Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

Last night's movie viewing was back-to-back DVDs of Star Wars episodes 1 and 2: The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. Kibo had never seen Menace, and Sam and I had missed Clones in its theatrical run, so something was new for all of us.


When The Phantom Menace came out, it got such negative press that my expectations were extremely low. The result was that in the theater I was actually entertained by the spectacle in sequences such as the pod race midway through the movie. There were certainly some things that bothered me and I recognized that it wasn't a great movie.

On seeing it again a few years later, after some of the positive and negative hype has died down and I can watch it with fresh eyes, it's quite striking how bad a movie The Phantom Menace is. All the Star Wars movies are juvenile fantasies, but for my money it's not Star Wars if it isn't pitched to, say, at least a bright eight- or nine-year-old. Phantom Menace seems made for kids barely out of diapers-- except that the plot hinges on things like taxation of trade routes that would hardly appeal to such a demographic. There are talky scenes that go on forever and do nothing but damage to the larger Star Wars plotline. You don't see these movies for the dialogue, but, geez, did that warmed-over Madeleine l'Engle stuff about "midichlorians" have to be in there? Did Anakin really have to be a virgin birth? When something makes you say "oh, come on" even in the context of Star Wars mythology, there is a problem.

Characters, especially little Anakin and Jar-Jar, are constantly solving problems by random blundering with cutesy consequences, particularly in the annoying climactic space battle. The extremely cool Darth Maul is hardly even in it, and his big fight scene is set in a strange out-of-place environment seemingly stashed away in the basement of the Royal Palace of Naboo in case somebody wanted to have a light-saber fight there (Kibo thought it was based on a Dark Forces level).

It also contains some of the most embarrassing recycling of Earthly ethnic stereotypes ever to appear in these movies. To me the worst in this regard isn't Jar-Jar, but those Trade Federation guys who are right out of some whacked Forties Yellow Peril propaganda. The whole thing's just a disaster.

It was fun watching Kibo's reaction to Jar-Jar Binks. Kibo had seen bits of the movie, of course, and had some idea that Jar-Jar was pretty loathsome in it, but he actually had no idea just how loathsome. Or that he'd also desperately want to smack most of the other characters through the rest of the movie.



All these things made it all the more surprising when Episode II: Attack of the Clones turned out to be far better than I expected.

One of the few small pleasures that can be extracted from The Phantom Menace is just knowing that sneaky Senator Palpatine is playing everybody for a sucker. This becomes more elaborate and obvious to even the most undiscerning viewer in Clones, but our heroes never catch on, which means that the proceedings are dripping with dramatic irony. It's reminiscent of the clever third act of The Empire Strikes Back, when Darth Vader is reeling everybody into Bespin Cloud City like fish on a line. Only this time it's the whole movie. And Lucas even uses Jar-Jar as part of it, which, as others have mentioned, cleverly plays on our hatred of the horrible goofus. It turns out that he's actually no ordinary screw-up, but rather the biggest screw-up in galactic history. He's not redeemed, but he gets a sort of anti-redemption that at least makes him integral to the story. C-3PO provides more annoyance this time around.

The vaunted romance subplot is, of course, horrible. Fortunately it doesn't take up too much of the running time. I will say that Hayden Christensen did better than I expected with his darkening character arc; he does better at portraying the temptation of evil than, say, Mark Hamill ever did. Mostly he's a pretty face, though, as is Natalie Portman, who gives a less embarrassing performance than in Menace but is still no Carrie Fisher.

Most importantly, this movie is absolutely crammed with cool stuff, enough to make up for the relative paucity of it in Menace. Lucas really goes all-out with 3D virtual sets this time around, and uses them to give a grandeur and texture to the Star Wars galaxy that we haven't really seen before. It's got an aerial chase better than the one in The Fifth Element set in an incredibly elaborate Blade Runner-meets-Trantor cityscape; a wild ring-system space pursuit; Christopher Lee; a land battle that kicks the ass of the one in Menace; Yoda jumping around like a Hong Kong wuxia knight; a droid factory full of miscellaneous killamajigs; long-necked Grey-like critters breeding a clone army in a blinding white blobbosphere; man-eating monsters; giant tick-pigs; conspirators tampering with the Galactic Library in a highly Asimovian manner; a multi-armed CGI diner proprietor who manages to project real warmth for the few minutes he's on screen. And Boba Fett cultists undoubtedly spent the entire film in an ecstatic altered state of consciousness.

What it doesn't have is a Han Solo or a Millennium Falcon. You can't have everything.

(Of course, one can easily quibble with the plot points. It's Star Wars, after all; it's not gonna be all that logical. You're telling me that the Galactic Republic of umpteen thousand solar systems has existed for a thousand years with a federal military consisting of a few dozen wandering magic swordsmen? Granted, it seems to be a loose confederation of quasi-autonomous planets and nations, but if you're gonna go around taxing trade routes you need more muscle than that. OK, OK, maybe there were a billion Jedi back in the old days when the Light Side of the Force was strong, but given the current state of the organization by the time of Clones, you'd think the Grand Army of the Republic proposal would have been brought up seriously long before now. How did this cockamamie Republic get started anyway? But these implausibilities are par for the Star Wars series, and don't really take one out of the movie.)

Anyway, while of course it's no masterpiece, I'd rate it solidly above Return of the Jedi, though not above the first two movies (excuse me, Episodes IV and V). It's well worth seeing if you like exciting eye candy, and it does make me want to see the final installment of the prequel trilogy.