(Note: If the title of this page isn’t enough of a clue, this article will discuss various plot details of Shutter Island. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you might not want to read this. There’s your spoiler warning.)

This film is an exercise in doubt. If I were to break it into three parts, I would say that the first third sows the seeds of doubt over whether or not the authorities of Shutter Island can be trusted. Our U.S. Marshal characters go in to solve the mystery of a missing patient. They are met by a number of important people who make a big show of being helpful, without ever doing anything to help. We get the pervasive sense that nobody is being honest. This sense is communicated through every frame of every shot.

The middle third sows the seeds of doubt in our perception of the events. In a chance encounter, one particular character makes a compelling point: if our hero’s sanity comes into question, then his credibility is forever undermined, even to himself. And because our hero is our guide through this narrative, that means that everything we’ve witnessed so far and everything we’ll eventually witness can only be taken in those uncertain terms. His mission is no longer just to unravel the mystery, but to cling to the faith that he’s in the right. In his view, the authorities of Shutter Island might question his sanity, but his sanity allows him to see their ulterior motives for doing so. It’s all part of their devious plan.

So what does the final third do? The majority of movies don’t require the audience to think very hard. Most viewers have been trained to expect that the mystery will be solved, that the questions will be answered, that everything will be tied up nicely. The cleverness of this portion of the movie is that these people will find what they’re looking for. Shutter Island provides the necessary evidence to support this interpretation. All has been revealed. We’ve reached the cheese at the end of the maze.

That is, if we stop looking once we’ve found the cheese. We must be careful to guard ourselves against confirmation bias, which is what happens when we see the evidence we’re looking for and disregard the evidence we’re not interested in. In truth, Shutter Island is littered with too much evidence to conclusively point to any one answer. By my count, there are three major possibilities left open at the end of the movie, and they all deserve consideration. They are broken down as follows:

1. Our hero is insane. In the course of the final act, the authorities reveal that our hero is a mental patient, living in an elaborate delusion. It appears that they’ve gotten through to him, that he’s accepted their attempts to convince him. However, in the final scene, he speaks confidentially to his doctor—the man who, in his fantasy, is his U.S. Marshal partner. He reveals that he still intends to escape and bust this Shutter Island conspiracy wide open.

This seems to be the most commonly accepted interpretation of the ending. He’s insane, and has been the whole time. There have been some negative reactions to the film that appear to be based on this version. The viewers feel as though everything they’ve slogged through to get to this point has been invalidated, as if a film this well-crafted could ever be described as a slog. But never mind that.

2. Our hero is sane. In this version of the ending, our hero is still playacting—not as an insane man pretending to be sane to placate his doctors, but as a sane man pretending to be insane in order to guarantee a release from his pain. His last words to his “partner” strongly imply that he is sane, but is willing to be lobotomized so that he won’t have to live with the terrible things that his fantasy was safeguarding him against.

While this interpretation doesn’t frame the earlier portion of the movie in a drastically different way from the first interpretation, it does cast some interesting doubts upon earlier scenes that seem to imply insanity. It becomes that much harder to tell when he’s been wrong and when he’s been right.

3. The conspiracy is real. According to the laws of reality, this is the least plausible of the three endings. But for one thing, “least plausible” is not the same as “implausible.” Shutter Island is an utterly self-contained environment where any attempt to question the authorities can easily be dismissed as the ravings of a delusional paranoiac. One of the main reasons for disbelieving in conspiracy theories is that they’re untenable in an open marketplace of ideas. Shutter Island is anything but.

For another, to dismiss this interpretation out of hand is to ignore the seductive ideas that the film has been playing with all along. Our hero’s certainty is all he has to tell him that he’s sane, and the most obvious way for his enemies to protect themselves would be to declare him insane. In his most vulnerable moment, it may be that they’re not freeing him from the delusion, so much as crafting it for their convenience. In a place like Shutter Island, reality is fragile and mutable. Which version of reality is the “real” one might depend solely on how many people are willing to agree upon it. In the final scenes, our hero simply gets voted down.

There is not enough evidence to settle upon any one ending, and that’s just as it should be. As Scorsese’s on-and-off collaborator Paul Schrader is fond of saying, the final scene of a movie should continue to play out in the lobby of the theater. Movies with open-and-shut endings are rarely as interesting as movies that encourage the viewers to puzzle over the pieces. Unfortunately, it often seems as though a clean-cut ending is all that the average moviegoer cares about, as though two thirds of the story are just a means to arrive at that point. It’s a shame.

Nerds, rejoice: at long last, someone official has finally let it slip that Christopher Nolan and his writing team are working on the next Batman movie. I’ll understand if you have to take a moment to collect yourselves. This is good news for people who like movies about good guys and bad guys in flamboyant costumes. The bad news, perhaps, is that the Hollywood rumor mill is already in the red. This latest development may cause the pipes to burst.

Fans speculate. They always have and they always will. In a way, the appearance of fanfiction on the Internet is really just a formalized version of fan speculation. Everybody knows what they want to see, complete with a wish list of characters. The dark side is that their ideas, as silly as they often are, can become the measuring stick by which they judge the end product.

They say that a hero requires a villain. That’s usually the case, but most people leave it at that. Need a story for your hero? Throw a villain at him. Bam–there’s your story. It’s so simple that most people were very puzzled over Nolan’s hesitance to take on this project.

And if only it were that simple. If it were, there would be nothing to separate the good heroic stories–from Beowulf to Batman, from Samson to Superman–from an episode of The Power Rangers. A new day, a new villain in town. The hero’s problem in this scenario is that he hasn’t beaten the villain yet. The solution is that he does. Maybe he has some girl trouble on the side, but let’s not venture too far from the tried and true.

Is that storytelling? Sure it is. But for my money, it’s boring. Flat. Repetitious. Some people like stories like that, and that’s okay, I guess. I’d rather have a story where the hero forgets to bring his wallet to the coffee shop and doesn’t realize it until he’s buying his coffee. In this case, at least the writer is forced to be creative with the problem. No story is less interesting than a hero vs. villain story in which the villain is utterly obligatory. And yet, too many stories–even ones commonly thought of as decent–fall into this trap.

