, and, significantly to me, the time period in which I established my fandom of the series; but, for most of the public, Star Wars was still a niche interest. Sure, they were fondly remembered films from the late-seventies and early-eighties. But people like me showed that there was still a significant enough interest in the series to create more and more stories and branded merchandise. Ultimately, all of it was paving the way, in terms of both audience appetite and filmmaking experimentation, for Episode I, a film that might fairly be called the most anticipated film of all time.
The conventional wisdom holds that it was all for naught. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace is considered by many today to be one of the biggest disappointments in entertainment history. The film was supposedly abysmal, full of confusing and overly-complex discussion of trade routes and political intrigue mismatched alongside childish pratfalls and fart jokes, elaborated at length by folks like RedLetterMedia. Some claimed that the film retroactively destroyed their childhood, expressed with a vitriol levelled at George Lucas comparing him to a literal child-rapist and mass-murderer. The backlash against The Phantom Menace was as strong and sustained as the excitement and hype building up to its release.
Evaluating The Phantom Menace then becomes a difficult endeavor. One can easily be drawn into defending the film, point by point. But the conventional wisdom that the film was a disaster, publically or critically, doesn’t entirely hold up to scrutiny either. For one, the film’s box office testifies to a significant level of popularity—while I am loathe to hold up financial success as any kind of evaluation of a film’s worth, The Phantom Menace’s success suggests that it was more than just a curiosity, revealing legs that kept it in second-run theatres into the new millennium, nearly a year after its debut. People went to see it multiple times and some must have enjoyed it. Secondly, the film’s critical drubbing is not as thorough as is often thought; many critics, including Roger Ebert, praised it significantly. But perhaps that isn’t a good line of defense either. The reality is that The Phantom Menace has a reputation, whether real or deserved, among many people as being a big disappointment.
But others’ opinions aside, I believe The Phantom Menace is a finely-crafted and, yes, entertaining film, full of some of cinema’s most stunning and ground-breaking visuals. It remains a pioneering work of genre entertainment in its prequel concept, functioning to extend the series by mining the diegetic backstory of the original. A prequel by definition relies almost entirely on an audience’s affection for a prior story to justify its existence, and yet as a continuation of storytelling ex post facto on its narrative future, it is about extending and keeping something going. This re-watch confirmed that the comparison I made between The Matrix Reloaded and the Prequel Trilogy earlier this year still stands. Like the similarly derided sequels by the Wachowskis, I find The Phantom Menace much more interesting, risky, and entertaining than most of what passes for blockbuster filmmaking today. In fact, the very things that people decried about it endear it to me! It is an admittedly idiosyncratic film. It’s a political treatise and a kids film. A massive blockbuster and a deeply personal film.
Perhaps for the first time, Lucas was able to do what he had said he always wanted to do in terms of story and filmmaking, free of constraints and limits, technical or financial (though one can argue for the value of constraints, it is still wonderful to see an artist set free). Aren argued that Return of the Jedi was this turning point for George Lucas, but even more so, The Phantom Menace finds him behind the camera once again, directing and taking sole writing credits. It’s his vision, for better or worse. It shows Lucas out of step with the currents of that moment, lost in the past of his own films and Hollywood serials, samurai movies and religious myths, but nonetheless changing the way we looked at Hollywood movies at the same time (all while being self-financed and produced outside Hollywood).
The Phantom Menace also functions as a turning point in the development of the hyper-online and obsessive fan bases that dominant our entertainment culture today (see for instance the Twitter discourse over famous directors expressing their dislike of the Marvel films). This makes it a fascinating film as a historical artifact, but I want to suggest that the film, if inadvertently, thematizes its own function as a focal point for diverging film culture. It’s a film of contradictions and paradoxes, where the things that on the surface seem the most important pale next to the momentous changes going on in the background or in the side plots. Like the sub-title of the film suggests, the most crucial parts of The Phantom Menace are shadowy and hidden: Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) notes this in the film’s first scenes, his Jedi senses suggesting that there is something bigger going on than a simple “trade negotiation,” that the danger lies in “something elsewhere, elusive.”
