Re-Awakening the Force #1 | Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace directed by George Lucas

We live in exciting times, just days away from the premiere of not just a new Star Wars movie, but a whole new era for the franchise - and a
promising one at that. 

Of course, we’ve been here before. I still vividly remember the chills that I got watching the first teaser for The Phantom Menace - the “Every Saga Has a Beginning One...” It made the movie seem stirring, epic and powerful - a feat that, with hindsight, is almost as incredible as George Lucas actually getting the original Star Wars film made despite all the fences fancing. Yet, whilst generally being considered second only to Sex Lives of the Potato Men when it comes to history’s most derided motion pictures, the Star Wars saga’s fourth offering and first chapter is actually a bloody good film. The trouble with it that it’s not a very good Star Wars film, and that’s not something that those reared on the superlative original trilogy can ever forgive.

The Phantom Menace’s mis-steps and misjudgements are too numerous to document, though many have delighted in trying to do so over the past sixteen years. Of them all, I think comedian David Mitchell most succinctly summarised the movie’s patent pitfalls with his usual barbed eloquence in a piece that he wrote for the Observer, later reprinted in his collection Thinking About it Only Makes it Worse and Other Lessons from Modern Life:

“The problem isn’t just that it’s terrible but also that it retrospectively spoils the original films. George Lucas took the hinted-at, mythical, ancient yet futuristic realm of his first films and filled in all the detail like a tedious nerd. He ruined his own creation. It was as if Leonardo da Vinci had painted a speech bubble on the Mona Lisa in which she explained her state of mind. Everything that was magical, mysterious and half alluded to, Lucas now ploddingly dramatised, making it seem dull and trainspotterish…”

However, as these Re-Awakenings are intended to be a celebration of the saga, as opposed to a post-mortem of its less lauded instalments, I don’t intend to rehearse Episode I’s many shortcomings myself. Rather, I intend to accentuate its positive elements - even if that does mean that this opening piece is going to be very short indeed.

Say what you will of George Lucas’s decision to set Star Wars’ opening episode in the childhood of his saga’s central protagonist, but there’s no denying that the era of The Phantom Menace is a fascinating one to explore. The thousand-year-old Republic exists in a state of faded gentility, its leader and senators powerless in the face of aggressive commerce. The complacent and stagnant Jedi, supposedly the keepers of peace and justice in the galaxy, are blind to their nemesis who walks the same corridors, stealthily orchestrating his rise to power under a mask of civility. And then, living in slavery on a remote desert world in the Outer Rim, there is a child conceived by the Force itself; a child prophesied to restore balance to the ever-darkening Force. That’s a hell of a canvas on which to start painting.

My favourite thing about The Phantom Menace is Lucas’s portrayal of the boy destined to become Darth Vader, particularly in the intense attachments that he has to his mother, and later Padmé. It’s a credit to both Lucas and the young Jake Lloyd, who plays Anakin Skywalker, that you can see the boy’s unravelling before he’s even fully wound; it’s all right there in that beautiful, “Binary Sunset”-scored scene in which he leaves his mother behind: the character’s defining fear and passion, his fear of loss, of change - the shape of things to come. 

The other aspect of the film that I feel works well is its Palpatine-led Coruscant sub-plot. Ian McDiarmid is so good as the wily senator cum phantom menace that it might be his finest performance in the saga - it’s certainly his most nuanced. McDiarmid manages to convince as someone so thoroughly evil that he’s trying to pass himself off as a thinly-veiled political opportunist as cover; only the most fleeting of looks betrays his true agenda. It’s a dazzling turn from the Shakesperian Scot.

Liam Neeson is nearly as good as the movie’s leading Jedi, Qui-Gon Jinn. He makes even the most opaque of dialogue seem meaningful (“Your focus determines your reality...”), carrying the whole picture from end to end on the back of his understated charisma and calm recklessness. I even like Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan. The Trainspotting star had the hardest job of anyone, in my view, as not only did he have to take on a part that Sir Alec Guinness had put such an indelible stamp on, but he had to play that part in a way that, by necessity, would be almost unrecognisable. Crazy old Ben’s character in the original trilogy was that of a wise old hermit; a magician in self-exile with the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders. Young and headstrong Obi-Wan carries none of that burden, and he’s yet to gain most of that wisdom, but McGregor still makes the line between the two iterations visible with his Guinness-like delivery of some of the character’s dry witticisms and a mischievous twinkle here and there.

The Phantom Menace is also an arresting visual and aural spectacle – that much is beyond dispute. More of its CG is photo-real than it often gets credit for, and its climactic triple-threat lightsaber duel blows away anything that the original trilogy ever offered up, at least on a technical level. And when it comes to the score, if any piece of music was to have a hope of living up to “The Imperial March”, then it’s “Duel of the Fates”. By turns haunting and frenzied, it serves to heighten the drama as the film nears its end, whilst at the same time hinting at the dark future that’s about to unfold.

 

And so, when you find yourself being sucked into the fashionable trend of Episode I-bashing, try to remember that it’s not all bad. A good forty minutes or so of it is actually quite good, even by Star Wars’ lofty standards. For every Jar Jar Binks, there’s a double-lightsaber-wielding Darth Maul. Though the Force may be demystified through the introduction of midi-chlorians, it’s enriched by the prophecy of the Chosen One. And, whilst the taxation of trade routes might sound like a preposterously banal jumping-on point for such a spectacular saga, it actually speaks to Lucas’s intention to tell a much more adult and politically complicated tale than he did in the original trilogy. It’s just a pity he started to tell it in a kids’ film...

Under its newly-shortened title Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, the 2011 edition of Episode I (featuring a CG Yoda in place of the original puppet) is available to download from iTunes in 1080p HD for £13.99. A Blu-ray is also available, with today’s cheapest retailer being Zavvi, who are selling the beautiful limited edition steelbook for £17.99 with free delivery. The original 1999 version of the movie is no longer in print on DVD, but can still be found on eBay and other second-hand sites.