If the fans–bless their little hearts–if the fans told the stories, based on their own speculation, we’d see a lot more of this. That’s hardly a slur against the fans, because if telling a story were as easy as appreciating a story, there would be more storytellers and less fans. (Or critics, for that matter.) Most fan speculation for stories like these amounts to deciding on a favorite villain, then retroactively coming up with reasons to justify that choice. Reverse logic rarely turns out well, even in storytelling.

Let’s get back to The Dark Knight. Whatever flaws it might have, the choice of the Joker as Batman’s opponent-du-jour is hard to argue with. It’s a slam dunk, and the audience tuned into it. In the beginning of this cycle of films, the hero is burning to do something–what, he doesn’t know, at least not right away–and he eventually figures it out. The next step, logically, is to undermine his decision. This is what we see in The Dark Knight. The superhero genre is an exercise in very literal metaphors, and this is no different. The Joker makes a joke of people’s attempts to impose order upon their lives. And nobody is more invested in the imposition of order than the Batman, who does what he does because that sense of order was stolen from him so early on.

It would be just short of miraculous if Nolan and Co. went into these movies with a list of villains and a vague idea that Batman would be fighting them for some reason. It is almost certain that they knew, way back when they concluded Batman Begins, which elements of the Batman character were ripe to be challenged. The Joker is a means to provide that challenge. This is the kind of thing that’s easy to put together in retrospect, but not so much when the story hasn’t been told yet and you’re the guy doing it. A hero might only be interesting in conjunction with a villain, but that’s with a proviso. The villain ought to exemplify a conflict within the hero himself–flaws in his ideology, his deepest fear, or whatever.

At least, that’s my attempt to explain why Nolan might have taken so long to plan a return trip to Gotham City. For all I know, he had an entire roll of toilet paper with villain names written on it, and he took all this time finding a hat big enough to hold all the scraps.

It’s winter, meaning that one of the finest spectator sports is currently in season: people falling down.

Falling down is great when you’re watching it happen to other people, yet it sucks when it’s happening to you. (Science has yet to figure out why, and that’s why science doesn’t know anything.) Therefore, when falling down, it is important to keep in mind that there are right ways and wrong ways to do it.

I’ll cite my own recent experiences here as an example. The other day, I fell down in front of my apartment building on the way to my car. I was wearing nice clothes for once, because I had a thing to go to that demanded a modicum of professionalism. I slipped and fell on my side, my limbs flailing, my clothes making impact in the snow and dirt. My key fob was in my hand, and my thumb reflexively tightened on it, activating the panic button. My car alarm no doubt woke everybody in those early hours, who might have immediately glanced out their windows to see my misfortune firsthand. It was a red letter day in the sport of falling down, for everybody except me.

A few days later, I was walking in another parking lot on the way to a meeting, carrying a bag with my computer and various notebooks. Once again, I slipped and fell. This time, I ditched the bag, which skittered safely across the ice, and I bounced on my hand to make a safe landing back on my feet. It occurred in one, smooth motion. It could have only looked cooler if it had been in bullet time, before bullet time sucked.

The difference between those two events? Strategy. A prepared, quick-thinking faller is a good faller. And a good faller is one who can take a haphazard, unfortunate event and spin it into a spontaneous expert move on the spot.

To go with some historical examples, we’ll pick a couple of rock guitarists and examine their falling strategies. Rock guitarists have the dual relevance of being cool by default, and having a high propensity for drunkenly staggering around.

Our first example is Steve Vai. In the 1980s, prior to his solo career, Vai was a hot commodity in the rock community. His skills and the originality of his style made him one of the most sought-after hired guns in the era of excess. It was no surprise that he ended up playing sideman to David Lee Roth in those early post-Van Halen years.

Vai, whose flamboyant visual pomposity rivaled that of even the most visually pompous ’80s rock musicians, was the proud owner of a double-necked guitar in the shape of a large, red heart. Already, we are beginning to see some strategic errors here, given that the effectiveness of falling down is largely determined by the coolness what you’re carrying. On the scale of cool things, double-necked heart guitars fall somewhere in between capris on men and dog-eared copies of Azumanga Daio.

It transpired that one particular evening, the David Lee Roth band was playing an outdoor show in the rain. Whilst playing his heart guitar, Vai took one wrong step, and unceremoniously fell flat on his back, both legs in the air.

As John Madden might say, “Here’s a guy who, if he falls, then he’s got something he doesn’t want.”

To go with a different, more successful example, I will cite Angus Young. At 5′1″ in height and eternally damned to wear a pair of tight short-shorts on stage, Young is not an automatic recipe for cool, but his initial weirdness is a deceptively strong strategic move. It’s disarming. Your threshold for comedy has been raised, and an error in falling is likely to be more acceptable.

One day, very early on in AC/DC’s career, Young happened to trip and fall on his guitar cable. (This was before wireless systems, Pac-Man video games, and the Internets.) He promptly fell on his side, right in the midst of an especially bombastic guitar solo. Rather than lie there like a doofus, Young promptly began spazzing out, his paroxysms achieving rhythmic unity with every distorted note. Flopping around on the stage like a dying fish is risky and not widely attempted, but for Young, it has evolved into a staple of his repertoire. He takes a recipe for all things wrong with falling and makes it look good.

‘Ey! Wazzup? Welcome to the third and final part of my critique of the 70 minute Phantom Menace review. It’ll be so sad when it’s over, but so sweet when it’s here.

In the last episode, you’ll remember I brought up the allegation that The Phantom Menace has no clear protagonist. Our intrepid reviewer cited Luke as the protagonist we could root for in the original Star Wars. But this argument presents just one of many kinds of protagonist. Luke was the normal one in the galaxy of freaks and weirdoes, the one who hungered to break out and have adventures. It’s easy to root for Luke, because his initial troubles are pretty down-to-earth.