It’s impossible for me to know what it would be like to watch The Phantom Menace without knowledge of Star Wars. And that makes viewing the film both thrilling and uncanny: after the iconic opening crawl (in which the much derided “taxation of trade routes” is in dispute), we get to finally see the past, what Obi-Wan Kenobi referred to in A New Hope as “a more civilized age.” A vaguely familiar looking starship approaches a green and lush looking planet, a stark contrast to the chased starship approaching a dry desert planet in the 1977 film. Aboard this ship are two Jedi, sent to ensure that the trade negotiations go smoothly, ambassadors of the Republic Senate and there to force a settlement.
The opening scenes of The Phantom Menace are still thrilling to me for their portrait of the glory days of the Republic, the past mentioned and fought for in the Original Trilogy. It shows a much shinier and less utilitarian world, very different from the rough and “used universe” look of the Original Trilogy. Things look familiar, but are different. For instance, a protocol droid very similar to C-3P0 greets the Jedi, but its feminine voice and silver plating contrast with Threepio’s. Finally, the Jedi remove their hoods and the younger one is identified as Obi-Wan. A shiver of recognition might run down the spines of fans realizing they are getting their first glimpse of a character whose fate and future they know all too well. But his master is a character they’ve never heard of before, Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), not Yoda—who is named-dropped a few lines later. When a nervous member of the Trade Federation asks if his counterpart has ever encountered a Jedi before, he responds in the negative; perhaps even a fan of the Original Trilogy might ask him or herself if they really have seen a Jedi either?
The plot quickly kicks in as the Trade Federation, under orders from the mysterious Darth Sidious (Ian McDiarmid) via hologram, move to eliminate the meddling Jedi negotiators. Now audiences get to see a Jedi in full power: not an old man, nor a young, half-trained adept, but fully powerful Jedi on a mission. The display is thrilling. In their hands, lightsabers deflect the blaster bolts of battle droids like spinning shields, cut and melt through massive blast doors. Jedi can hold their breath to avoid poisoning and race down hallways in the blink of an eye. These are powers not yet revealed in the Star Wars saga.
The plot of the film moves very quickly. Lucas always had a desire to move things quickly (which led to clashes with Irvin Kershner when making The Empire Strikes Back) and The Phantom Menace does move fast, but also with an uncommon attention to visual and expository detail. Scenes often continue longer than you would think they would in a film of this type. The Phantom Menace is much more indebted to the Saturday afternoon serials that Lucas claims inspired all the Star Wars films than the Original Trilogy was. Scenes are often built with mini-tension builders, resolving quickly and then moving on to the next thing, which is more often than not a remarkable visual accomplishment.
Naboo is a sight like none before seen in the Star Wars films. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon in evading the Trade Federation army, stumble (literally) upon the much maligned Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best), who takes them to the underwater city of Otoh Gunga, a gorgeous collection of bubbles, like pearls on a string, glowing with warmth. From there they travel through the planet’s core, encountering massive monsters and surviving narrow escapes, until they arrive at Theed, the planet’s capital, a gorgeous Renaissance-inspired city perched upon a series of waterfalls (Theed owes more than a passing debt to the appearance of Waterfall City in James Gurney’s Dinotopia book series). Despite the decrying of “digital effects,” the Naboo sequence proves that Lucas’s crew were master model makers here, merging the careful and detailed models and lighting with state of the art digital compositing. It’s no exaggeration to say it looks as good or better than anything in any contemporary film. It’s astoundingly beautiful.
After rescuing the Queen (once again, Lucas borrows the broad beats from Kurasawa’s The Hidden Fortress with the Jedi escorting the young monarch across enemy lines), they leave aboard her shiny Royal Starship, with another mini-tension builder as their ship is strafed by the Trade Federation battleships and we are introduced to another familiar character in a new context, R2-D2. Artoo saves the ship, but the damaged hyperdrive forces the ship to make an emergency landing on Tatooine, the childhood home of Luke Skywalker, another throwback.
