23 thoughts on The Phantom Menace

Twenty-five years ago I saw Episode I with a childhood best friend in the theater that sits at the entrance to Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida; last night I saw the re-release with my sons at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. I’ve got thoughts.

1. No matter its potential, no matter the what-might-have-beens, no matter the revisionist reviews or retconning or retrievals, three things were always going to keep TPM from being a great Star Wars film: (a) an eight-year-old Anakin; (b) unnecessary narrative nostalgia; and (c) cutesy cartoon schmaltz. We now have forty years’ worth of evidence that these decisions were not departures from the vision of George Lucas, but part and parcel of it. To change course, he would have had to listen to outside voices suggesting that Anakin be eighteen, not eight; that Anakin not be the original builder of C-3PO; that Jar Jar and Watto and Sebulba and “sleemo” and “doo-doo” and ha-ha neighborhood Tatooine slave children taunting “Ani” are neither funny nor endearing, including to actual children. But Lucas doesn’t believe in listening to others, here in his galaxy above all. So there’s no sliding doors moment where Episode I is truly excellent; it was always going to be hamstrung from the start.

2. A partial addition to this list is Lucas’s obsession with “cutting edge” CGI, which everyone but him knows ceases to be cutting edge the moment the car drives off the lot. On re-watch, though, had the film lacked the above three items of dead weight without cutting the gratuitous CGI, it could have held up. So long as the animated characters weren’t cartoonish or racist(!)—a big “if”—then TPM would have been like Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park or Fellowship of the Ring. The “dated” graphics aren’t dated at all: they’re remarkable testaments to digital artistry. Rather than what they became, which is testaments to Lucas’s softness for silliness.

3. A friend told me years ago that a professor of his ruined The Godfather for him by pointing out Diane Keaton’s acting in it. Allow me to suggest that Natalie Portman is the Kay Adams of The Phantom Menace—indeed, of all three prequel trilogy episodes. She’s not exactly spectacular or awful, the way Hayden Christensen is on screen and going for it and not quite succeeding but still, you know, doing a thing. It’s a void, an absence, a null. She’s a non-presence in every single scene. I’m happy to blame Lucas for this instead of Portman, both for his direction and for his writing of the character. (Portman is, after all, a very accomplished actor outside of Star Wars, which was one reason to be excited about her casting!) Nevertheless one-half of the Skywalker twins’ parentage is a zero in our introduction to her. A lost opportunity.

4. The only time Portman is half-alive is when she “plays” her own double on Tatooine and repeatedly butts heads with Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn. But then, the entire handmaiden/queen ruse and its “reveal” is goofy to begin with. I wonder how it played with adults at the time. I vaguely recall being surprised in 1999, yet minus any payoff. The only narrative logic is that it allows Lucas to put Portman in town with Neeson when they meet and befriend Anakin and his mother Shmi. Otherwise it’s a dead end.

5. Given the furor it caused at the time, I have to admit that, on re-watch these many years later, with so many shows and film and canon filled out, I don’t mind the Midi-chlorians one bit. It’s actually rather elegantly done, I must say. Begone, haters! Hier stehe ich und kann nicht anders.

6. There are other clunky bits, not least just about everything related to the Gungans as well as the deep-sea adventure through the planet’s core, plus some of the Trade Federation politics- and alien-speak (again, those accents are shameful). That said … like all the other revisionists, I can’t hate this movie, and there’s a lot to appreciate, even love. Let me count the ways.

7. Neeson’s Qui-Gon is not only a home run: well conceived, well written, and well executed. He may be one of Lucas’s greatest creations. He commands every scene. He’s always in his own skin, comfortable where others are not. His simultaneous uncertainty, confusion, confidence, and resolve are palpable. The hints at his past and his running conflict with the Council are expertly deployed in their ambiguity. He has chemistry with everyone: with Portman, with Ewan McGregor, with Jake Lloyd, with Pernilla August. Neeson somehow single-handedly elevates this movie from forgettable to memorable, at least when he’s on screen (which is a lot). All this is not even to mention the moral gray that Lucas leans into with Qui-Gon. I lost count how many times Neeson lies to someone’s face without a trace of regret. He gambles without promise of gain and doesn’t even stop to inform the queen. What a character! What a performance!

