disappointment due to missed opportunities

Rating: Null/10 (20 May 1999)

As the Phantom Menace drew to its finale, I thought to myself how nostalgia seems to have been the driving "creative" force behind much of the action and its motivation depicted on the screen. For a movie that was not supposed to be "Star Wars", it sure borrowed quite heavily from it.
I'll start off by saying that overall, I was disappointed with the film. Not so much because I expected a perfect movie, but because it was apparent to me that in spite of the high gloss, big budget, and ubiquitous marketing, there was a really good movie trying to emerge from the Phantom Menace; unfortunately, George Lucas seems to have repressed that potential in favor of simply trying to make "Star Wars for the 90s". The Phantom Menace doesn't even succeed, however, in capturing the same charm that the original movie had, in its own fleeting moments, and in its own cultural idiom.
To backtrack, I think it's important to remember that the original movie wasn't all that tightly woven and compelling either. Having seen the older movies in the previous trilogy recently, but with a far more discerning eye than I had when I was, say, 13, I found them to have plenty of corny dialogue and cliched moments. The Phantom Menace certainly lives up to the earlier movies in this regard. But the earlier movies, in my opinion, did have their moments of genuine pathos, and interesting explorations of the role of technology in our lives versus the role of faith and simplicity. The characters sometimes came across as flat, but they at least exhibited the same kinds of weaknesses and strengths that we do.
One thing is without question - the Phantom Menace is visually spectacular. It's spectacular even in comparison to the visuals in a number of other recent movies with computer-generated effects, which is no mean feat. Unfortunately, there are occasions in which the impressive backdrops come to overshadow whatever actual storyline is evolving among the characters. More than once I watched the background scenery instead of the live action. I don't really fault the actors, since I imagine that performing under the circumstances must have been quite difficult - I read somewhere that 95% of the movie has at least some form of digital element to it. That means that most all the time, the live actors were interacting with or performing amidst "ghosts", or elements which wouldn't be added to the film until post-production. In spite of that, the actors seem to do OK, although I read a segment from an interview with Ewan Macgregor, who plays the young Obi-Wan, who said that it was often frustrating having to act with so much that wasn't actually there in front of him.
The problems with this technology-driven movie go beyond that, however. There are some scenes where the live-action actors can only react to what they are observing (which is all computer-rendered). I found these scenes difficult to watch, not because of the emotional drama in the story, but because I realized that I was basically watching other people watching technology. It made me unusually self-conscious while watching a movie, and not in a thought-provoking or interesting way. It simply reminded me of how popular self-reference has become in our arts, and how technology allows us to take voyeurism to a new level - we can be entertained simply by watching other people be entertained, even if we are contemptuous toward those other people.
One staple of Star Wars movies seems to be how the characters ride dangerously on the edge between archetype and stereotype. Certainly some aspects of this can be helpful in figuring out a character's motivations, but other times I find it distracting, especially since almost every non-human character is depicted as conniving, bumbling or inefficacious; this problem is compounded in that the non-human characters sometimes have characteristics which are reminiscent of very human racial or ethnic stereotypes. In this case, I just wonder why as much imagination and cleverness wasn't put into developing these characters as was put into developing the eye-popping sets and visuals.
Another distraction was the number of characters who were introduced or included in the Phantom Menace who had no real value to the storyline. Yet another was a lack of context for some of the actions taking place in the movie. Sure, we in the audience know a lot about the Star Wars mythology and all, but these movies are *prequels*, for gods sake - I would think that the whole point of a prequel is to make clear how things came to be in the original story. Instead, the audience is left waiting for the *next* prequel movie, Episode II, to find out more on what made the Star Wars universe what it was when we first saw that Star Destroyer bearing down on Princess Leia's ship way back in 1977. So, you'll have to excuse me if I seem annoyed about too much deferred gratification. I came away from the Phantom Menace still not knowing much more about this fantasy realm than I did when I walked in; and now, I also don't know much about what I even saw in *this* movie.
In defense of the movie, I will say that the tone is much more to my liking than Return of the Jedi. I like intrigue, and am not uncomfortable with a more elaborate or even confusing plot. I think I was one of the few people who wasn't bothered by not understanding, say, the plot to Tom Cruise's "Mission: Impossible" a couple years back. But again, my defense only goes so far - I kept thinking that there were some real missed opportunites in conveying some really interesting ideas through the storyline. That's what I mean when I say that there was a really good movie trying to get out. If only a few things had been done differently, I would have been much more forgiving of the Phantom Menace than I am. I don't expect sterling drama all the time, but I did want a little more wit, character development, and exposition just to tie me over. Instead, I saw a lot of formulaic overreliance on "what worked before", simply updated for a more computerized and impatient audience.