‘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?
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
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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!”