This, needless to say, is hardly the only type of protagonist, though it is a common type. One needs only to apply a few moments of critical thought in order to find plenty of counterexamples to our reviewer’s argument. I propose, just as one example, the Nick Carraway model. Despite the title, Jay Gatsby is not the protagonist of The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway is. Nick is a mysterious, thinly drawn character, and I doubt many readers would be able to describe him beyond those characteristics. He’s there to be the reader’s eyes and ears. He bears witness to the downfall of Gatsby, who, along with various associates and enemies, participates in the drama. Nick, in spite of his attendance, is more of a spectator. What he goes through in his personal life is of little consequence to the bulk of the story.

I would say that Obi-Wan fills a similar function in The Phantom Menace. Obi-Wan is the type of character who doesn’t cause things to happen, so much as things happen to him and around him. His will doesn’t mean much in the course of the events, though his role in them is tailored so that his observations and his opinions will eventually be important. He is our window to this faraway galaxy where bad guys wish to do bad things, and good guys strive to stop them and preserve order.

The chronological arrangement of the six Star Wars films is a crucial reason why this might work. We know what’s coming. The dramatic irony is that we know the eventual price of the efforts of the Jedi, in a way that wouldn’t be possible if the stories played out in the conventional order. We know what Obi-Wan and his allies are up against, which they’re not aware of. We know what will become of him, and of young Anakin. To pretend that these are not operative factors for the story of The Phantom Menace is, you know, playing dumb.

The Phantom Menace doesn’t have a whole lot of back story to rely on. The characters come together through inference, rather than being illustrated through expository scenes early on. In Star Wars, we discover that Luke yearns for adventure through the early scenes of him gazing up to the stars, and arguing with his uncle over remaining on the farm for the next harvest. By contrast, The Phantom Menace drops us into the action right away. We learn much about the headstrong Qui-Gon and the circumspect Obi-Wan, mainly through the way they interact with each other throughout the film. This is an entirely valid approach. To cite an example outside of Star Wars, we’re given none of Travis Bickle’s history, so we discover who he is through his actions and his words. I don’t mean to compare the Star Wars saga to Taxi Driver, but there is a commonality in this approach.

Our intrepid reviewer also presents his own friends’ inability to clearly describe the characters as evidence of the poor characterization. Not to put too fine a point on it, but testimonials are testimonials, and rarely give a complete picture of what is happening. The descriptions they provide for the characters of the original Star Wars are fairly basic, because their development in the movie is fairly basic. Han is a rogue, a quick-thinking scoundrel with a heart of gold. You could probably say more about him, but that’s his according-to-Hoyle role in the game.

This isn’t a fleshed-out realistic character. This is a type. The characters of The Phantom Menace are similarly types, even if our intrepid reviewer’s friends don’t care to notice. Maybe they just haven’t had the benefit of 30 years to think about it.

But try this on for size. Qui-Gon Jinn is like a mad scientist. While he’s talented and good at what he does, his zeal in pursuing his own convictions clouds his judgment. His strengths are his good heart and his well-honed skill, and his weakness is hubris. And another: Padme is competent beyond her years, though the idealism of her youth comes at the price of the experience that she might have if she older. While these qualities often help her, it is conceivable that they could also lead her to make an impulsive decision and then not back down when the time is crucial.

Again, they’re types, but if the types in one movie are subject to criticism, then why not criticize the use of types in all the movies?

***

The ending of the Phantom Menace is certainly dense, though density in itself doesn’t make an ending bad by any means. If this were true, anything ever filmed by Francis Ford Coppola in the 1970s would have crashed and burned. It is fair to say that several different scenes with drastically differing emotional tones COULD clash unfavorably, but that is also not necessarily true. Parallel action between a scene of triumph and a scene of despair can combine to produce a tone of bittersweetness, particularly when a group of good guys find that their victory comes at a price. We see this play out in the death of Qui-Gon, which is the cost of keeping the dangerous Darth Maul at bay while the larger battle rages outside. Though our intrepid reviewer simply dismisses it out of hand, the third act of Return of the Jedi has a similar structure.

And while Revenge of the Sith doesn’t fall into the scope of this piece, I’ll mention that it has a similarly dense ending, involving parallel scenes of the birth of the twins and the creation of Darth Vader’s cyborg body. This sequence is perhaps the finest and most effective of the prequel trilogy. It has an undeniable retroactive impact on Vader’s presence in the original films. Even the most ardent of the prequel haters would have to concede that.

***

In part six of the video, our intrepid reviewer actually spots a stylistic element of the film and analyzes the effectiveness of the choice it represents. He stumbles across some legitimate criticism here. By comparing the lightsaber duels of the previous trilogy to the prequel trilogy, he begins to unearth some insight. He asserts that there is more emotional content to the way Luke loses his cool and starts swinging his lightsaber like a club in Return of the Jedi than there is in the carefully choreographed acrobatics in the prequels.

However, once again, the argument is incomplete. If you’re going to put the heat on The Phantom Menace every chance you get, then you probably shouldn’t ignore the way Luke’s dubious tactics should leave him open to easy counterattack by Vader, who—until this moment in the series—has been a formidable opponent at every turn. Once Luke gets mad and goes all cro-mag, Vader mysteriously abandons his skill, goes on the defensive, and crumples like a frightened dog. It’s the kind of leap in logic that you accept in this sort of situation, because it lends a certain quality to the scene. Kind of like how you’d expect some real deal, seasoned, old school Jedi warriors to have the cool moves that you wouldn’t expect from a Johnny-come-lately like Luke.

Is it that hard to believe that Obi-Wan is pissed at Darth Maul at the end of The Phantom Menace? I don’t think so. The choreography does affect some of that caveman anger in the moment when Maul is just about on the ropes. However, Obi-Wan the aggressor has his rage taken advantage of, as you’d rightly expect.

And ultimately, you have to consider the fact that the movie is pitting two Jedi Knights against a dual blade-wielding Sith warrior. Would you rather they just stand around and occasionally touch their lightsabers together, like Obi-Wan and Vader in the first movie? Our intrepid reviewer, in one moment, seems to be making the point that the fight choreography ought to be expressive of the internal conflict. But then he promptly forgets what he’s talking about and starts arguing that the internal conflict makes the fight choreography irrelevant.

