Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) Review
4/10
A blockade over a small planet is disputed on tax grounds. Two Jedi are sent to negotiate. The negotiations fail, and the film spends the next two hours resolving a procedural conflict about a shipping route.
The 4 is for real achievements buried inside catastrophic decisions. The Duel of the Fates is the best lightsaber sequence anybody has staged, John Williams wrote a permanent piece of music for it, and the podrace is a real feat of construction. Almost everything around them is inert.
I find this film exhausting. Two hours of trade disputes, senate procedure and a child I’m asked to accept as the future Darth Vader, while the best music and the best fight in the series wait at the end like a reward for sitting still. I’d rewatch the duel on its own any day and skip everything else.
The problem is that nobody in the production had the standing to tell George Lucas that a story about trade federations has no protagonist in it.
Nobody Could Say No
Lucas wrote it, directed it, and financed it himself through Lucasfilm, which he owned. There was no studio with approval rights, no producer above him, and no financier who could withhold money.
That arrangement had been his ambition since the 1970s, and the film is a case study in what it costs. On the original trilogy he had collaborators with authority: Gary Kurtz producing, Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett on scripts, Irvin Kershner directing the middle film and arguing with him. I’d give a lot to have had one of those people in the room for this script.
By 1999 he’d removed all of it. He’s said since that the people around him had stopped questioning him, and that’s visible in the finished picture at the level of basic structure instead of in any individual scene. The clearest evidence is the opening crawl. A saga about a boy who becomes a monster opens with a paragraph about the taxation of trade routes, and no one present said that a nine-year-old audience wouldn’t follow it and neither would anybody else.
Kershner is the comparison that clarifies it. The Empire Strikes Back is the best film in the series and it’s the one Lucas didn’t direct, made from a script he didn’t write alone, by a director who argued with him about how it should be shot. Everything people love about that film came out of a disagreement.
Authority given away is only useful if somebody really uses it. Lucas spent twenty years acquiring total control and the control removed the friction that had produced his best work. The friction has to come from people who can lose you money or refuse to shoot something. Notes from people with no power to stop you’re suggestions, and suggestions are easy to wave off at scale.
For a writer the equivalent is an editor who can decline to publish. Feedback from readers who will praise you regardless is pleasant and worthless, and success tends to replace the first kind with the second.
There Is No Protagonist
Ask who the film is about and the answer keeps sliding. Qui-Gon makes the decisions and has no arc. Obi-Wan is present and passive. Padme is a queen operating behind a decoy and gets no interiority. Anakin arrives forty minutes in and is a child. That structural hole is why the film feels inert despite constant motion. Things happen at a steady rate and none of them are happening to anybody who wants something the audience can hold. That emptiness is the film’s deepest flaw. I’ll sit through stiff dialogue and clumsy comedy if somebody on screen wants something, and for most of this film nobody does.
Compare it to the 1977 film, which is Luke’s story from the first scene he’s in, with a want stated aloud and a home to leave. Every set piece there’s measured against a person. Here the set pieces are measured against a plot. Liam Neeson is the film’s best decision and the reason it holds together at all. Qui-Gon has a calm authority that lets him carry exposition without seeming to explain, and the film loses its last anchor when he dies. Palpatine is the other thing the film gets right, and it’s a long game. Ian McDiarmid plays a senator manipulating a crisis he manufactured, and the trade dispute that makes the opening so tedious is exactly the machinery he’s using. The politics are correct. They’re simply not dramatized as anybody’s problem.
The Duel Is Great
Ray Park was a martial artist and gymnast, Nick Gillard choreographed the sequence over months, and the result reset what a lightsaber fight could be.
The original trilogy staged duels as heavy, slow and emotional. That was correct for those films. This one stages a duel as a demonstration of physical mastery between people at the peak of a discipline, and the choice is defensible because the Jedi Order in this era is meant to be at its height.
Williams wrote Duel of the Fates for it, with a choir singing Sanskrit, and the music is doing most of the emotional work. The piece has outlived the film so thoroughly that it’s used to score things that have nothing to do with Star Wars.
Maul is the other reason it works. He speaks about three lines, has no interiority, and functions purely as a physical threat. That’s the correct use of a character with no writing behind him. Every later attempt to explain him has weakened him.
Maul is my favorite thing in the prequels, and I think it’s because Lucas left him alone. Whenever the film lets a character be simple, it gets better, and I wish it had trusted that instinct more often.
A character with no interior life can be a superb antagonist if the story uses him as a force instead of a person. The failure is giving him just enough backstory to raise questions the work won’t answer. Decide which kind you’re writing and commit. Landa in Inglourious Basterds is a person. Maul is a shark. Both work. A shark with a tragic childhood mentioned once works considerably less well.
Notice how much the music is carrying. If a sequence in your work depends on the reader supplying emotion, you need an equivalent, which in prose is usually rhythm and sentence length instead of content.
The Child and the Comedy
Jake Lloyd was eight during filming and the film asks him to carry the emotional center of a film about the origin of Darth Vader. That isn’t a thing you can ask an eight-year-old to do.
The decision is upstream of the performance. Anakin at nine can’t have the qualities the story needs, which are arrogance, appetite and the beginnings of something dangerous. So the film makes him sweet, and the trilogy then has to invent all of that from nothing in the next film. Jar Jar Binks is the other one and the criticism has been made at enormous length elsewhere. The structural problem, separate from the performance, is that the film assigns its comic relief to a character who’s also required to be consequential in the plot.
What Lloyd and Ahmed Best received afterward was disproportionate and ugly, and both have spoken about it. The decisions weren’t theirs, and the people making the decisions weren’t the ones who paid.
It Made a Billion Dollars
A hundred and fifteen million in production against just over a billion worldwide, the highest grossing film of 1999, and by some distance the most anticipated release of its decade. The commercial result guaranteed two more films made under identical conditions, and that frustrates me more than anything else about it. Nothing in the market told Lucas that anything had gone wrong, because financially nothing had. The technical legacy is real and mixed. This was among the first major films shot considerably with digital tools and it accelerated the industry’s move away from physical construction, and the podrace and Coruscant still hold up better than most of what followed them.
What survives now is a strange, partial thing: a score everybody knows, a duel everybody cites, a villain who became popular after the fact, and a film almost nobody rewatches whole.
There’s also a generation that grew up with it and defends it. That complicates every conversation about it. They’re not wrong about the podrace or the design or Maul, and the structural criticism and the affection can both be true, because people form attachments to whatever they happened to see at nine, and never to whatever happened to be well made that year.
Commercial success provides no information about quality and the market can’t supply the correction. A billion dollars is a signal to repeat the process exactly.
Which means the correction has to be structural and internal. Somebody in the room needs both the judgment to see the problem and the standing to stop it, and those two things rarely sit in the same person. The lesson for anybody working alone: build the constraint deliberately. A reader who will tell you a chapter doesn’t work, and whose opinion you’ve agreed in advance to act on, is the cheapest quality control available.
Should you watch The Phantom Menace?
Watch the last forty minutes and skip the rest without guilt. The Duel of the Fates is the best thing in the entire series and the podrace is a real feat, and on their own they’d score far higher than a 4. The ninety minutes before them are a procedural about a blockade with nobody at the center, made by a filmmaker who’d stopped letting anybody tell him no, and that dead weight is what sinks the film to a 4.
