Star Wars: Episode 1 the Phantom Menace
This week The Phantom Menace re-released in cinemas in the UK1 to celebrate it’s 25th anniversary, and I took my friends out to go see it. 90 or so minutes later, I left with a very different impression of the film. Here’s a 5-minute review of one of George Lucas’ most divisive works.
My first impressions past the opening crawl were that the film looks like shit. And it does. When I first saw Episode 1, during its debut in the cinemas 25 years ago, it looked like the best looking film around. Just like however, it’s aged a fair bit, and it shows. The murky opening colour palette of the bleak Trade Federation ship, the swamps, and the underwater sequence don’t do the films any favours either. Backgrounds, and even foregrounds, look washed out and splotchy. The visual effects of the film are clearly aged too. In some scenes, aliens stand out not because of their otherness, but because of their prosthetics - Nute Gunray and his neimoidian colleagues being egregious examples. Perhaps most offensively even lightsabers felt wrong. Rather than feeling like a dangerous finesse weapon they moved with weight and drag and droids on the receiving end of a lightsaber blow often reacted like they’d been struck with a concussive force than sliced cleanly into two. Whilst the visuals never quite looks as crisp as I recall it, the final four-way battle and the pod racing hold up much better than the first quarter of the film.
My recollection of the film was mostly a series of big dramatic set pieces held together by a string with a mostly fallible, borderline incoherent plot, and the cynic in me thinks that’s probably a fairly accurate depiction. However, I was surprised how much I didn’t care about most of that stuff on this rewatch. I did notice the terse dialogue, the Jedis’ laissez-faire attitude to the safety of others, and illogical decision-making but it wasn’t a distracting part of the experience. Instead, once the film opened up and the action moved to Tatooine I started to be drawn in by Qui-Gon’s character for the first time. The subtlety with which Liam Neeson created a Jedi with a rebellious streak, his bond with Anakin, and the air of authority he carried. The relationship between him, Anakin, and Shmi Skywalker has a genuine warmth to it - and I think it’s no coincidence that the sequences on Tatooine are the most memorable in the film, aside from the big action set pieces.
Despite a cast made up of near exclusively top bill actors, the by comparison unknown Ian McDiarmid and Jake Lloyd are the showstoppers for me here. I loathe the character of a precocious child, but somehow Jake Lloyd managed to deliver a performance that hit the notes of intelligent, naive, curious, and kind without straying into the territory of unbelievable or annoying. In fact, without a shadow of a doubt he has the strongest performance in the whole film. The scene with his mother could’ve easily been cheesy, but the scene feels sincere and genuinely moving2. Of course, this is all relatively speaking and no one should be nominated for any awards. Given the performance by Hayden Christiansen in Attack of the Clones though… it’s not hard to be impressed by Jake’s performance. Ian McDiarmid delivers his performance far from centre stage, and with a limited amount of support. Jake Lloyd’s character is given a love interest, a podrace, a family meal time, and a journey. By contrast, Ian McDiarmid’s character is forced into scenes and despite having plenty of lines is never a focal point, forever the sideshow. Yet he plays his role perfectly, to the point only if you really peer beneath the surface you see the venom with which he wields his words.
The Phantom Menace is by no means a great film, I’m not even sure it’s a good film. However, what it has in spades is fuel for the imagination. As a 5-year-old, it hooked me. And George Lucas aimed for the stars and hit in a hundred ways, but missed short of making a great film.
I could list off dozens of things wrong with the concept of the film, but I can’t get over how much it gets right. I love the aesthetic of the republic before the fall - the clothes, the technology, the settings. Pod racing is amazing. The Duel of Fates is iconic. The dozens of alien races all feel “at home” in Episode 1 in a way they simply don’t in the sequels. I walked away from the cinema feeling like a kid again, and that’s the magic of Star Wars.