But I love Star Wars???

Rating: 6/10 (4 August 2014)

Watching the older movies, I found it incredible that "Phantom Menace" could be so bland, a result of featureless characters, an uninvolving story and excessive use of CGI special effects that never mesh with the story, but threaten to override it. So overdone are the effects, that watching this movie reminded me less of the first trilogy than of "Cool World", Bakshi's misfire mix of live-action and animation. In this entry, a young Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan Mcgregor), only a student Jedi, travels with his teacher to the planet Naboo on a mission of mercy. Jedi Qui-Gonn Jin is older and wiser than Kenobi, but both are dispatched to prevent the invasion of idyllic Naboo by the droid armies of the trade federation. When this fails, the two save that planet's leader, the elected Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman), and retreat to the safety of Corsuscant, the home of galactic senate. Heavy damage forces them to make an unscheduled stop on arid Tatooine, where they enlist the aid of a young Aankin Skywalker, a boy slave with the potential to become a Jedi master. Safely reaching Coruscant, Amidala finds only bureaucratic indifference to her world's plight. Returning to Naboo to lead the fight against the federation, Amidala and the Jedi's enlist the aid of the Gungans, amphibians who live in large cities secreted in Naboo's oceans. While the naboo battle the federation on the ground and in space, and Amidala leads a desperate charge directly into her occupied capital, the Jedis are forced to confront an evil Jedi, an emissary of the long-thought-dead order of the sith Jedi and closer to the power behind the federation than the craven Federation viceroys. Actually, the plot doesn't sound half-bad, if that's enough after a 16 year wait. Less generous might compare it to a mediocre add-on level for the Star Wars computer game, Jedi Knight. The characters are incredibly one-note in comparison with the heroes of the older films. Even the Jedi seem interchangeable with Obi Wan seeming as effortless in his moves as Qui-Gon. The older Jedi is also pretty monochrome considering the dialogue hinting at a rebellious streak (he clashes often with the Jedi counsel). The characters themselves speak in hushed tones and drop names that are familiar to Star Wars fans but will probably baffle anybody else. There's no rebelliousness to any of the characters - where's Han Solo in all of this? The controversies of the alien characters' very human ethnic traits probably wouldn't have come to the for if the human characters themselves had enough character of their own and embodied some of those negative traits themselves. In the older films, we probably wouldn't have noticed the orientalisms of the greedy Watoo or the craven Federation honchos, or minded the comic relief of Jar Jar Binks. Hey everybody's an idiot, everybody makes mistakes, that was what the first trilogy seemed to say. And there's no menace either. Darth Maul is no Darth Vader (though his moves would put the latter evil lord to shame, a true dark lord seldom needs to prove that), and certainly he gets no fun lines ("apology accepted....) The underlying evil is the mysterious Darth Sidious who appears mostly in the form of a hologram beamed to the federation viceroys. But Sidious (whose probably isn't sufficiently mysterious for true star wars fans) doesn't seek to cow his minions either. He issues commands which the viceroys would probably have issued anyway. And there's none of the irony of the first films which here should centre around the manoeuvrings of Senator Palpatine. That name enough lets fans know what's going on, but his insistence that political circumstances require drastic changes should be enough to set off anybody's warning bells no matter how apparently benign his intentions. Instead, the characters all seem so dim, why bother worrying. In one telling scene at the end of the film, the senator - now the Chancellor - meets Anakin Skywalker for the first time. We'll be looking at your progress quite closely, the smiling galactic power holder says. Because I'm such a Star Wars fan, I've pretty much got to do the same with the other films. Perhaps "Phantom Menace" had to be a botch, something to teach Lucasfilm how not to do a Star Wars film, a learning experience like THX-1138. Hey, there's plenty of time to get things right before Memorial Day Weekend of 2002.