Movie review: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Originally published June 11, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1334

Peter’s Star Wars Journal

WEDNESDAY, MAY 12: I make a rare trip into Manhattan. There is a weekly get together of people in the science fiction writing community which has been held every Wednesday at the same restaurant for nearly a decade, if not longer. I decide to show up for once. Much discussion is made of various people being “on line.” I assume they’re discussing the Internet. It is only after some minutes that I realize they mean that the aforementioned folks were actually on line for Star Wars Episode I. There is much talk of the multiple-block-long queues that await anyone determined/foolish enough to try to score tickets.

I then spend the mid-afternoon at the audio division of Simon & Schuster, participating in the recording of background crowd noises for the audio release of a Trek novel, Vulcan’s Heart, along with writers Josepha Sherman and Susan Schwartz, editor John Ordover, and Alan Zimmerman, a friend of John’s who used to own a comic book store (and aren’t former comic store owners as rare as hen’s teeth, huh, kids?). Variously impersonating a Romulan and a Klingon, I pitch in with an assortment of efforts including derisive laughter, gasps of horror, shouts of “Let it be war!” and, my personal favorite, grunting “It is a good day to die!” in Klingon. By the end of it I’m getting so punchy that I start vamping a whole Klingon weather report. “It is a good today to die—and tomorrow is also looking like a good day to die, thanks to the incoming warm front. Now let’s look at the five day forecast. Yes, it appears in fact that the entire week will be a good week to die. Back to you, Roger.”

I return home at 6:15, tired of riding around, my throat raw, and Gwen and Kathleen are waiting for me. The moment I walk in the door, Gwen is on her feet. “Can we go get Star Wars tickets?” I am somewhat daunted by the prospect. I beg for a few minutes to get myself together, but it’s made pretty clear to me that the only acceptable answer is going to be to turn around and get in the car.

Gwen and I prepare for the lengthy wait sure to be ahead of us. I get some books, a bottle of water. She collects things to keep herself busy. Kathleen will remain home with Ariel and bids us adieu. I don’t expect to be back home for some hours.

We drive to the theater. It’s 6:30 p.m. Under normal circumstances at dinnertime on a Wednesday, there wouldn’t be much of a crowd, but these aren’t normal circumstances. I’m expecting the place to be mobbed and, as we approach the theater, I strain my eyes trying to spot the parking lot so I can see just how crowded the place is.

Parking lot’s empty, or nearly so. Crickets chirping.

I’m afraid to believe it could possibly be that easy. “Well, people probably just pulled up and dropped other people off,” I say. “It’s probably packed inside.”

We park the car and go in.

There is no line.

I don’t mean that the line is so short as to be insignificant or unworthy of comment. I mean there is no line. The ticket counter is devoid of ticket purchasers. The ticket sellers are standing there staring at vacant carpet.

“They’ve sold out!” says Gwen, but that doesn’t stop her from breaking into a dead run, as if afraid that a horde of customers are going to pour in from the other direction. Her fears are groundless. No one else materializes.

“Okay,” I say, “I’m going to need five tickets. What’s the first showing you have five tickets available for?”

“Well, there’s the midnight show on Wednesday. That’s the first showing.”

I blink like a blinded owl. “Excuse me? You have tickets available for the very first screening?”

“We have tickets for all of them,” she says. “None of them are sold out.”

I’m picturing block-long lines in Manhattan. “Let’s do it, then,” and quicker than you can say, “You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy” with a straight face, we have the tickets in hand. “I can’t believe there wasn’t a line,” I say. “Oh, there was,” says the ticket seller. “At 3 this afternoon, it was a madhouse. The line went all the way around the theater.” I’m trying not to cackle dementedly as I picture all those people waiting for tickets to shows that we just walked up and purchased.

We return home to the waiting Kathleen. She is stunned that we’re back so soon. “Well?” she asks. I adopt my most hangdog expression and say, “I’m sorry, I simply could not stand on the line. I couldn’t do it…” Once she’s totally snookered, I then shout, “Because there was no line!”

Sometimes I love living in the sticks.

FRIDAY, MAY 14: I’m in the supermarket and see the new issue of TV Guide. There are four different covers from Star Wars. I get the one with Liam Neeson cause Kathleen digs him. The one thing I can’t figure out is what possible relevance the new film has to television. Could it be that TV Guide is simply trying to cash in and turn a buck? Naaaahh.

SUNDAY, MAY 16: It turns out Shana has other plans for Tuesday night and will not be able to join Kathleen, her sisters and me. I suggest to Gwen that she invite a friend. “None of my friends like Star Wars,” she says. I tell her to call around. Gwen shows no interest in doing so. Ariel then asks if she can give the ticket to her gigantic, four-foot-tall plush Ewok. I say, “If Gwen doesn’t want the ticket, then sure you can.” Horrified by the prospect of possibly being seen seated next to a life-size Ewok, Gwen gets on the horn and finds a taker for the ticket, her friend, Cayley. Handy little creatures, those Ewoks.

TUESDAY, MAY 18: At Gwen’s request, I drop her and Cayley off several hours early to save places on line. There’s no one there, so they’re first on line. At 11:30, Kathleen, Ariel and I show up. Ariel is wearing the head dress which fits the full-sized Ewok, so it looks pretty convincing on her, and she’s toting her small-sized plush Ewok. I haven’t ever told her that most fans absolutely despise the little furballs. That some fans were advocating that—in the re-release of Return of the Jedi—they should digitally remove them.