It is in the Tatooine sequence we finally meet the future Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) and his mother, Shmi Skywalker, played by Swedish actress (and Ingmar Bergman collaborator), Pernilla August. Jake Lloyd plays Anakin with a guileless and straightforward manner that makes it hard to believe he’ll be the future Sith Lord, something fans disliked. It’s true that he’s not an exceptionally talented performer, occasionally wooden and unconvincing in delivery, but the hatred spewed at the young actor by fans remains one of the darkest stains on Star Wars fandom, given that they practically destroyed his life.
Portraying Anakin in an overtly innocent way is meant to invest his fall with more pathos, but the entire handling of Anakin goes against what many probably expected. For one thing, the Prequels seemed intent on making Anakin truly a tragic figure, done in by the hand of Fate rather than simply his own bad decisions. When Anakin prepares to leave with Qui-Gon and Padme, he pauses and returns to his mother for comfort, as she is remaining a slave of the junk-trader Watto. It’s perhaps the best moment of acting from Lloyd in the film, heartbreaking in its portrayal of a child’s fears of leaving home and the only loving parent he had ever known. Shmi’s response to him underlines the sense of fate that shapes Anakin’s journey over the following films, as she tells him, “You can’t stop the change, any more than you can stop the suns from setting,” nicely alluding to both the binary sunset scene in A New Hope and the final image of the Prequel Trilogy at the end of Revenge of the Sith.
Fans, however, are particularly vocal about their dislike of the idea of Midichlorians, a symbiotic creature in the cells of living things that Lucas introduces as a way to measure Anakin’s Force potential. It is a jarring revelation about the Force, in contrast with what many assumed based on the original films, and supposedly turns the ability to use the Force into a genetic superpower. The Midichlorians recall some of Lucas’s early ideas about the “Whills” from early drafts of Star Wars, but also revisits concepts borrowed by Lucas from the Lensmen series by E.E. Smith, in which the “Lens” confers and confirms its wearer with special mental abilities inseparable from the individual. I would suggest that the Midichlorians are less about asserting genetic superiority than they are a narrative device with which to embody destiny. They also facilitate the revelation that Anakin is born of a virgin, either by the will of the Force itself (via the Midichlorians) or through the manipulations of Sidious, as Revenge of the Sith suggests.
But the Tatooine sequence is more than narrative development. It contains a couple of the film’s most thrilling sequences. The podrace is a wonderful action scene, visually stunning and exciting, drawing on the chariot race from Ben Hur and injecting it with an otherworldly science fiction speed. On Tatooine the heroes also first encounter Darth Maul (Ray Park), the red faced, tattooed Sith apprentice of Darth Sidious sent to hunt down the Queen and her protectors. Maul’s appearance is one of the film’s most striking, foreshadowing the film’s final lightsaber battle on Naboo between him, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon.
As far as thrills in the film, the final battle is perhaps the one thing that even the film’s detractors will admit is brilliant. Maul appears as the hangar bay doors in Theed Palace open, his demonic appearance summoning the two Jedi warriors to battle. When his lightsaber extends its afore unrevealed second blade, it’s clear that things are going to be beyond anything fans had witnessed in the Original Trilogy. Ray Park’s performance as Maul is possibly underappreciated for the sheer raw aggressive energy, even its animalistic intensity, shown as Maul paces between the closed blast shields while Qui-Gon patiently meditates. Park’s wu shu (kung fu) skills bring something new to Star Wars that would set the bar for performers like Ewan McGregor and later Hayden Christensen.
In the end, the film’s title, The Phantom Menace, is an apt one, despite how odd it sounded to many at the time of the film’s release. As I noted, it suggests the real threat is the one that isn’t front and centre. The obvious example is Darth Sidious and his manipulation of the Trade Federation to secure his alter-ego’s establishment as Supreme Chancellor of the Republic. Some at the time claimed it wasn’t meant to be obvious that Palpatine and Sidious are one and the same, but the film doesn’t really hide that McDiarmid plays both, especially since a prequel is by definition meant to be watched with a kind of dramatic irony, where the viewers have more knowledge than the characters, knowing the future in store for the characters.