8. Did I mention that Qui-Gon was dead right about the Jedi and the Republic? About its sclerosis, decay, and internal rot? About its detachment from the common good? About its aristocratic self-regard and blindness to the evil in its midst? Neither Yoda nor Mace Windu could see Palpatine standing right in front of them. Palpatine made sure his apprentice killed the only one who might recognize him before it was too late.

9. (This point and the next two relate also, by the way, to The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson understood that Luke had to come to terms, on screen, with the “intra-Jedi” debate between Palpatine, Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Yoda. In a sense, Luke—through Ren—had to mature beyond Yoda and Obi-Wan’s vacillating optimism and despair in favor of something less childish, less binary, less yin and yang, without succumbing to the Dark Side. That maturity goes unspoken in the film, but its name is Qui-Gon. Had Episode IX been made by someone as shrewd as Johnson, Rey’s journey and continuation of the Jedi would have made explicit this callback all the way to Episode I: “a new start” for “a new Jedi,” open to the wisdom and worldly good sense of a Qui-Gon Jinn.)

10. Qui-Gon wasn’t just right about the Jedi; he was also right about Anakin, assuming he was indeed the Chosen One (a contestable proposition, I admit). Even if he was wrong about the prophecy, or rather ensured the truth of the prophecy by tragically ensuring Anakin’s training, he was right to see promise and potential in Anakin and the Council was wrong to treat a third-grade child—to his face—like his sadness and fear, after leaving his home and mother behind, were such a psychological obstacle to his learning the Force that they would rather him suffer humiliating rejection before the highest sages of the land. Hm, I’m sure that would have bode well for the virginally conceived Jesus of Midi-chlorian Force powers. They sealed their fate, and confirmed Qui-Gon’s worst fears about them, in that very room, by that very decision. It’s a miracle that Anakin ever repents at all, given his experiences.

11. Think again about those experiences. He’s conceived without a father’s involvement. He’s a slave from early childhood. He leaves his mother before his tenth birthday. He joins an order that not only keeps him from ever visiting his still-enslaved mother for a full decade but also refuses to use their power, influence, and wealth—not to mention their lightsabers—to liberate her from a slavery that the Republic itself outlaws! Oh, and the Jedi also require lifelong abstinence, forbidding marriage and children. Later, Anakin will return on his own to Tatooine to find his formerly enslaved mother kidnapped, tortured, and raped by Tusken Raiders. He will murder all of them for this. Later still, Anakin’s secret wife, secretly pregnant, will die, in part as a result of his lashing out at her with the Force. Then he will be led to believe that his unborn child died with her. Then he will learn that his son lived, but this knowledge was kept from him both by his current master (Palpatine) and by his old master (Obi-Wan)—all surrogate fathers who failed him. Then he will learn that his son has a twin sister, likewise kept from him. Then he will fight and nearly kill his son. Then he will kill his current master, having “killed” (or defeated) his old master, and ask his son for forgiveness before dying of his wounds. (Note: All three of Anakin’s surrogate fathers died as a result of apprenticing him.) Then he will look on from Force-ghost-world as his grandson turns to the Dark Side and murders his own father and nearly his own mother, even as Luke turns away from the force in despair and self-chosen exile. Then, finally, his grandson will join forces with (former Nabooian Senator) Palpatine’s granddaughter to destroy Palpatine himself—whom Anakin, somehow, failed actually to kill in his one and only good deed in life. Having killed Palpatine once and for all, Anakin’s grandson gives his life to save Palpatine’s granddaughter’s. And so the Skywalker blood line is complete: from Shmi to Anakin (and Padmé) to Luke and Leia (and Han) to Ben. Seven Skywalkers, all special, most Force sensitive, some Jedi, all dead and gone, and for what?

12. No, J. J. Abrams, Rey is not a Skywalker, even if she wants to claim the name. And yes, it occurs to me that one of Freddie deBoer’s best essays is a longer and much funnier version of the previous point. Go read him and weep/laugh.