Maybe Vader and Obi-Wan should have just borrowed that cool holographic Chess game from Han, and used that to settle their score, instead of engaging in a tired slap fight that—as many have observed—is quite boring, no matter how interesting the conflict is. You know, the conflict that gets alluded to a few times in the dialogue, but doesn’t get any real weight behind it until it gets explored further in… oops, I forgot. We’re not allowed to say anything good about the prequels.

***

One of our intrepid reviewer’s most encompassing speculations is that, at this point in his career, Lucas is surrounded by yes men. The proposition is that the work suffers if nobody is willing to critique his ideas. Perhaps that is true. However, this does not justify glossing over the fact that while Lucas has an incredible amount of directorial authority at this stage in his career, he was in a similar stage in the mid-1970s as a young independent filmmaker. By all accounts, Lucas was a notorious micromanager who frequently annoyed his cinematographer with the specificity of his shot ideas. His close involvement with the various aspects of the production only relented in the final days, when pressure from Fox over the delays and escalating budget forced him to split everything into multiple units to finish the film. And, in post-production, Lucas frequently reasserted his close involvement in both editing (re-editing, more accurately) and special effects.

I’m sure people were less afraid to tell him “no” back then, but it would appear that he was unwilling to listen. Perhaps Star Wars would have been a better film if he had, but this doesn’t appear to concern everybody, so I won’t dwell on it.

Lucas’s collaboration with others in those days (Lawrence Kasdan or Gary Kurtz, for example) is often cited as evidence for his inefficacy as a filmmaker. The thinking seems to be that if he delegated any of the work, then he deserves no credit for his accomplishments and all the credit for his failures. This line of thinking is manifestly absurd. Film is a collaborative medium. Unless you’re pointing a camera at yourself, by yourself, you have no choice but to share the work with others. This necessarily means that your singular vision will be diluted at least a little. That is not to say that the end result won’t majorly reflect that vision, particularly when that vision is as forceful as the one presented in Star Wars.

Even so, the nature of Star Wars remains, at its heart, juvenile. When Lucas declares its intention towards children, he’s not excusing himself, so much as stating something that’s been obvious from square one. With the Star Wars saga, he essentially recreated the kind of entertainment he loved as a boy. The basic concept of Star Wars—a repressed, unremarkable kid gets to go off on adventures and reveal his innermost quality to a galaxy of heroes who love and understand him—is straight-up adolescent escapist fantasy. The same fantasy presents itself again, after a fashion, in the prequels.

There is nothing wrong with that, but there is something wrong with elevating Star Wars to the level of deathless poetry. While the Star Wars saga did (unintentionally?) approach a greater level of mythic resonance with The Empire Strikes Back, it is important to note that the series as a whole remains what it has always been. Empire is the key that, were it left unturned, would have perhaps relegated Star Wars to the cultural footnotes. The series might have burned itself out after the brief craze of toys, radio plays, and comic books, rather than enduring as it has. Who knows?

***

And why all the hatred? This is anybody’s guess. Even legitimately horrible movies, which I don’t believe The Phantom Menace to be, don’t serve as such a lightning rod for the vilest of criticism. It’s up to speculation, which I’ll delve into for a moment.

I think people had such a long time to think about it, through the course of so many important changes and developments in their lives, that they accumulated a fairly specific idea of what they wanted the prequels to be. When the prequels turned out to be something different, it was that disappointment–not the quality of the film itself–that provoked much of the harshness in their reactions. There is also the issue that many of the viewers first experienced the originals as children and went on to see the prequels as adults, and it is very hard to equalize the data gathered through those two very different lenses.

Do not misunderstand me. It’s not my intention to declare that there’s nothing wrong with The Phantom Menace or that there can be no valid argument against it. But the buzz around this review has been quite troubling, hence my response. There is a strong underlying attitude that A. the original trilogy’s robes never touch the ground, B. the prequels fall into an untouchable caste, and C. this 70 minute video pulls together all that can be said about the Phantom Menace.

A and B plainly are not true, for anyone with even a modicum of cinematic experience outside of Star Wars. You can do far worse than the prequels, you can do far better than the originals, and the two are far more similar than most of the fans are willing to admit. And while C is plainly not true, it would say much about the hollowness of all the vitriol if it were. Simply put, if you spend 70 minutes attempting to rip the movie apart at the seams and you still don’t accomplish it, perhaps it’s time to reevaluate.

***

Our intrepid reviewer saw fit to close his review with some quotes and clips that he felt summed up his thoughts, so I’ll close with a few quotes as well. A couple of them come from film critics who don’t take 70 minutes to make their point.

Firstly:

“The Phantom Menace is not a masterpiece, but it’s an example of how imagination, craftsmanship, and technological bravura can fashion superior entertainment out of something that is far from flawless.” - James Berardinelli, Reelviews.net

“If it were the first “Star Wars” movie, “The Phantom Menace” would be hailed as a visionary breakthrough. But… many of the early reviews have been blase, paying lip service to the visuals and wondering why the characters aren’t better developed. How quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders.” - Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times

And the last one:

“People should have a well rounded life. I’m happy that Star Wars stimulates young people’s imagination, but when you get a situation like this where you have so much hype and expectation, a movie can’t possibly live up to that.” - George Lucas, creator of Star Wars

***

On a personal note, I was able to get through this review by viewing a little at a time, mainly through the salvation of tabbed browsing, TV dinners, and a portable laptop computer that enabled me to take a crap during the really interminable parts. I prefer to imagine that this review was actually a subtle, brilliant satire, and that our intrepid reviewer has an extremely ironic sense of humor. When dealing with spoiled Star Wars nerds, this is the closest it gets to going to your cave and finding your power animal.

I suppose that about wraps it up. It appears that our intrepid reviewer has another review on the way about Attack of the Clones, in the same style as this one. If you were to ask me if I plan to respond to that one the same way I responded to this one, I’d have to simply quote Darth Vader: “NOOOOOOOO!”

