Return of the Menace
Hyped reissue of preposterous and incoherent travesty all about greed
Inconceivable though it may seem, one of the worst movies of the 1990s returned this month to cinemas around the world.
Yet, should we really be surprised that The Phantom Menace — artistically a scarcely breathing corpse at the time of its much ballyhooed 1999 release — should now be getting a gala 25th anniversary resuscitation? To be honest, it's a testament to the resilience of the Star Wars mystique. In spite of the unkind things done to it — of which The Phantom Menace is but one lamentable example — it trudges on.
However, the current reissue is also a testament to Hollywood greed.
The Star Wars franchise has long been a possession of the Disney organization, which is also the industry's most conspicuous recycling bin. So in the midst of those often mindless and unnecessary galactic spinoffs, why not seek to squeeze some extra dollars out of those diehard fans who have forgotten or — in the case of a younger generation — never known how bad Phantom actually was?
In any event, there's vindication for Disney in the solid box-office figures chalked up on opening weekend. Furthermore, let's not forget that its original release a quarter of a century ago was a colossal financial success in spite of a lukewarm critical reception. After all, fans had been waiting 16 years for filmmaker George Lucas to deliver his promised prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy that had seized the imagination of fans so forcefully back in the 1970s. They were also excited that for the first time since the original Star Wars in 1977, Lucas himself was back as writer and director. They could not allow themselves to be disappointed — which is why a goodly portion of the fan base still looks back on The Phantom Menace's clunky arrival with moist-eyed reverence.
Cults can be notoriously impervious to reality. More than a month before The Phantom Menace's opening, I visited a couple of Los Angeles sites to talk to diehard fans who were already camping out with lawn chairs and sleeping bags outside cinemas where it would be showing. Obsessed with being at the front of the line for tickets, they talked about it with such reverence that they might have been awaiting the Second Coming.
On the other side of the continent, in New York City,
The Phantom Menace was to première at the opulent Ziegfeld Theatre. Those of us there for the press night were not impervious to a sense of excitement and anticipation — but all it took were those numbing opening references to trade blockades and taxation to trigger twinges of anxiety.
To be fair, The Phantom Menace does not belong at the bottom of the franchise's rubbish heap. That spot is reserved something like The Rise of Skywalker, a particularly awful product of Disney's Star Wars stewardship.
Indeed, if judged only for its stunning visual and technological spectacle, it would earn five stars. The astonishment of that lightsabre battle and the exhilarating pod-racing sequences ensure it a permanent place in the memory books.
Unfortunately such scenes are trapped within a preposterous and incoherent narrative. Lucas as screenwriter is responsible for the atrocious dialogue, and accomplished actors like Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman and Ewan Mcgregor often have about as much reality as toystore action figures.
Perhaps Mark Hamill, the franchise's original Luke Skywalker, got it right when he once mischievously observed that if technology ever reached the point where Lucas could get away with using computerized creations, rather than live actors, he probably would.
The sad truth is that Lucas felt a need with this much-hyped movie to reassert his credentials not just as the franchise's guiding genius but also as a director and writer. He hadn't directed since the first Star Wars in 1977. Its illustrious predecessor, The Empire Strikes Back, is the most revered of all the entries in the canon, but it was also graced with a brilliant director in Irvin Kershner and a superb screenwriter in Lawrence Kasdan. With The Phantom Menace, Lucas hoped to remind us that he was their equal, and he failed.
One suspects that he was still unaware of the extent of his failure when a few years later he invited journalists to his fabled Skywalker Ranch to see his underwhelming followup to The Phantom Menace — the badly written and directed Attack of the Clones.
Lucas, a shy and likable man, was there to talk to us and report that people he trusted were telling him that The Phantom Menace was the best movie ever made. Yes, there had been negative reactions, but he considered them unfair — especially when it came to Jar Jar Binks, the hideously unfunny creature he had proudly computerized into existence for Phantom Menace. As proof of the movie's actual popularity, he would cite the favourable review carried in a small-town paper from his own loyal Marin County area of California.
According to the grapevine, his colleagues at Skywalker Ranch were in protective mode. The bad reviews were kept from him; feedback from the wider world was first subjected to a filtering job by attentive staff.
In other words, Lucas was cocooned from reality. One could say the same thing about his most blinkered followers — yet the Force endures. And perhaps he wasn't so blinded to the truth after all when, in a moment of clarity, he once acknowledged the real nature of the business he was in.
“Popcorn pictures have always ruled. Why do people go and see them. Why is the public so stupid? That's not my fault.”