13. Since I’m mentioning writers on these themes, see also Matt Zoller Seitz and Ross Douthat. And Freddie again, who is correct about The Last Jedi.

14. What else does Lucas get right? The politics, the decadence, the transition from planetary democracy to galactic democracy to galactic republic to galactic emergency to galactic empire. He also understands that the wider cinematic and narrative frame of Star Wars is not itself, his own prior creation, but the larger mythic and movie worlds of both Western and Eastern culture. Granting the moments of eye-rolling nostalgia and point-and-laugh coincidences, Star Wars has not (yet) become solipsistic at this time.

15. The music is flawless. Thank you, John Williams.

16. Lucas also nails multiple scenes and images, to the point that some of them remain iconic. The greatest of these is every single frame of the Darth Maul fight. I dissent from the view that Maul should have lived to fight another day; it was wise to kill him off. What makes the duel with Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon so compelling—somehow I’d never realized this—is that none of them ever speaks a word. In just about every climactic fight sequence in any action movie, the leads are in constant conversation: cajoling, insulting, persuading, begging. Not here. There’s nothing to talk about. It’s pure visual poetry. Few things filmed since then can match it.

17. Maul is a singular visual creation. You can’t help but stare. As for other characters, Obi-Wan is well written by Lucas and well acted by McGregor, as are Palpatine by Ian McDiarmid and Shmi Skywalker by Pernilla August. I was surprised how affecting August’s portrayal of Shmi is. The only pathos in the movie, with the possible exception of Obi-Wan’s grief over Qui-Gon, belongs to Shmi. She is worn down by the world, yet oddly hopeful, given her experience with Anakin’s miraculous conception and her love for him. She wants him to leave, even as she registers a moment’s hurt quickly covered over by a mother’s affection when she sees his forgetfulness, then remembrance, then acceptance at her remaining behind (as, the movie won’t let us forget, a slave).

August and Neeson share multiple moments together: knowing glances, light touches of arms and shoulders. Squint and you might see romantic tension. On this viewing I saw instead a kind of shared religious sensibility. They both relate to the Force the way Mary and Joseph relate to God. Like Joseph, Qui-Gon is a surrogate and adoptive father (also like Joseph, Qui-Gon dies before Anakin becomes an adult; unlike Jesus, Anakin has major daddy issues for the rest of his life, as do his son and grandson, Luke and Ben—apparently the only way for sons in Star Wars to exorcise their paternal demons is by slaying their father or dying themselves, or perhaps through handing on the line from multiples generations of failed father figures to an adopted daughter figure: this is the only reading of Rey I will allow). Note well that Shmi isn’t passive before Qui-Gon; rather, her fiat mihi is, like Mary’s, an active consent in response to a higher benign power. In this way Shmi and Qui-Gon alike are responsive to a kind of cosmic momentum sweeping them along. They see it, acquiesce to it, float along with it, even at great cost; in fact, at the cost of both of their lives.

18. I remain struck by the fact that when Lucas sat down to write Darth Vader’s backstory he made the child Anakin Skywalker a slave on a backwater planet. I must have seen The Phantom Menace at least a dozen times since 1999, but I had never registered the brief conversation at the Skywalker dinner table in which Anakin explains that all slaves on Tatooine have a chip implanted beneath their skin that (a) can’t be detected or removed by the slave himself and (b) marks them as a slave for life, lest they attempt to escape. This, in what is otherwise, in Lucas’s hands, a children’s fable! Anakin can’t run away, much less hop aboard starship, because his brutal slaveowners will track him down through the cybernetic chip implanted in his body!

Is this a kind of dark foreboding of Anakin’s eventual bodily disintegration and reintegration via robotic machinery? “More machine than man”? A man enslaved by his own passions, by his unchosen transhuman body, metal and circuitry rather than flesh and blood? A man overmastered by a Force he supposed he could manipulate to save the wife he eventually killed? All of which turned on his receiving freedom from slavery without his mother—a motherless origin at this, the source of the most famous “orphan’s tale” in American pop culture? Recall that, in the next film, Padmé comforts Anakin following his slaughter of men, women, and children among the Tusken Raiders, after they took and abused his mother (once she had herself been freed and married by a good man!). I lay all this out to show what was going on in Lucas’s mind as he sketched out the origins of Darth Vader. As seemingly light and occasionally cartoonish as Episode I can be, it has moments of such darkness it makes you gasp.

