STAR WARS AND ITS CRITICS
PODHORETZ, JOHN
STAR. WARS AND ITS CRITICS The Phantom Menace Makes It to the Screen By John Podhoretz Movie critics don't like the new Star Wars movie—or perhaps it's better to say that they were so sick of...
...Yes, it appears George Lucas is a NAFTA supporter...
...My own newspaper, the New York Post, began publishing a story a day on the movie six weeks before its premiere, as did USA Today...
...The Jedi knights realize the Force is with this kid like nobody's business, and they bring the boy away with them...
...American Graffiti, which cost $750,000 to make and has earned about $100 million, remains (on a dollar-for-dollar basis) the single most successful movie ever made...
...It was a commercial triumph that made it clear just how enduring the Star Wars myth was and fueled the enormous hype for The Phantom Menace two years later...
...Coming out in 1977, after years of bitter American movies with unhappy endings in which the bad guys triumphed and the good guys slunk away in defeat, Star Wars sounded an entirely uncharacteristic note of optimism and good cheer...
...Editors and reporters have endlessly sought new angles on the phenomenon while laboring entirely in the dark about it...
...There's a whole other plot in the film as well, about a very suspicious senator named Palpatine and a bad guy named Darth Maul who are trying to destroy the Galactic Republic from within, and a bunch of lizard people with Jamaican accents who live in an underwater city, and...
...The jokes in Phantom Menace are broad and childish in a way that may displease sophisticates but will be endearing to everyone else...
...The comic relief comes from a mush-mouthed alien named Jar Jar Binks who will drive movie critics insane but will delight every ten-year-old in the world...
...Guys with horns on their heads are bad...
...The naysayers are right in part: The characters aren't all that interesting, and The Phantom Menace lacks the first movie's dazzling series of mini-cli-maxes—in part because the first movie used special effects in a new way: Moviegoers were seeing things in 1977 that they'd never seen before...
...What was so disarming about the original Star Wars was the absence of cynicism or camp...
...Critics and their bosses felt they had all been had, and so they took out after Godzilla with a gleeful vengeance...
...it still makes for a surprising and refreshing evening at the movies...
...Forced to land on a desert planet, they encounter a nine-year-old slave boy named Anakin Sky-walker...
...Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace has become a blight upon entertainment journalists' lives...
...But the head Jedi knights don't want anything to do with him...
...We all assumed that readers just can't get enough of the subject...
...The truth is that the years in which the America-is-a-cesspool philosophy dominated Hollywood were among the best in the history of movies...
...The film has dominated conversation for months before its release, despite the fact that nobody knew much about it...
...But it's still a very good movie, lovely to look at, with an interesting and complicated story line...
...When the films were re-released in 1997 (with a few extra minutes of new footage) after being absent from theaters for fourteen years, they made more than $400 million at the box-office worldwide...
...But his films changed the face of American movies by delivering to Hollywood a lesson as simple and seductive as "May the Force be with you": If you make a movie that pleases audiences—instead of trying to confront them with the horrors of their capitalist, bourgeois, phony existence— the public will make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice...
...The film begins forty years before the first Star Wars...
...But the film is more than just the sum of its special effects, and I think it will strike a real chord with audiences for the same reason that its predecessors did: It is earnest, well-meaning, and delightfully free of irony...
...And an ever-smiling politician is the incarnation of all evil...
...There has never, in the annals of entertainment, been a money-making machine with the staying power of this one, which began with the release of the original Star Wars in 1977 and was followed by The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and Return of the Jedi in 1983...
...Star Wars was an unabashed tribute to 1930s science-fiction serials and flying-ace pictures like 1939's Only Angels Have Wings...
...The cognoscenti assumed that this post-Jurassic Park dinosaurfest would topple all box-office records—until somebody finally saw the thing about ten days before its release and discovered that it was a colossal misfire...
...You might say The Phantom Menace is the George W. Bush of motion pictures...
...In The Phantom Menace, the only movie he's actually directed since Star Wars (two hacks made the other two films in the series), Lucas shows he still believes in good guys and bad guys, in right and wrong, in the Force and the Dark Side—and if that's even more unfashionable today than in 1977, so be it...
...One of them is the young Obi-Wan Kenobi (who, as a much older man played by Alec Guinness, trains Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars...
...Actually, only the first two movies really struck a chord...
...A peaceful planet ruled by a teenage queen is under pointless and savage military assault by evil members of the Trade Federation...
...Yes, it appears George Lucas supports term limits...
...The Jedi knights save the teenage queen and fly away...
...But Star Wars isn't Godzilla...
...And the cosmology is very simple...
...Lucas came of age at a time when moviemakers thought they were supposed to use their ill-gotten capitalist gains to show Americans what a cesspool of corruption their nation really was...
...By the time the first weekend was over, journalists had made sure that residents of the United States would stay away from Godzilla in droves...
...So the president of the Galactic Republic sends two emissaries to find out what's going on...
...Post-Star Wars American cinema has been pretty dreadful...
...But hype is a dangerous business, particularly when it comes to movies nobody has seen...
...But Lucas can't be held responsible for the way Hollywood made cynical use of his own defiant unwillingness to surrender to cynicism...
...By some reckonings, series creator George Lucas has made $2 billion—for himself, alone—on the three movies, their video releases, and his assorted licensing deals...
...Two decades later, we're so used to being dazzled by those special effects, we take them for granted, even though The Phantom Menace has more of them and uses them more creatively than any movie before it...
...It was a remarkably nice movie, and it made audiences feel so good that they returned over and over again just to try to recapture the experience...
...A contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz is the editorial-page editor of the New York Post...
...everyone I've ever met agrees that Return of the Jedi was a major stinker...
...The Galactic Senate should be putting a stop to this war, but the Senate has become a do-nothing body full of endless and pointless debate...
...The Jedi knights are good...
...You can learn from cynicism, but you can't build on it," Lucas told the Los Angeles Times in 1973 about his other triumphant film, American Graffiti, which also paid affectionate tribute to an American ideal that had become distasteful to the other young turks of Young Hollywood...
...It didn't make fun of its antecedents, but borrowed their solemnity and their devil-may-care playfulness...
...These emissaries are Jedi knights, those mystical and powerful folks who know everything about the Force (of "May the Force be with you" fame...
...You can't count the number of magazines that have put the movie on their covers...
...Nothing could have lived up to these expectations, and The Phantom Menace doesn't...
...Anyone familiar with the plot of the first three Star Wars movies knows that Anakin is Luke Skywalker's father— and that sometime in the future he will be seduced by the Dark Side of the Force and become the evil Darth Vader, villain of the original trilogy...
...WARS AND ITS CRITICS The Phantom Menace Makes It to the Screen By John Podhoretz Movie critics don't like the new Star Wars movie—or perhaps it's better to say that they were so sick of hearing about it, they heartily wished the picture ill from the moment it began...
...Last year, entertainment journalists went nuts over Godzilla until two weeks before its release...
...A nation traumatized by the loss in Vietnam could celebrate as two American prototypes—the gee-whiz good guy Luke and the hard-bitten romantic Han Solo—blew up the bad guys...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 34
