STAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACE
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN Richard Alleva NOT CRAP, NOT GREAT 'Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace' Star Wars: The Phantom Menace arrived after six months of unprecedented ballyhoo that prompted hundreds...
...Each of the four completed episodes is an artifact confected by the ten-year-old, California-suburban, comic-book reading, pinball playing, TV watching, neighborhood-movietheater frequenting proto-nerd that still survives within Lucas's head...
...He most certainly is not...
...The scoring of the concluding victory march brings the story to a surging close...
...And I sense that people are just beginning to tire of this...
...Commonweal 20 July 16,1999...
...Another criticism is right on target: The acting is bad and bad nearly straight across the board...
...I already hear the objection: but Star Wars is popular everywhere in Europe and Asia...
...The pod race is derived from the chariot race in Ben-Hur but the imitation is even better than the prototype...
...But I saw all three again upon their re-releases two years ago and, though I enjoyed them once again, I saw no greatness then just as I see no cause for Mr...
...No more...
...When this king has a tantrum and shakes his head while foaming at the mouth, he makes even slobber seem a royal prerogative...
...Well, the amphibious creature, Jar Jar, who serves as comic foil, does bear a fair resemblance in gait to Steppin Fetchit, while his speech mannerisms are akin to Butterfly McQueen's...
...To compare this scene with the monotonous kung fu matches in The Matrix is to understand the difference between the artful use of violence and the lazy exploitation of noise and special effects...
...But, in a work of art or even pop entertainment, God is in the details, in the tone and diction and visual rhetoric...
...Lucas situates the combat in a palace room of mounting platforms with force fields functioning as transparent sliding doors that often separate the warriors and temporarily interrupt the fight...
...The director dresses his heroine like a Chinese princess out of Turandot, but every time Natalie Portman opens her mouth, it's Valley Girl time...
...Here is Lucas's provinciality working positively...
...At one pass, with Obi-Wan incapacitated, a force field separates Qui-Gon from Darth Maul...
...It is...a pretty good movie...
...The cinematic equivalent of War and Peace, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and Wagner's Ring cycle all miraculously blended into one slam-bang work of art...
...The character of Jar Jar may act like Steppin Fetchit, and the villainous heads of the Trade Federation may sound like the "Japs" of World War II movies, but this isn't because Lucas is a racist...
...This moment isn't just an effective ploy for increasing suspense...
...Twenty years ago, Harrison Ford, after playing Han Solo in the first Star Wars film, complained that George Lucas knew nothing about directing actors...
...SCREEN Richard Alleva NOT CRAP, NOT GREAT 'Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace' Star Wars: The Phantom Menace arrived after six months of unprecedented ballyhoo that prompted hundreds of people to camp outside theaters literally for days in order to see...the previews...
...True, Darth Vader was a more original creation, but if s in the Hollywood tradition to allow the villain some malevolent uniqueness...
...The same goes for the pack animals in the desert scenes, creative variations on camels and llamas that are just exotic enough to titillate but not so strange that they distract us from the narrative...
...If you've stayed away you could go to it casually and you might have a great casual time...
...Is that what all the press rage ("Crap...
...At the arena where Anakin races his "pod" (racing car), the announcer has two heads, each of which eggs on the other just the way our network sports announcers do...
...However: Lucas may be unable to create interesting human characters but he is a whiz at the fabrication of fantastic creatures and the realms they inhabit...
...This movie isn't great, it isn't the heir of Malory or Wagner, it isn't the artistic counterpart of the collected works of Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell, it isn't the secular religion Star Wars fans want it to be...
...shrieked Anthony Lane in the New Yorker) is really about...
...There is a laser-sword duel between the two Jedi and an assassin, Darth Maul, which is a model of how to shoot such scenes...
...So whom did Lucas cast...
...It is the Pop Empire of the mind...
...Toad, being both impossibly pompous and unexpectedly generous...
...The trusty Liam Neeson brings his wonted dignity and strength to the Jedi master Qui-Gon-Jinn but also gives the first dull performance of his career, probably because he got bored performing with a cast half of which was computer-generated...
...To which I reply: Southern California rules the world...
...But he simply can't get those 1930s and 1940s movies (that he watched on TV in the 1950s) out of his head, and they were crammed with stereotypes...
...I doubt it...
...A pretty good, efficiently made, second-rate science fiction movie that cost a gazillion dollars and is expected to earn a hundred gazillion...
...This works to make Star Wars accepted pop mythology...
...And is that why the box office returns, though quite impressive, aren't living up to predictions...