Welcome back. In our last thrilling episode, I spent some time discussing the original Star Wars trilogy. The underpinning of the 70 minute Phantom Menace review is that the original trilogy is the standard that the prequels ought to be judged against. But the reviewer didn’t spend much time justifying his faith in the original movies, resting especially heavily upon the first film. This is a weakness, one of several.

The review is in the form of a YouTube video. It’s an excellent opportunity to really dig in, to examine the compositions, the editing, the very stuff that movies are made of. You can dissect plot until you’re blue in the face, but you’re not discussing the story unless you’re discussing the language that the story is told in. In film, that language is the visual. And in film, as in other forms of audio/visual presentation, everything you see on the screen is the result of a choice on the part of the author. That choice may or may not be conscious, but it’s there.

With YouTube, you can do all the in-depth criticism right on the screen, and the images are right there. Sadly, the closest our intrepid reviewer comes to this sort of analysis is to complain about “all the shit” that goes into each shot, accompanied by brief flashes of the battle scenes. It’s throwaway, as if it were self-evident that the dense amount of activity in the visuals of The Phantom Menace is a bad thing.

And perhaps it is a bad thing, but it’s not self-evidently so. This is why the reviewer needs to devote more time to this stuff if he’s hoping to convince anybody who wasn’t already convinced in the first place.

The video format also represents an opportunity to discuss the advantages of old-school practical effects versus today’s heavy-handed CGI, but this, too, is a missed opportunity. Again, the reviewer takes for granted that CGI is bad, without bothering to explain why it’s bad and how the choices affect the film.

On the coherence of the visuals, consider the directorial style of most modern action movies. Compare the alleged visual chaos of the countless Gungan soldiers and killer robots from The Phantom Menace to the actual visual chaos of movies like The Bourne Ultimatum or The Dark Knight. George Lucas, for whatever faults he may have as a writer and a director, can fill alien worlds with endless characters, ships, and special effects, and keep it both coherent and comprehensible. He directs with composition in mind. He gives the audience a sense of the geography and of the environment, and edits the shots together with reasonable clarity and logic.

This is a far cry from the so-called kinetic style of today’s popular directors, who can’t keep the camera still for a second and constantly interrupt actions with edits. It’s a surefire way of inevitably losing the audience. And we’re talking about movies in which we only have to keep track of a few characters at a time. Flesh and blood characters, in real, physical environments (presumably). The Phantom Menace is one movie where you won’t have to wait until the end of the scene to figure out which side is winning.

Modern schlockbuster directors like Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich get off surprisingly lightly with comparison to George Lucas, although it’s difficult to imagine how their work has any merit while The Phantom Menace doesn’t. But I’m getting away from the topic.

And incidentally, as far as I know, I coined the term “schlockbuster” just now, so be sure to give me credit when you casually bust it out at a cocktail party. I know you do that.

***

Anyway, this video series is 70 minutes long. That, in itself, is not the issue, but it’s clear that the time is poorly spent. I understand there’s a certain style that our intrepid reviewer aims to achieve, and a certain sense of humor, but there’s no need for this review to be half the length of the movie itself.

***

In the first part of the video, our intrepid reviewer alleges that the movie has no clear protagonist; therefore, the audience has nobody to root for during the course of the story. But there’s a problem. What good is an argument that doesn’t address the points from the other side? When developing a persuasive case, there are usually two main explanations for why this might occur. One is that the author omitted this portion of the argument unintentionally, out of a lack of attention to detail. The other is that the author did so on purpose, crafting the (false) impression that there are no opposing points. I suspect the latter, given that this gentlemen devoted so much of his time and energy to producing the video.

Playing dumb is a time-honored way of ducking out of a real argument. His specific crime, in the parlance of psychology nerds, is called the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses. In representing only one option—in this case, one character type—he leaves the audience to infer that it is the main option, or maybe even the only option.

***

Much of the criticism, particularly in the middle, is basically nitpicking about individual plot points, which would be acceptable if our intrepid reviewer weren’t insisting on using original Star Wars for a basis of comparison. The unspoken assumption is that Star Wars sets an unimpeachable standard of plotting excellence. Imagine, for a moment, that I am the intrepid reviewer.

(ahem)

“At this point, Luke Skywalker has found his uncle and aunt dead. His first reaction is to go flying back to a guy he just met and make plans to follow in his father’s career as a Jedi, which he just found out about, and learn the ways of the religion that he’s gone his entire life thinking is a big pot of crap. He apparently doesn’t know anybody else he can go to on the entire planet that he’s been stuck on for his entire life. Everybody who disagrees is a fucking idiot, and should definitely not try to rebut this flimsy argument.”

“Now the Millennium Falcon comes out of hyperspace and finds that an entire planet has been destroyed. Rather than immediately get the fuck away from whatever it is that caused this, they decide to follow a TIE Fighter. Which couldn’t have gotten here on its own, belongs to the very large, powerful, and evil Galactic Empire, and is probably there with a bajillion other TIE Fighters nearby. This movie was plotted by retarded children.”

“Darth Vader, one of the most important people in the Empire, forgets that he has any number of better things to do and decides to join the dogfight over the Death Star. He’s doing a job that could be done by any of the idiot pilots in the Imperial service. Maybe he’s in the battle because he’s a superior pilot, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he gets spun out at the end like a total noob. Believe it or not, that’s how the Imperial Dark Lord gets taken out: in a deep space fender bender. In other news, my review, for all its lengthiness and self-importance, consists of the same old nitpicking, mainly done before by other dipshits who act like George Lucas killed their family and burned their house down.”

And so on. See how easy that is?

***

Our intrepid reviewer, by turns, criticizes the beginning of The Phantom Menace for being too quiet and tranquil, and for containing too much mind-numbing action. Let’s ignore the contradiction, and consider and address both of the arguments. And remember, part of the rules is that comparisons to the original trilogy are fair game.

