Triumphantly prevails against the best efforts of its creator

Rating: 9/10 (20 August 1999)

Some apologists for "The Phantom Menace" - not all - defend it by saying, "Yes, it has its flaws; but it's just as good as the original Star Wars, which had the very same flaws."
After a while it's hard to avoid the suspicion that they're right. Not about "The Phantom Menace" being a good film - it's ridiculous to suppose that they could be right about THAT - but about "Star Wars" being no better. Maybe we've been deluded these past decades. Similar delusions have persisted for just as long - longer - in the past. Could it be that "Star Wars", too, was an unimaginative, flatly directed, kiddie movie?
NO! Most certainly, it was not. One thing "The Phantom Menace" reveals, though, is that "Star Wars" was not fated to be as good as it was. It became great partly by accident.
Harrison Ford has genuine charm; Mark Hamill is perfect as the innocent adolescent with a tendency to whine; Alec Guinness managed to be at one and the old time an old sage and an ex-warrior; and no other female lead had the strength of Carrie Fischer - at least, not while playing a traditional princess. Maybe this perfect cast was assembled by sheer chance. (Lucas never replicated the feat, after all.) But so what? It's still a perfect cast. They all created memorable characters; and moreover, as characters and actors, interacted successfully with each other.
Mos Eisley's spaceport was also a fortuitous accident. "Never will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy" - yet it managed to avoid being a thriving, respectable looking town largely because George Lucas didn't have the money to turn it into one. And a good thing too. It's possibly the most frightening place in the Star Wars universe: truly grimy, light years away from real civilisation, crawling with odd and touchy aliens.
With art direction, special effects, and music, too, George Lucas struck gold. Has a science fantasy world ever looked better? Have special effects ever succeeded in making such a world look more real? Arguably not - although this isn't what makes "Star Wars" unique. Nor is the music (although the music is part of what makes it unique). No: there really is magic here. It sounds a clichÃ©, but there IS something about the simple but honestly pursued story, or the world, or the score, or something, that lifts "Star Wars" high above by-the-numbers space opera - the same indefinable element that makes "Das Rheingold" more than a soap opera with occasional sorcery, and "The Lord of the Rings" more than the first of five thousand episodic fantasy adventures. This is the company "Star Wars" belongs in.
If the film isn't quite up to the standard of the opera or the book, well... maybe that's because it found its way into such company by accident. It belongs there all the same.