The theater is about three-quarters full. Probably at this moment, every theater in Manhattan is packed to overflowing. Fans are reasonably rowdy, but not uncontrollably so. Lights come down. Trailers start. Tarzan is, inexplicably, booed. Austin Powers II gets an enthusiastic response, as does The Wild, Wild West. The 20th Century logo rolls. I’m glad that the studio’s involved; the opening fanfare just wouldn’t seem right without it. The Star Wars logo hits. Place goes wild. Several fans up front start swinging glowing plastic lightsabers, and an usher is right on them, using the Force to make them stop. The opening crawl starts rolling. I read it softly and quickly to Ariel. It’s a lengthy dissertation about taxes and embargoes. Ariel looks completely confused. I can’t blame her. I’m not entirely sure I’m following it, either. Pretty complicated stuff for a film that Lucas claims is aimed at 12-year-olds. I’m still fuzzy on why Naboo, of all places, is targeted to have an embargo. As opposed to the previous films where all the bad guys have British accents, this time around they seem to have Asian accents. That, combined with the Queen in Kabuki make-up, makes me feel like I’m watching The Seven Jedi Samurai.

Ariel is sound asleep fifteen minutes into the film. The film continues without her. Liam Neeson maintains his dignity, Natalie Portman is stiffer than her costumes, and Jake Lloyd—Mannequin Skywalker comments to the contrary—is the second-best thing in the film (the best thing being his mother, a nicely underwritten and quite well-acted character). I find that Jar-Jar Binks is not only the most annoying individual in all of Star Wars, he may be the most annoying character I’ve seen in a movie, ever. I haven’t wanted to see a character die this much since the guy who kept babbling about shrimp in Forrest Gump. The only Phantom Menace individual more insufferable than Jar-Jar is his boss, the one who talks like Brian Blessed and looks like Earl Sinclair from Dinosaurs.

Everyone keeps calling Anakin Skywalker “Anni,” which weirds me out. My eyes get tired; I’m getting too old for this stuff. I start fading in and out. Different movies start to run together in my mind. In my confusion, I’m envisioning young Obi-Wan Kenobi crawling down a toilet and swimming to an underwater city. I picture young Anni Skywalker with a red curly wig singing, “The suns’ll come out, tomorrow, bet your bottom credit that tomorrow… there’ll be suns.” I wake up and find that I’m watching the chariot race from Ben-Hur, except Judah Ben-Hur is ten years old, and Massala has a snout and weird ears.

Then I close my eyes to rest them, open them a moment later, and I’m in the middle of a big fight scene with robots and even more of the irritating Jar-Jar guys—the most distressing turn of events since one Ewok was joined in battle by several hundred—and I realize that I have absolutely no idea what’s going on. I’ve slept through the previous half hour, and I’ve completely lost the storyline. The final credits run. Ariel finally wakes up after sleeping through almost two hours of the film and announces she loved it. I have no idea whether I liked it or not because I’m still not entirely sure how the whole thing fits together.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 19: The family decides to see it again, during the day, since (a) Shana is now available to come along, and (b) Ariel and I have a much better shot at staying awake, having gotten sufficient sleep during the first viewing. It turns out to be a better film if you’re actually conscious. (Don’t laugh. There are some movies which only improve if you’re comatose.) At least I don’t have trouble following it this time.

So many people seem to want to have the same reaction to this one as they did to Star Wars twenty years ago. I find that I genuinely do. Twenty years ago, I thought. “Hunh. Great effects, but the dialogue is stilted, the actors are having trouble making it come to life, and the direction is kind of leaden. I liked American Graffiti better.” So now I’m watching Episode I, and I’m thinking the exact same thing.

Then again, it comes down to honing one’s abilities. Lucas has spent twenty years perfecting the craft of special effects, and on that score, the film is unassailable. But the rest of the stuff has been left to whither. His scripting, for instance, is still of the same caliber as it was two decades ago, back in the days when Harrison Ford threatened to tie Lucas to a chair and make him read his own dialogue out loud.

However, the good news—in retrospect—is that the flat characterizations of A New Hope became lots more fun under the scripting and directorial guidance of folks other than Lucas once Empire Strikes Back showed up, and I can only hope that Lucas will have the good sense to do that again. I start making mental guesses as to what the second and/or third films will contain. I list them here for you with no concern about spoilers since they give nothing away about Episode I, and they are pure speculation based on no inside information whatsoever. In fact, since I’ve read very few of the novels and manuals, for all I know some of this is already “established.”

1) Anakin’s mother is killed, Anakin blames Obi-Wan Kenobi for it for some reason, and that is the catalyst for sending him towards the Dark Side.

2) Anakin’s little black-haired friend grows up to be Boba Fett.

3) The limitations of the battle droids prompts the development of cheap cloning techniques designed to create almost limitless soldiers. These clone warriors are not only the basis for the stormtroopers of the other films, but for the Clone Wars alluded to in A New Hope.

4) At some point, a group of defenders will have to blow up a large space-going thing in order to defeat the bad guys.

Speaking of A New Hope, a local station that evening is wisely running the original film (the updated version). I’m watching Luke go up against the Death Star. The phone rings. The Force seems strong within the phone. I answer it. I was right: it’s Mark Hamill, calling to chat about something. It’s a surreal experience, talking with him on the phone while I watch him blow up the Death Star. A pity: If only Vader hadn’t been so dámņëd tall, they could cast Hamill to play Anakin in Episode III. Although now that I think about it, who knows how much of Vader was biological as opposed to mechanical? Kenobi said he’s more machine than man. So maybe the only human bits left of him are his head and machine-aided circulatory system. Which means he could have been any height before he was remade as Vader. Oh, Mr. Lucas, sir…

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)