The opening of The Phantom Menace is not as instantly action-packed as the opening of the original Star Wars. It’s quieter and more portentous, like the opening to the Empire Strikes Back. I don’t think anybody wants to argue that it didn’t work then, and outside of comparisons to the original trilogy, our intrepid reviewer doesn’t provide an explanation as to why it doesn’t work here.

Then comes the criticism of mind-numbing action, which, again, leads me to cite the beginning of the first Star Wars. Massive spaceships, shooting lasers at each other, with barely a shred of explanation. Of course, it was a little more exciting than I make it sound, but you get the point. I found the action sequence near the beginning of The Phantom Menace to be a nice payoff to the subdued opening. The battle was handled well enough and, for the first time, we get a taste of what two fully fledged Jedi Knights are capable of in the heat of combat. It’s not exactly laden with heavy meaning, but neither was the opening battle in Star Wars. It’s easy to forget that when you’ve seen the movie a hundred times, and you know who’s on the ships, and what their significance is.

At the outset of The Phantom Menace, the Jedi are arriving in the Naboo system to settle a trade dispute. This leads our intrepid reviewer to wonder if they’re the best men for the job, in so many words. Perhaps the Jedi are experts in intergalactic trade law, or perhaps not, but that isn’t the point. Perhaps negotiations are more effective when the offending party is speaking to someone who’s capable of peering into their minds, stopping them in their tracks, using telekinesis to turn them upside down and shake out their lunch money, et cetera.

More to the point, the criticism here is of the relatively humble beginnings of the story. A trade dispute is by no means the stuff of exciting fantasy action. But neither is a shady transaction with roving Jawa merchants, picking up shoddy second-hand farm equipment.

Our intrepid reviewer describes the mystery surrounding the Trade Federation’s scheme, and cites it as evidence that the film is a plot-driven mess. But where’s the analysis? If I’m wrong in assuming that the trade scam was just the catalyst for the action, rather than the entire point of the movie, then it would be nice if my wrongness were explained. Instead, we get a mixture of irrelevant comedy and painstaking plot summary. Please, armchair critics: unless you’re doing a pre-release review, plot summary is redundant. It’s certainly not worth the time that’s spent on it here. Description is not analysis.

Ultimately, the trade scam isn’t terribly important. It’s the backdrop of the plot, rather than the story in whole.

***

The ensuing adventure is a series of improbable coincidences. It’s possible to view this as dissatisfying, but I would disagree, once again citing the first Star Wars film. When we’re introduced to Luke Skywalker, he isn’t doing battle and he isn’t attempting a daring rescue. As I mentioned, he’s accompanying his uncle, buying secondhand farm equipment from some enterprising Jawas. Exciting, right?

Upon being purchased, one of Uncle Owen’s new (used) droids blows its lid. Had the droid waited until any later to fail, or had it not failed at all, Owen would have never picked R2-D2 as his second choice. The plans for the Death Star would have never fallen into Luke’s hands. And perhaps Owen and Beru would have been spared, leaving Luke without his incentive to leave the planet when he did.

Consider it. The information needed to destroy the Empire’s new superweapon fell into the unwitting hands of the son of the dark lord in charge of finding them. And it was all one faulty droid away from not happening at all. It would appear that humble beginnings and astonishing coincidences are the quintessential elements of the Star Wars saga.

But what happens next? Does our intrepid reviewer drop the ball again? Does he find his feet, abandon the nonsense, and begin the real criticism? And what happens to Han when he gets taken away by the bounty hunter? All this and more in the next and final installment of this exhilarating series.

When I was a little kid, I was into Star Wars. In the third grade, my friends and I would hurry out to our favorite climber during recess. It was either our rebel base or our Death Star, depending on the situation. We’d find the right woodchips that were shaped like the pommel of a lightsaber or a good blaster to keep at our sides.

This got us the wrong kind of attention from the playground ladies. They thought we were trying to stab each other. They didn’t seem to understand when we explained to them the stupidity of trying to stab somebody with the handle of a weapon.

Our teacher had the picture book adaptations of the first and third movies: Star Wars and Return of the Jedi. Curiously absent was The Empire Strikes Back, which I would come to think of as the best in the series. At the time, it didn’t matter. It was all Star Wars, so it was all cool.

Kids are funny that way. They get this intense obsession over the things that they love, and that obsession doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with critical appraisal. If they decide they like something, they’ll piss a circle around it and defend it against all competitors. Back then, I decided I didn’t like Star Trek, without so much as seeing an episode of the shows or any of the movies. I had friends who loved Star Trek, and I couldn’t understand where they were coming from.

I remember a particularly giddy moment when I went to a movie with a friend of mine, sometime in 1996. We were still very young, and we were both still in our Star Wars phase. I don’t think he ever got out of his. Neither of us was prepared for what the theatrical trailers had in store for us.

It started unassumingly enough with a graphic of a small TV in the center of the screen, complete with tinny audio. It displayed the battle over the Death Star, but when the X-Wing fighter made its strafing run at the camera, it burst free from the TV and filled the movie screen in its entirety. The John Williams score surged into mezzo forte, and the narration proudly announced that the original Star Wars trilogy would be returning to theaters for a 20th anniversary special rerelease.

Needless to say, my friend and I were giddy as schoolgirls. We probably paid zero attention to the actual movie, which, coincidentally, was Jingle All the Way. It starred Jake Lloyd, who would eventually play the young Anakin Skywalker.

We had the action figures. We read the novels. To this day, one of us even has an impressive collection of vintage merchandise, worth a mint… not me, of course. We were ripe for new Star Wars, and that’s exactly what 1999 brought us when The Phantom Menace was released in theaters.

That was over 10 years ago, and as a decade of reflection has shown us, what is highly anticipated isn’t always highly received. Those who demanded the prequel films most loudly and camped out for the first screenings the earliest have now become the worst detractors. You’ll rarely hear anything about George Lucas from his own fans that isn’t derogatory, if not outright cruel. And it’s conventional wisdom to think of the originals as undisputed classics that tower over their vastly inferior successors.