...A boy who is indistinguishable from any of the kid actors who infest Saturday morning TV programs...
...And what kind of movie, in fact, has The Phantom Menace turned out to be...
...Because a movie that cost so much, that was ten years in incubation and six more years in actual production, simply had to deliver more than it actually delivers...
...Menace has more of the same...
...But is there justice in any of the accusations—the charge of racism, for instance...
...What film could live up to such expectations...
...Martin Stephens in The Innocents possessed exactly this palette...
...Jar Jar is tiresome but the king of Jar Jar's fellow Gungans is a worthy cousin of Kenneth Grahame's Mr...
...And that is the utter provinciality of the mind and sensibility of George Lucas...
...The opening credits of each installment announce, "In a galaxy long ago and far away," yet we never get out of Southern California...
...Lucas has learned nothing since...
...So this role had to be cast with a boy possessing a certain inherent strangeness which could subtly suggest genius and malevolence and doom...
...Or was it because the first three Star Wars were so great and this new installment falls so far short...
...This gives the action ebb and flow, plus variety in composition and point of view...
...This was clear from the very start in 1977, when we found that the hero of this intergalactic epic was to be a snubnosed, blonde, surfer-type named Luke Skywalker, that the heroine looked like the pretty Jewish girl next door, and that the secondary hero, Han Solo, was a clone of all those Bogart tough guys who start out cynical and wind up on the side of the angels...
...The noble Jedi lowers himself to the floor, shepherding his strength like a yogi, but the assassin, insatiable in his blood lust, paces back and forth like a caged wolf...
...Griffith, and he keeps the far-flung action coherent, tense, and increasingly suspenseful...
...Lucas has always been a good action director and in this department he has gotten better...
...Lucas's provinciality particularly disables him when he has to create a conceptually bold character...
...But, then again, for Lucas, perhaps, Saturday morning TV is a viable version of childhood...
...Lucas cuts from one zone to another with a skill worthy of D.W...
...So The Phantom Menace is a masterpiece, right...
...But all the criticisms, fair and unfair, are, I suspect, motivated by something in the nature of the Star Wars cycle that has always been there but only now, after twenty years, penetrates critical and popular awareness...
...Lane's outcry now...
...it's good characterization...
...A pretty good movie...
...Lucas may be spotty as a director but he is infallible as a producer...
...He has gotten his designers, technicians, cameraman, editors, and composer to do their best work...
...and Natalie Portman is a joke as Queen Amidala...
...The producer's relation to the director is the armorer's to the knight...
...For the scene in which underwater monsters attack the Jedi's miniature sub, Lucas has come up with creatures based on the standard underwater horrors—dinosaurs and sharks— but he has distorted and rearranged body parts just enough to suggest something extraterrestrial...
...Other creatures are just as delightful...
...An underrated overrated movie...
...One man's racism may, I fear, be another man's visual mythology and, though Lucas draws on Arthurian myth for his story, he depends on old Hollywood for his visual and verbal language...
...To be sure, the overall narrative isn't provincial, for there are universal implications to any story about oppressed people, divinely destined liberators, black-clad villains, a "force" that represents divine virtue, fallen knights who turn into monsters (think of Klingsor in Wagner's Parsifal), and sons who outdo their heroic fathers by clinging to absolute virtue (think of Malory's Galahad finding the Grail while his formidable but adulterous father, Lancelot, fails...
...The composer John Williams has evidently been listening to Carmina Burana and Carnival of the Animals, but he's synthesized his influences nicely...
...Anakin Skywalker Commonweal 19 July 16,1999 is a gallant, even angelic kid who will nevertheless grow into the ferocious Darth Vader, avatar of the "Dark Side...
...No less...
...And that duel in Menace is only one of the four areas of combat in the big battle scene that climaxes the movie...
...Anakin's master, owner of a sort of intergalactic hardware store, is a gigantic mosquito with that insect's ability to annoy and sting (one's wallet...
...Schematically, Star Wars is a true descendant of chivalric legends...
...On the other hand, I don't think that another charge, that Lucas's storytelling and staging are klunky, has merit...
...And it was in its execution, in the Californiacute casting and in the tooth-aching AilAmerican dialogue that Lucas betrayed his provinciality...
...Get that word outta here...
...But will the kids who compose the bulk of the audience for Menace actually know who Fetchit and McQueen were...
...Still, Bob Hoskins surmounted the same problem in Who Framed Roger Rabbit...
...Ewan McGregor is a flyweight as Obi-Wan Kenobi (this guy ages into Alec Guinness...
Vol. 126 • July 1999 • No. 13
