In a Parallel Universe, Far Far Away

Rating: Null/10 (4 July 1999)

With "Episode I - The Phantom Menace," George Lucas has created a masterpiece of end-of-the-century, Post-Modernist satire.
"Episode I - The Phantom Menace" is Lucas's brilliantly subversive, daring presentation of the first "Star Wars," as if it had been made in an alternate universe where his career was prematurely destroyed by a movie utterly lacking in wit, charm, excitement, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher.
"Episode I - The Phantom Menace" is the picture that wary studio executives suspected that Lucas would make: a weirdly bombastic, hopelessly lifeless mess that would die at the box-office.
The fact that "Episode I - The Phantom Menace" is not a b.o catastrophe is George Lucas's exquisitely Kubrickian point. He's chuckling quietly over the irony that a film that would have failed twenty-two years ago will be a huge money maker. "The Phantom Menace" could not fail because it's linked to the "Star Wars" Lucas actually did release in 1977, not to mention the phenomenal success of the sequels, and the ancillary products.
It's obvious that Lucas is commenting on the present-day reality of big budget, mainstream fantasy moviemaking. There's no place anymore for surprises like "2001," "Alien," or the Terminator pictures. Style and content means nothing. The only things that count are the franchise, the logo and the slickness of the C.G.I.s.
Bravo to George Lucas for deliberately making an almost unwatchably mechanical film that cleverly lures his audience into seeing themselves, like Dorothy and her Pals when they reach Oz, for the manipulated suckers that they are.