You’d think that after 10 years, people would get tired of complaining about George Lucas and his movies, and find something else to carp about. But that’s what you get for thinking. It’s come to my attention that some guy, who runs a site called Red Letter Media, has produced a series of YouTube clips that comprise an astonishing 70 minute lecture on the finer points of prequel bashing—specifically, The Phantom Menace. This is the sort of thing that has historically gone unchallenged, but far be it from me to let it slide. I don’t know for sure, but this might be the first shot anyone has taken at comprehensively critiquing this ponderous review.

***

Our intrepid reviewer is basing his criticism on the assumption that there’s an enormous gap in quality from the original trilogy to the prequel trilogy. He uses the originals as a standard of excellence to measure the prequels up against. To be nice about it, I found this assumption to be undeveloped. He seems to be taking it as a given. At 70 minutes, his review certainly had enough time to cover this and then some, but never mind that.

If you’re going to use the originals as your basis of comparison, you have to flesh out what that basis is. Some critical discussion of the original trilogy is necessary. It’s my thesis that the two trilogies are far more alike than the majority of the detractors care to admit, which lets the air out of our intrepid viewer’s balloon by itself. The originals typically receive undiscriminating praise, while the prequels—and George Lucas himself—typically receive nothing but damnation from the fans. Everyone has to grow up sometime, and while the Star Wars movies were definitely childhood favorites of mine, I couldn’t say I view them with quite the same eyes today. I’ve discussed this in another entry, which can be accessed at ievolvedintothis.com/?p=35.

A bit about the names: I never did care for using episode numbers to refer to each movie, and I also never cared for the subtitle to the first film, A New Hope. The names I’ll be using in this critique will reflect that. In other words, the 1977 movie is simply called Star Wars. The 1980 movie is The Empire Strikes Back, and the 1983 movie is Return of the Jedi. The prequels will be referred to as The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith, although I doubt I’ll have much reason to refer to any of the prequels here aside from The Phantom Menace. The original trilogy will be referred to as such, and the prequel trilogy will be referred to likewise. The series in whole will be referred to as the Star Wars saga.

Much is often made about the threads of inspiration that went into Star Wars. The most obvious influences are the matinee film serials that George Lucas went to as a boy, which also show their impact in the Indiana Jones movies. Star Wars is essentially a Flash Gordon style space opera, mixed in with Tolkienesque fantasy archetypes and a plot structure lifted from Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress. The result is a lightweight space adventure that manages to be a lot of fun. The special effects were state of the art in their day, and they still hold up reasonably well.

Star Wars would have remained just that: a gussied-up tribute to the B-movie serials, if not for The Empire Strikes Back. It was this film, not Star Wars, which expanded the universe of the story and gave it a larger sense of mythology. The characters were previously simple archetypes in straightforward story of good versus evil, but they became much more interesting. To put it simply, The Empire Strikes Back made Star Wars seem a hell of a lot better.

Take Luke Skywalker, for example. Previously, he was like the Hobbit: the unlikely hero who tumbles head-first through adventure and excitement. In Empire, Luke is recontextualized as a savior figure. It’s Luke who gets separated from group and winds up in the wilderness, so that he can eventually return with the strength to deal a decisive blow against the forces of darkness. It’s Luke who gets defeated, then undergoes a rebirth. He sheds his inadequacies and becomes the self-actualized warrior he’s destined to be.

The savior is not the strongest of archetypes. He fills a story function, but in most cases, the drama belongs to those being saved. With Luke, it’s no different. But who is Luke saving? His friends? The rebels? The galaxy? Perhaps, but the real answer is obvious. Luke is saving Darth Vader, famously revealed in The Empire Strikes Back to be his father. The son, long cast away, returns to take on his own father, each battling for the other’s soul. That’s mythology.

It’s Vader who is introduced as the epitome of evil in Star Wars. It’s Vader whose corruption and innermost desires are hinted at in The Empire Strikes Back. It’s Vader to whom the story belongs, because it’s his arc—not Luke’s—that represents the fall from grace and the redemption that give the Star Wars saga its dramatic weight. Without it—had Vader remained the villain, had Luke remained a straightforward young maverick, as they were in Star Wars—the saga would have never risen above its beginnings.

George Lucas, by many accounts, was there for each of the original Star Wars films. He was the de facto co-director, managing each production over the shoulder of the nominal director. In the case of Empire, it was with Irvin Kershner, and in the case of Jedi, with Richard Marquand. The original Star Wars, as with each of the prequels, was a solo effort on Lucas’s part. It’s evident that while he’s not a terrific director of actors, nor a strong writer of dialogue, it’s his ability to realize the visual concepts in his imagination on the screen—to create worlds, in other words—that makes Star Wars so much of what it is. He also deserves credit for the practical execution of such enormous ideas, which few directors have matched. Peter Jackson. James Cameron. George Lucas.

What comes to mind when you think of Star Wars? Sparkling, witty banter? Gut-shaking, emotionally wrenching performances? Maybe not.

Or is it the endless fountains of fighter ships pouring into one another, the crackling of lightsabers, the mind-boggling depths of Cloud City, the unfathomable Death Star? That’s a bingo!

In the next part of this review-of-the-review, I’ll get down to business and look at this guy’s videos. Stay tuned.

I will submit an informal theory, which I will dub the Beavis and Butthead effect. Imagine, for a moment, an average anti-intellectual moron. We’ll call him (arbitrarily male, of course) “Jack.”

Jack goes to the movies. He sees, oh, say, Avatar. He comes away from it thinking it was crap. “Who are these people trying to fool?” he bellows. “This is the same plot as a bunch of other movies I’ve seen! Why, the acting wasn’t even that great!” Jack goes home, logs onto IMDB, and gives Avatar a 1 out of 10 rating. Somebody needs to put these Hollywood hacks in their place, after all.

Meanwhile, Jill (arbitrarily female), for all her differences of opinion, is very similar to Jack. Jill goes to see Avatar and she loves it. She finds the special effects dazzling; Pandora is so real to her that she felt she could reach out and touch it. She thinks to herself excitedly: “This is the best movie I’ve seen in a long time! Just look at all the stuff on the screen! Check out all the hidden messages!” Jill goes home, logs onto IMDB, and gives Avatar a 10 out of 10 rating. Surely this marvel, this wonder of a film, deserves to unseat stodgy old bores like The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption. Why, those movies aren’t even relevant to today’s world.

