Hey Boyos! The Phantom Menace at 25
Star Wars absolutely peaked just a hint after midnight, the morning of May 19, 1999.
It’s almost impossible to remember now how excited everyone was. And by “everyone” I don’t mean “nerds” or “fans” or whatever, I mean everyone. The monoculture hadn’t splintered yet, and “new Star Wars” was an event. Everyone talked about it, Natalie Portman’s kabuki-makeup face was everywhere, they ran that Darth Maul Duel of the Fates music video on MTV constantly.
The other thing that’s hard to remember is that “Star Wars” meant something totally different there in the spring of 1999. “Star Wars” was three good movies, and… some books and video games, maybe? But as far as the mainstream was concerned, it was just three movies that mostly everyone liked. For a certain kind of blockbuster filmmaking, Star Wars was still the gold standard, it was still the second highest grossing movie of all time, having only just been beat out by Titanic two years earlier. There was a tremendous amount of cultural good-will there—you don’t stay the highest grossing movie of all time by being outside of the mainstream. There were plenty of people who didn’t like it, but there were very few people who hated it. It was like the Super Bowl, or the World Series; the default cultural response was “yeah, those were pretty good!”
“Star Wars” was also a shorthand for quality. “Star Wars” movies were good movies, full stop, and “like Star Wars!” was about the highest compliment you could pay any live action action-adventure special effects anything.
And suddenly there was New Star Wars? That’s going to be amazing, by definiton!
And that trailer! We spent ages waiting for that trailer to download off the old Quicktime Trailers webpage over dialup. It was worth it.
It just genuinely didn’t occur to anyone that a new Star Wars might be bad. That just wasn’t a thing that happened.
Of course we all went to see it.
There was a big group of us that all went opening night, or rather the 12:01 am show the night before opening night. There was a bunch of us Star Wars fans, for sure, but half our group were casual at best. But it was a Thing! Everyone wanted to go.
This was before you could do this on the web, so we had to stand in line all day to get tickets. We worked out a rotation so no one had to stay there more than half an hour or so. The line outside the theature was basically a block party; everyone was in good spirits, the weather was gorgeous, someone brought a barbecue.
The little northern California town I was living in had the one Good Theatre—it was a remodeled vaudeville theature, single huge screen, lots of seats. Still had the old-style auditorium seating. The current owners had upgraded it with one of the best surround-sound systems I’ve ever heard.
The screening itself was a party. Everyone was there early, it was being “hosted” by the local radio station, and one of the DJs was MC-ing the scene, doing trivia, giving away prizes. Some people came in costume, but not a lot. This was’t a comic book convention thing, this was a bunch of regular people in a college town ready to watch a new movie that everyone knew was going to be great.
I swear this is a true story: I remember one of my friends, one of the not-so-much-a-fan ones, leaning over and asking me “what are all these nerds gonna do if the movie is bad?” She nodded her head towards the group of fans that did come in costume. Someone had a full Boba Fett outfit, which was not common in those days.
I wish I could remember what I said back. I think I made a crack along the lines of “I think they could just run that trailer a dozen times and everyone would be happy.” But it wasn’t a scenario worth thinking about. A bad Star War? No.
There had been rumblings of course. The reactions on what passed for the web in those days were… not an enthusiastic as one would have expected.
At midnight, the lights went out, and the audience roared. 12:01. Logos, then STAR WARS with that theme music. The audience made a sound I have never heard before or since, just an absolute roar of delight.
Then, that sound cut itself off very quickly, because suddenly everyone had to read a bunch of text we had never seen before.
I had another friend who was convinced that “Phantom Menace” was a fake title, and the real movie would have a “better one”. I remember side-eying him as THE PHANTOM MENACE scrolled into view in those chunky yellow letters.
The audience never got that loud again. There was a weird vibe in the room as the movie kept not… being… good. I distinctly remember the moment where the old guy with the pointy beard on Naboo says “This can only mean one thing, invasion!” which was such a cool line in the trailer, but in the context of the business meeting it actually happened in, just kind of flopped onto the ground and bled out.
“Oh shit,” I remember thinking. “That lady on AICN was right.”
My other clear memory of that night was walking out into the street afterwards. It was 2-something in the morning. It was a warm northern valley night, so it was shorts and short-sleeves weather.
The mood as we walked out into the night was strange—not sad, or angry, or even disappointed, but confused. Like leaving the stadium after your team blew what should have been an easy game. What the hell happened?
Someone I knew but hadn’t come with waved to me across the street. “That was amazing!” he yelled. We both knew he was lying, but we both let it slide. My friend that had asked what the nerds were going to do had slept through the second half.
No one would ever use “it’s like Star Wars!” as a compliment ever again.
The Phantom Menace has aged strangely, and mostly to its benefit. It’s still a bad movie, but not a terrible one. The passage of time—and the way “blockbuster” summer genre movies have evolved past it—have made it easier to see what it did well.
For starters, having the Queen of a planet arrive at the Galactice Senate to deliver eyewitness testimony about an illegal invasion only to be shut down by the senator for the invaders saying, basically, “why would we let this evidence get in the way of our desire to do nothing lets form a committee”, hits in 2024 in a way it didn’t in 1999.