The most important unrecognized event of the film is the discovery of Anakin Skywalker, the young slave boy whose fate is the film’s real reason for being and whose destiny, from this point on, would dominate Lucas’s re-conception of his series as “The Tragedy of Darth Vader.”
This question of focus is one that is explicitly referenced in one of the film’s most confusing pieces of dialogue. When he is brought before the Jedi Council, Qui-Gon references the prophecy of the one who will bring “Balance to the Force,” but he also says that Anakin is a “vergence” in the Force. A vergence describes the curvature of optic wavefronts, giving us the words convergence and divergence. It’s about seeing, and it’s also about how to see when two waves are coming together. Anakin is what allows the Jedi to see the threats against them in this sense. His existence points to something, focusing attention on the movements of the Force, if one has eyes to see.
The Phantom Menace is a film that is thematically all about not realizing what you’re witnessing. It is filled with these kinds of revelations of secret identities and hidden powers, Anakin and Darth Sidious being the most ominous ones. But revelations don’t have to be dark; Queen Amidala’s disguise as her handmaiden Padme, which allows her to safely and secretly go along on the mission on Tatooine is another revelation (and another one obvious to most). The revelation, or realization, that the Gungans possess the army needed to fight the Trade Federation is another. In each of these cases, most of those in power, at least those who don’t focus on the “Living Force” as Qui-Gon does, including the Republic, the Naboo, and the Jedi, fail to see what is right in front of them.
The Phantom Menace is very astute in its treatment of history in this sense, even if it is dramatically too neat in others, but this is because it is not uncommon for people and societies to fail to recognize the most important events in shaping their destiny in the moment. Even the much emphasized “Golden Age” that the Republic of this film is meant to convey is already filled with rot, political stagnation that is ripe for Sidious to exploit.
Thematically, The Phantom Menace is exactly this very thing it depicts: a vergence in fan culture and cinematic development. In the moment, everyone was quick to condemn the film; it revealed the extent to which a growing fan culture and its reactive nature would shape the future of popular cinema. But it was also a throwback to films that were out of fashion, full of anachronistic dramatic choices at the same time that it was pushing film technology forward with fully computer-generated characters like Jar Jar and Watto.
At the end of The Phantom Menace, order seems to be restored: the Trade Federation’s occupation of Naboo is ended and Anakin has been accepted into the Jedi Order, but Qui-Gon has died and the appearance of Darth Maul reveals the return of the Sith to the Jedi, covertly facilitating the ascension of Palpatine to the seat of Chancellor. The final parade and celebration would seem to be unearned, but with the complete set of trilogies, we can see the inverted chiasmic structure—that is the poetic criss-crossing pattern of repetitions—with which Lucas would structure his two trilogies: the ending of The Phantom Menace ironically “echoing” the ending of Return of the Jedi is formally pleasing, and finally suggests that the extension of the films by Disney as part of the official Skywalker saga ruins the symmetry of Lucas’s films.
Evaluating Episode I – The Phantom Menace is for me about articulating what works so well for me about the film. Perhaps, for many viewers, the formal, thematic and visual pleasures of the film aren’t enough to make up for how it is perceived to fail on other levels, or how it goes against either viewers’ own ideas of what a blockbuster or Star Wars film should be. I’m not particularly interested in defending individual elements of the film, but for me, the film works in a way that few others do. It plays an important role in the history of both Star Wars and blockbuster filmmaking, and yet I admit it is an idiosyncratic and unusual film. For me, I choose to focus on the pleasures that it represented in 1999 as the next step in the Star Wars saga and its continuing pleasures as a piece of filmmaking and storytelling are more than enough to cement its place in my own cinematic pantheon.
10 out of 10
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
Written and directed by George Lucas; starring Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor, Ian McDiarmid, Jake Lloyd, Ahmed Best, Terrence Stamp, Pernilla August.