19. This is a movie about overconfidence. More than once different characters say, “You assume too much.” Or, “I promise you…” followed by an outlandish vow they can’t be sure they can keep or whose implications they can’t foresee. Even my beloved Qui-Gon comes under judgment here. No one knows anything—the only exception is the Sith, who see all. No one else has sight. Everyone is blind while presuming the indefinite persistence of the status quo. And it’s all about to come crashing down around their ears. This is the tragedy of the beginning of the story of Darth Vader. This is “the phantom menace” haunting the galaxy, haunting the Jedi, haunting the Republic, haunting Anakin and his many would-be fathers.

20. So no, I don’t mind the name, either. It’s both accurate and appropriately apt to the Saturday morning genre B-movie serials that influenced the original film.

21. Three final thoughts, each a missed opportunity. The first concerns slavery. Why not make that issue more prominent in the next two episodes? Why not make Anakin an abolitionist? Why not insinuate the issue into the Senate’s bureaucratic machinations and Padmé’s own frustrations? Why not send Anakin back to Tatooine to liberate the slaves—only to have his hand slapped by Coruscant, even to have the slaves returned to their masters by the august Republican Senate? And why not have Palpatine rise to the occasion, offering the power of emancipation to Anakin and Padmé in return for emergency wartime powers? After all, doesn’t he need the military might of the Republic to stamp down the Hutts and other slave-mongering forces? How did this not write itself?

22. Why not let Anakin lose the pod race? The race is well shot, but there’s no urgency or angst because we know he’ll win. What if he didn’t? What if a loss then put Qui-Gon in the position of stealing Anakin away, refusing to honor his bet with Watto and the Hutts? Qui-Gon would do it. And it would make him a hero in Anakin’s eyes, even as it made Anakin resentful and ashamed for having lost and furious at the now-villainous Council and Senate, which would politely instruct Qui-Gon to return Anakin to Tatooine. This plot line, too, writes itself.

23. Oh, Jar Jar. By which I mean: Darth Jar Jar. Do I buy the theory? I want to. And man, there really are odd aspects of TPM if Lucas truly had nothing up his sleeve with this character. His banishment, the fear he inspires in fellow Gungans, the suggestion that he will be punished or even killed once Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan depart, his occasional physical prowess and grace, his crucial role at key moments to catalyze the plot (such as hinting in Padmé’s ear that she should return to Naboo—moments after Palpatine whispers diabolical suggestions in her ear in the Senate—not to mention his fateful vote to make Palpatine Emperor in Episode III). Remember, too, that Palpatine is a Senator from Naboo, so it’s absolutely plausible that he and Jar Jar have had prior contact. He just “happens” to run into the Jedi and incur a life debt. Oh, and how does Darth Maul track Padmé’s ship to Tatooine if they never sent a transmission off world, but only received one? One option: Jar Jar himself found a way to send a transmission, alerting the Sith to their whereabouts.

The notion of doubles (“Always two there are”)—co-equal/rival pairs or even a kind of surreptitious self-doubling—is pronounced in TPM: Republic and Trade Federation, Senate and Council, Amidala and Padmé, Palpatine and Sidious, Sidious and Maul, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan and Anakin. Why not Jar Jar and Darth Jar Jar?

As others have detailed, this would also explain Maul’s death and Count Dooku’s random appearance in his place; it was meant to be Count Jar Jar all along. Had the JJB character not been such a fantastic fiasco and embarrassment from day one, he might have been the Gollum of Star Wars: the first true and truly momentous CGI character, and a secret villain to boot. Was he? Was that the plan?

Maybe. Who knows. On this re-watch, aside from some of the narrative holes, it didn’t seem particularly likely. And it sure seems like we would have heard some leak from Lucasfilm in the last three decades spoiling the secret.

Chalk it up as one more might-have-been in this remarkable might-have-been of a movie.