And that podrace still slaps. And not just the lightsaber fight, but the whole final 4-location battle is a pretty spectacular piece of action movie-making, the occasional “let’s try spinning” non-withstanding. Lucas is at his best when he’s throwing weird images on the screen: that shot of the gungans coming out the swamp contrasted with the robots unfolding, Darth Maul pacing behind the laser fence while Darkman meditates, the fighters swirling around the command ship. The old Star War sense of humor occasionally shines through: for example, the music swells, the big door opens revealing Darth Maul and his double-bladed sword; and then Natalie Portman side-eyes Liam Neeson and deadpans “we’ll take the long way.”
I haven’t become a Prequel Apologist, exactly, but the curve I grade it on has certainly changed over the last two-and-a-half decades.
There’s a class of “big noise” movies that have become the dominant form of blockbuster action—obviously fake environments, too much CG, PG-13 without being sexy or scary, filled with beautiful-but-bored actors visibly thinking about how they’re going to spend their paychecks as they spout what’s not really dialogue but just sort of shout quips past each other. Part of what we talk about when we talk about “superhero fatigue” are these enormously expensive live-action Saturday morning toy cartoons with nothing to say.
Part of why Phantom Menace got such a nuclear negative reaction was that it was such a surprise. Before, if a huge expensive AAA movie was bad, it was because it was a colossal screwup—your David Lynch’s Dune, Dick Tracy, Waterworld, Batman & Robin. Those happened every few years or so, and would be followed by years of axe-grinding, blame-shifting, and explainers about “what went wrong.” And sure, bad sequels happened all the time—mid-tier Roger Moore Bond movies, or Jaws 3, Superman IV, Star Trek V: the low budget, low effort cash-in sequel.
Instead, here was a huge expensive AAA movie, advertised to hell and back, and by all accounts the exact movie the people making it wanted to make, and it was still bad. That just wasn’t a category in 1999. Now, it’s the dominant form. In a world where they actually honest-to-god expected me to pay full price to see Thor: The Dark World, I can’t generate the energy to be too mad about the movie with the good lightsaber fight.
To demonstrate what I mean, and without getting drawn into a epistemological debate about what I might mean by “worse”, here is a list of big-budget AAA blockbusters that have been released since 1999 that, if I had to choose, I would choose to watch Phantom Menace instead of:
- Any live action Transformers
- Any of the three Hobbit movies
- Prometheus
- Any of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels
- About half of the Fast and the Furious sequels
- That insane Lone Ranger movie with Johnny Depp as Tonto
- John Carter
- Honestly, about a third of the Marvel Movies. Well, maybe half?
- Any of the live action DC movies other than Wonder Woman
- The third Matrix
- Any of the reboot “Kelvin Universe” Star Treks
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, which still makes me angrier than TPM ever did
Compared to all that, Darth Maul is high art.
On the one hand, saying a bad movie doesn’t seem so bad because other movies got worse is damning with the faintest of praise, but on the other hand, go look at that list again. Yeah, we’re grading on a curve here, and yes, Jar-Jar is terrible, but did you see Star Trek Into Darkness?
At the end of the day, The Phantom Menace was one reclusive billionaire’s deranged vision, unimpeded. Say what you will about Lucas, he basically paid for this movie out of his checking account, and it’s clear it was the exact movie he wanted to make. After decades of warmed-over lowest common denominator films by committees that have been sandblasted into nothing, one guy’s singular artistic vision starts to sound pretty good, no matter how unhinged it might have been. We need more movies where someone just gets a giant pile of money to make whatever the hell movie they want, not less. Even if they don’t always work out.
And, TPM kicked off a cycle of directors going back and revisiting their older work, which has been a mixed bag, but we got Fury Road and Twin Peaks: The Return out of it, which was more than worth it.
What does The Phantom Menace mean, two and a half decades later?
“Episode I bad” is still shorthand for “absolute trash fire of a movie”. And that night in 1999 was certainly the point where “Star Wars” stopped meaning “the only series with no bad movies” and started to mean “increasingly mid movies with breathtakingly diminished returns surrounded by the most toxic fans you can possibly imagine.”
But it has a strange staying power. There have been plenty of worse followups, sequels, and remakes, but those slide out of mind in a way that this hasn’t. No one still makes jokes about fighting Giant Spiders or “Nuking the Fridge”, but this movie has remained the Totemic example for “Terrible Followup”. To put that another way: No one liked Jar-Jar Binks, but a quarter-century later, everyone on earth still knows who that is.
Why does this movie linger in the collective consciousness like—if you’ll forgive the expression—a splinter in the mind’s eye? I think it’s because unlike most bad movies, you can squint and almost see the good movie this wanted to be. And the passing of time, and the wreckage of those other bad movies, have made it clearer what this one did right, how close it almost got. This isn’t a Blade Runner situation, there’s no clever edit that could fix this one, it’s too fundamentally misconceived in too many ways. But you can nearly feel there was a version of this movie made from almost the same parts that would have worked. You can imagine what a good movie with this cast and with these beats would look like. You can almost reach out and touch it.
