‘The Phantom Menace’ Reconsidered

With its finger more on the pulse of the zeitgeist than usual, Disney opted for a May 4th (groan) rerelease of George Lucas’ brilliant Star Wars prequel trilogy, starting with The Phantom Menace, just in time for a long overdue mass reappraisal spurred on by the deserved unpopularity of their own sequel trilogy. Of course, Lucas’ genius is such that most dissatisfied nostalgic laymen can only intuit it, just as was always the case with the primordial mythos of the originals.

Star Wars, at its core, is a sandbox of eternal semiotics whose core futurist-fantasy contrast is so magical that not even the most corporate filmmaking of all time can truly kill it. The ability to grasp that magic is universal, of course, but the sheer Pavlovian resonance of its esoteric Ancient Grand Narrative trappings has oftentimes rendered it difficult to comparatively evaluate amongst its peers in contemporary cinema. Much blood has spilled, of nerd and normie alike, in the prequel-sparked Star Wars wars, but we may finally be turning the corner, though they will remain polarizing films. 

Episode I: The Phantom Menace will, for its many glaring surface flaws, will always remain the primary battleground. Let’s take a moment to reminisce on those flaws. Jar Jar Binks’s cringe has perhaps only gotten worse with age. “How rude!” he quips multiple times with varying appropriateness, an ill-advised robbery of Michelle from Full House’s catchphrase. Jake Lloyd is dopey as hell. Natalie Portman is as wooden as she’s ever been, which lesser fans of her than I would say was quite the feat.

The tone is often wonky and staid, a result of the ambitious Force-spiritual and prevailing goofy/childishness. It’s difficult to ignore all of this, even as one considers more charitable alternative functions of these issues. Jar Jar is Buster Keaton in experimental mocap. Jake Lloyd’s role is to look and act exactly like baby Luke Skywalker, and he does, as well as pure an innocent as possible to heighten the tragedy. It appears to be a distinct choice on Portman’s part to play Amidala as an emotionless drone and Padme as almost a girl next door. The final tonal point is a bit more difficult to excuse, as it appears an early bit of overambitiousness that the series later corrects. Still, that quality delights some viewers in and of itself, especially those who can tolerate Jar Jar for the IDEA of Jar Jar.

The only truly satisfying way to speak on the prequels in our collective moment of their reclamation is on their own terms, and that means more niche, historical ones than their mainstream status invites on the surface. They’re an archetypal, iconographic work whose designs and characters has brought out nearly infinite cultural returns. Some of the early defenders of The Phantom Menace have keyed in on the silent cinema modalities in the films. Notably, the performances and casting is more physical than verbal (in particular for Lloyd and later Hayden Christensen), and the crosscutting in Phantom’s climax is straight out of D.W. Griffith. Try observing  one of the windswept closeups as you would the romantic portraiture of the earliest cinema; they should appear as those same ciphers did then, the approach to character the same.

Keep in mind: Lucas is a contemporary and colleague of Steven Spielberg. He was never going to cohere to the emotionally optimized post-Spielberg mode of blockbuster filmmaking. His toolkit is the same as it was in 1977: a Ford and Kurosawa acolyte versed in Lang and even Riefenstahl’s visions of fascism. His only new tricks exist because of technology, and as we observe the effects landscape of today’s similarity to his prequel experiments, we know A New Hope doesn’t form the limits of his influence. It’s no wonder people misunderstood the movies; behind a bevy of turgid vocal performances and classically Lucas bad dialogue, their visual and rhythmic form was basically antiquated. But for film historians, these works are rich beyond peer. Call it a failure of translation, but The Phantom Menace, for all its idiocy, is also a work of painstaking anthropological research. Maybe it’s all too human.