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

Director: George Lucas
Starring: Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman

Synopsis:
Two Jedi Knights are sent to the planet Naboo to resolve a trade dispute, but there is more to the situation than it appears.

Impressions:
A lot of ink—both real and virtual—and vitriol have been spilled on the Prequel Trilogy and Episode I in particular. For an exhaustive breakdown of what's wrong with this film and it's sequel, I recommend Red Letter Media, which actually goes on longer than the runtime of the films they're deconstructing. I'll bring up some of the issues, but I'm not going to spend the entire space ragging on the dang thing because there are some redeeming qualities that deserve to be acknowledged.

I'll be honest with you. I was more of an apologist for the PT when the films came out. Yes, I took issue with the more egregious problems, but still stood behind them. Time has served to embitter me. For comparison, I generally make a point to rewatch the OT once a year, but this is the first time in years I've rewatched the PT and I probably won't go out of my way to see them again. Once upon a time, George Lucas said, "Special effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing." He seems to have lost track of this. The '97 Special Edition of the OT was made to "complete" his supposed original vision with the advances in CG and no doubt in part to provide a testbed for the effects to be used in the prequels. To be fair, Episode I is a similar leap in special effects as Episode IV was 22 years earlier. The CG boom wouldn't be nearly in the shape it's in without this movie. This is both a good and a bad thing. Not all the CG has aged well, but a lot of it remains quite good and without it, there's a lot less the movie could do. Also, it's easy for detractors (myself included) to forget how much of the effects are practical. Anyway, the spectacle often outweighs the substance and that's a big problem.

This movie is perhaps as good of an example of George Lucas unfiltered as you can get, and that's a big part of the reason why this movie has so many problems. Lucas has some good ideas, but he also has a lot of limitations as both a director and a writer that need to be complemented by the work of others. In the OT, the actors rejected a lot of the dialog as Lucas wrote it and had the freedom to adlib to deliver more naturalistic performances (to say nothing of the script doctors that went over his work in the OT films and later in Episodes II and III). By the time the PT was being made, Lucas wasn't just that guy who made American Graffiti, he was GEORGE freakin' LUCAS. An entire generation had grown up idolizing him. You didn't have the same pushback that restrained Lucas' less admirable qualities that you had in the OT and these films suffer for it.

There are a number issues with the story and the characters, but I'll highlight only a few. One problem that pervades the PT is the focus on the high-level conflict. Disputes in the Senate simply aren't very interesting. This isn't a political thriller. The OT focused on a small group of comrades and their adventures in a much larger conflict. It kept things close, personal. Honestly, how close do you feel to Obi-Wan, Anakin or Padmé as characters, especially when compared to Luke, Han and Leia? Next, Lucas tries too hard to provide interconnections linking the two trilogies, which results in a lot of contrivances that strain credulity (even if you want to spin something about "the will of the Force"). Also, the comic relief is so clumsy and incompetent that it's flat-out cringeworthy. You had comic elements in the OT, but they were fairly subdued and that's how it needs to be. The worst offender is the execrable Jar-Jar Binks, that great blight on the galaxy that even Lucas backpedaled on in subsequent films. There are other poor stabs at comedy like droid antics at the podrace and a few instances of toilet humor (really, George?).

The characters. *sigh* The characters. I'm not going to talk about Jar-Jar anymore. Another target for ire is Jake Lloyd's performance as a young Anakin Skywalker. Child characters and the child actors who portray them are notoriously difficult to get right. The only other thing I've seen Lloyd in was Jingle All the Way and he certainly didn't show much promise there. A good director may have been able to draw out what talent he had, but Lucas isn't a very good director, so you take a bad actor, bad dialog and bad direction and you get a rather painful introduction to the series protagonist. The Neimoidians are straight Yellow Peril, which I guess works somewhat as a nod to the serials that inspired the franchise, but when coupled with the Gungans made the movie an easy target for charges of racism. (This is something I don't really care about, but you'd think the filmmakers would want to avoid stuff like that.)

It's not all bad, though. I liked Liam Neeson as the somewhat morally grey Qui-Gon Jinn and though some of her lines were a bit stilted, I liked Pernilla August as Shmi. Natalie Portman was also pretty good as Padmé. And of course Ray Park makes a splash as Darth Maul, one of the most beloved things about this movie.

Some people like the podrace and some people see it as little more than padding. I suppose it could've stood to be a good ten minutes shorter. I didn't much dig the final confrontation except for Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan's duel with Darth Maul, which really showed off how much more dynamic lightsaber combat could be away from the technical limitations of the OT.

A lot of the creature designs, particularly the denizens of Naboo and the various podracers, didn't win me over. Art direction will prove to be a bit of a problem for me throughout the PT. The used future look I so loved about the OT gets replaced by a much more sterile environment.

At least John Williams' score is one thing you can rely on. "Duel of the Fates" is probably the best thing about the whole movie.

And I'm going to close it here. This is a movie with a lot of problems, but it's not without merits. I continue to have mixed feelings about it. You can't really separate the good from the bad. Honestly, a part of me wonders what it would be like to never know the PT. If you can bear the issues this movie has, give it a watch. Otherwise, let it lie.

Rating:
50/50