And yet, the movie itself remains this terrible, beautifuly-made, stodgy thing. The sort of movie where you say to yourself, “it can’t possibly have been that bad, could it? We just didn’t like it.” And maybe you end up watching it with friends, or with your kids, or late at night on Disney+, and as it starts you think “no, this wasn’t that bad,” but sooner or later someone says “this can only mean one thing—invasion”, or Jar-Jar has a big idea, or someone asks The Junior Professional if she’s an angel, and you say “no, actually, it really was exactly that bad.”
There’s a scene towards the end of the first act that has ended up as my most-quoted line from all of Star Wars.
The heroes are escaping from Naboo on the Queen’s chromed-out starship. The Jedi are in the cockpit delivering stilted dialogue. At a loss for anything better to do, Jar-Jar wanders into the droid break room. As he enters, the R2-D2 and the other R2 units all wake up, and turn towards him, beeping.
“Hey boyos!” he exclaims.
I have five cats in my house, and whenever I walk into a room with more then one of them, they always pop their heads up and look at me.
“Hey boyos!” I exclaim.
Today in Star Wars Links
Time marches on, and it turns out Episode I is turning 25 this year. As previously mentioned, the prequels have aged interestingly, and Episode I the most. It’s not any better than it used to be, but the landscape around it has changed enough that they don’t look quite like they used to. They’re bad in a way that no other movies were before or have been since, and it’s easier to see that now than it was at the time. As such, I very much enjoyed Matt Zoller Seitz’s I Used to Hate The Phantom Menace, but I Didn’t Know How Good I Had It :
Watching “The Phantom Menace,” you knew you were watching a movie made by somebody in complete command of their craft, operating with absolute confidence, as well as the ability to make precisely the movie they wanted to make and overrule anyone who objected. […] But despite the absolute freedom with which it was devised, “The Phantom Menace” seemed lifeless somehow. A bricked phone. See it from across the room, you’d think that it was functional. Up close, a paperweight.
[…]
Like everything else that has ever been created, films are products of the age in which they were made, a factor that’s neither here nor there in terms of evaluating quality or importance. But I do think the prequels have a density and exactness that becomes more impressive the deeper we get into the current era of Hollywood, wherein it is not the director or producer or movie star who controls the production of a movie, or even an individual studio, but a global megacorporation, one that is increasingly concerned with branding than art.
My drafts folder is full of still-brewing star wars content, but for the moment I’ll say I largely vibe with this? Episode I was not a good movie, but whatever else you can say about it, it was the exact movie one guy wanted to make, and that’s an increasingly rare thing. There have been plenty of dramatically worse movies and shows in the years sense, and they don’t even have the virtue of being one artist’s insane vision. I mean, jeeze, I’ll happily watch TPM without complaint before I watch The Falcon & The Winter Soldier or Iron Fist or Thor 2 again.
And, loosely related, I also very much enjoyed this interview with prequel-star Natalie Portman:
Natalie Portman on Striking the Balance Between Public and Private Lives | Vanity Fair
Especially this part:
The striking thing has been the decline of film as a primary form of entertainment. It feels much more niche now. If you ask someone my kids’ age about movie stars, they don’t know anyone compared to YouTube stars, or whatever.
There’s a liberation to it, in having your art not be a popular art. You can really explore what’s interesting to you. It becomes much more about passion than about commerce. And interesting, too, to beware of it becoming something elitist. I think all of these art forms, when they become less popularized, you have to start being like, okay, who are we making this for anymore? And then amazing, too, because there’s also been this democratization of creativity, where gatekeepers have been demoted and everyone can make things and incredible talents come up. And the accessibility is incredible. If you lived in a small town, you might not have been able to access great art cinema when I was growing up. Now it feels like if you’ve got an internet connection, you can get access to anything. It’s pretty wild that you also feel like at the same time, more people than ever might see your weird art film because of his extraordinary access. So it’s this two-sided coin.
I think this is the first time that I’ve seen someone admit that not only is 2019 is never going to happen again, but that’s a thing to embrace, not fear.
The Prequels, slouching towards respectability
From Polygon today: “The MCU keeps copying the Star Wars prequels”
It’s been interesting to watch recently as the years have started to treat The Phantom Menace well. I’ve seen several pieces now over the last year or two with a favorable view of the prequels—did folks rewatch them for the first time in a decade over lockdown and realize they wern’t as bad as they remembered?
I’d submit George Lucas does the Big Special Effects Jamboree Action Scene better than anyone working today. Even Phantom Menace, probably the worst-received work of his career on release, has a meticulously crafted final three-part action sequence that puts most movies to shame. Always exciting, never confusing; the cuts from place to place are clear, you can tell where people are relative to each other, and every character in the movie gets at least one highlight moment to shine.
After dozens of movies with the same confusing all-computer graphics smash-em-up third act—Marvel and otherwise—it’s worth going back and looking at what the master of the form did, even in his lesser works.