You rarely see a Jack or a Jill go for the “5 out of 10″ rating, or its close neighbors. If you’re lucky, they’ll shave off a star or two at the top because it wasn’t the second coming of Christ. Don’t expect anybody voting at the other end of the scale to shave off anything.

I’m not sure what drives this phenomenon, but it is observable. Whether you go online and look at the numbers or just listen to the scuttlebutt around the water cooler, there seems to be a reverse bell curve governing people’s opinions about entertainment. In the parlance of Beavis and Butthead, either “it rules” or “it sucks.”

Why is there such an absence of more varied opinions? Why isn’t there a more complex gradation between the two poles? Here’s my theory. Outside of natural selection, there aren’t many ways for something complex to arise from something simple. You’re probably not going to get a thoughtful, well-rounded opinion from a simplistic viewing process. If all you’re doing is passively absorbing what the screen pumps at you, then you’ll likely respond just one way or the other. It becomes a reflex. It rules or it sucks, and damn the very notion that anybody should discuss it more deeply.

Movies are for thinking about. Art is for thinking about. If you go into it thinking that it’s okay to turn your brain off–or worse, that you should turn your brain off–then you’re depriving yourself. You’re disabling yourself from knowing real crap when you see it, and you’re closing yourself off to the sheer richness of a truly good movie.

Most of all, you’re shutting off the critical faculties that are necessary for knowing when a movie isn’t great, and isn’t crap, but just… is. What doesn’t deserve your best appraisal doesn’t necessarily deserve your worst. Some movies are just lightweight entertainments.

Setting the record straight, I believe Avatar is worth seeing. To say that it’s the best film of the year, or even a great film at all, is worrying. It’s certainly an imaginative, pretty film, with many evocative moments and much else to write home about. No, it isn’t especially well-acted, and the plot is low on both subtlety and originality, but plot and acting are highly overrated phenomena. Perhaps its worse crime is that its visuals are so splendid that the rest of the production just isn’t audacious enough to keep up. This is by no means a bad film, and certainly not a “1″ on the IMDB scale. But neither is it a “10.”

Your homework is to look up a bunch of movies on IMDB and check out their user ratings. Look for how many people voted at the extreme ends of the scale, versus how many voted for the middle ratings. Test my theory.

(And yes, I realize it’s been a long time since the last update. For the few people who may have noticed, I apologize. Hopefully normalcy will resume soon.)

It seems like everybody’s doing their “50 best albums of the 2000s” list. The meme’s going around, so I might as well get in on it.

Problem is, I don’t listen to a lot of new music. I don’t keep up with today’s fabulous new artists, and I barely even know what my favorite artists of yesteryear are up to. Suffice it to say that my choices were made by the following criteria:

1. Sublime ignorance.
2. It is on my shelf.
3. I have ascertained that this album definitely came out in the 2000s, as opposed to older albums that I merely discovered in the 2000s.
4. I have listened to it recently enough that I kind of remember it.
5. I think it’s good.
6. It shows off my great taste in music, which is obviously important.
7. Awesome rock guitar? I should hope so.
8. Maybe limit it to one title per artist, to avoid getting carried away.
9. Yeah, right. Like anybody cares about whole albums anymore.

With that in mind, here are my top 50 favorite albums of the past 10 years. And by “top 50 favorite albums,” I mean “top 16 albums that I liked,” in alphabetical order by album title.

Addicted (Devin Townsend, 2009)
Alien (Strapping Young Lad, 2005)
Black Holes and Revelations (Muse, 2006)
Blackwater Park (Opeth, 2001)
Down II (Down, 2002)
Full Bluntal Nugity (Ted Nugent, 2001)
Get Out of My Yard (Paul Gilbert, 2006)
Ensemble Modern Plays Frank Zappa: Greggery Peccary & Other Persuasions (Ensemble Modern, 2003)
Lateralus (Tool, 2001)
Miss Machine (The Dillinger Escape Plan, 2004)
Past Lives (Black Sabbath, 2002)
Real Illusions: Reflections (Steve Vai, 2005)
Reinventing the Steel (Pantera, 2001)
Stiff Upper Lip (AC/DC, 2001)
Strange Beautiful Music (Joe Satriani, 2002)
Trance-Fusion (Frank Zappa, 2006)

I’m sure I’ve bothered mentioning it in the past, but I try not to make a habit of doing lists. Half the Internet survives on porn, and the other half survives on lists. It is therefore with my utmost apologies that I pinch off yet another one of these, so close to my posting of my best movie picks. My first instinct is to blame Facebook, and that is utterly fine with me.

Perhaps I’ll follow this post up with some comments about the selections, but for now, you’ll have to be content with the titles.

Here’s a tasty winter season treat. A while back, IamRob and I were discussing doing a small musical project, just for fun. After a long time of not-getting-around-to-it-because-like-I-have-that-kind-of-time, I finally got around to it. Here is the result:

Rob made the initial recording, with Nick contributing the bass line. My additions are some (not all) of the dissonant sound at the beginning, the harmonies at the end, and the overdriven guitar solos that aren’t recorded through a wah wah pedal.

(Yes, I’m aware that I haven’t been posting much, and that the last two have been audio posts rather than real pieces of writing. Give me a break; I had finals last week and now I’m on vacation. Gawd!)

Today’s entry is special: the first ever I Evolved Into This!? audio entry. This means two things. One, there will be numerous musical examples, which are much easier to deal with in a podcast-style format than in a text article. Two, those of you who haven’t been already will soon be blessed with the sound of my splendid voice.

(In case you’re unfamiliar with newfangled technology, clicking the little “play” button will make the sound begin. You can adjust where you are in the presentation with the little arrow keys to the right, or you can grab onto the little slider and move it around. This assumes that you have located your computer’s “on” button and have somehow made your way to this page without these crucial bits of common knowledge.)