Twenty Years Since The Phantom Menace

How have the years treated it?

There’s a brief moment in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace where George Lucas *almost* has me.

Anakin Skywalker is trying get his podracer going but the engines won’t start. We see the crowd taking much amusement from this, and even Watto, the slave owner who Anakin belongs to, can’t stop laughing. It’s a ridiculous moment marred with incongruous CGI built around an undoubtedly offensive antisemitic stereotype. And yet, for a second, it totally brings me into the fairy tale tragedy of Anakin’s hard life.

It’s hard to figure out whether The Phantom Menace is a stranger work as a text or as a cultural artefact. It came out as surely the most anticipated film of all time (sorry to whatever other film I’m obviously forgetting), then you know what happened next. The Phantom Menace defined the nerdier part of the internet for the next two decades. Everything should be treated with cynicism. Anger is the fuel that drives engagement. Ironic detachment is the only way to survive. The Hobbit trilogy was framed as the Lord of the Rings franchise’s Star Wars prequels moment. This one film (and the two sequels, but really it was this one that set the tone for the whole conversation) were the epitome of failure, of letdown, of disappointment.

Then something interesting happened. Through a strange alchemy of the franchise returning to a very original trilogy-influenced aesthetic, the children who grew up with the films coming of age, and simply the qualities of the texts themselves, the Star Wars prequels became kind of cool. In the cases of the first two points, this could have largely been predicted beforehand. As Mike Ryan wrote back when the franchise relaunched itself in 2015, “the Star Wars prequels will eventually look so different than the other 20 some Star Wars movies and counting that people will start to like them for just how nutty they are”. Its aesthetic choices have been so rejected, both by Star Wars itself and every other blockbuster franchise that “learned lessons” from its failure, that these films increasingly stand alone as otherworldly.

But does The Phantom Menace as a film merit, for good or ill, this “otherworldly” reputation? Is it a secret masterpiece that everyone misread in 1999? Or is it simply a terrible film, totally deserving of the scorn it received? The answer to all of the above questions might be yes.

To start with, what’s The Phantom Menace about? What’s the central plot of the film. Anyone could tell you that the original Star Wars is about Luke Skywalker rising up from Tatooine and destroying the Death Star. But what’s The Phantom Menace’s core narrative? Is it about Qui-Gon Jin, finding a talented young potential Jedi and taking a chance on him despite everyone warning against him, being sure it is his destiny to fulfil the prophecy? Is it about Anakin Skywalker, the poor slave boy, rising above the hardships of his life to show everyone what he’s capable of? Lucas seems to believe it’s about Padme Amidala, and her struggles to lead the people of Naboo when besieged by the Trade Federation. That the director of the film seems to think this is a story about someone who barely has an arc, who spends most of the film hiding her identity from the audience for a theoretically clever third act twist, indicates the problems at play here. The original Star Wars films were character-centric narratives, heroic tales of Luke, Han and Leia. But that’s just not what Lucas is going for this time.

In what might be his boldest move, Lucas is trying to use a fundamentally different mode of storytelling in The Phantom Menace than any of the previous Star Wars movies. Zeynep Tufekci recently wrote an excellent article on the way another popular genre franchise, Game of Thrones, handles these different types of storytelling. That show, she argued, shifted from being a sociological story, one where “the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them”, to a psychological story, of the sort that “depend on viewers identifying with the characters and becoming invested in them to carry the story, rather than looking at the bigger picture of the society, institutions and norms that we interact with and which shape us”.

Reading Tufecki’s argument (which you really should, it’s outstanding), it struck me that Star Wars followed the same pattern, but in reverse. The original three films were psychological stories. The backdrop was the struggle to “restore freedom to the galaxy” against an oppressive imperial regime, but this was ultimately just part of the struggle in Luke’s journey to becoming a Jedi. The first act of Return of the Jedi is willing to completely ignore this epic war in favour of the private quest of rescuing Han Solo. The twist at the end of The Empire Strikes Back has essentially nothing to do with the Rebel Alliance’s plight and the greater impact to the galaxy. These are stories of heroes and villains, of character quests.

The prequels do not function in this way. In The Phantom Menace, every character exists as part of the greater story of the Trade Federation’s blockade against Naboo, the pretext for Palpatine (a character, yes, but one who mostly lurks in the background) rising to the position of Supreme Chancellor, which sets off a chain of events that leads to the dawn of the Empire with Darth Vader ruling by the now Emperor’s side. Something like Game of Thrones in its early seasons is a much, much better work of sociological storytelling than The Phantom Menace in part because it still manages to show its characters existing as humans, not merely pawns in a larger narrative. Lucas, in this instance at least, just isn’t all that interested in his characters as anything other than figures to illustrate the greater themes he’s getting at.

You can see it in his direction choices as well as the script. The film spends a lot of time showing us great landscapes and incredible alien worlds, prioritising this over cutting to the actors (and the film does have an obtuse beauty to it, even if it doesn’t conform to the original trilogy aesthetic). It feels odd that Lucas originally wanted his great friend Steven Spielberg to direct this film. Considering how close they are, Lucas would have surely trusted Spielberg to make his own directorial choices (as he did with Irvin Kershner on Empire Strikes Back), rather than insisting everything had to be done his way (as he did with Richard Marquand on Return of the Jedi). But Spielberg is the master of popular psychological stories. Had he directed this film, he would have surely emphasised the character journeys of Qui-Gon and Anakin over everything else. A filmmaker who looks to bleed every drop of emotion into a scene would have surely taken things in a different direction than Lucas’ deliberately detached vision. The iconic Spielberg shot is of a character staring at something in awe. Lucas would much rather cut past that and show us what they’re looking at.It’s this approach that drives the love for the prequels as much as the hate. Lucas is making these kids’ blockbusters about complex themes and the decay of democracy into fascism. The Star Wars Ring Theory, by Mike Klimo, suggests a structure by which Lucas looks to repeat his themes and ideas throughout the saga, but I kind of suspect this barely scratches the surface of how these stories are structured. In an era when blockbusters increasingly just seem to borrow from other blockbusters and comic books, Lucas is pulling from all sorts of obscure sources and even ancient mythology. It’s become something of a joke to call the Marvel movies our modern day myths, but the Star Wars prequels are evoking that vibe much more strongly. Again, this is in part because they don’t treat the characters as fully realised humans as much as cogs in a larger narrative, which is a big part of why they resonate so poorly. But there’s really nothing quite like them tonally. Through a combination of very deliberate, bold choices and poor execution, Lucas made something that feels unique.

A fair amount of that unique feeling, it must be said, comes in a very negative and damaging context. Back in 1999, the idea that the aliens in the film were drawn from racial stereotypes was very divisive, but two decades on it feels less like a bold reading of subtext than quite blatant text. “How in the world [could you] take an orange amphibian”, Lucas claimed while promoting the film, “and say that he’s a Jamaican? Even the idea of taking his ears and calling them dreadlocks, is a strange stretch as far as I’m concerned. It’s completely absurd”. That the director of the film could claim such a literalist reading is quite a heel turn when one considers his own interest in allegories. He has been very clear in the past that Return of the Jedi is specifically about the Vietnam War, with the Ewoks specifically cast as the Viet Cong against the American forces here represented by the Empire. If the Ewoks can represent more than cute teddybears, Jar Jar can be more than an orange amphibian. I have little doubt that Lucas had no idea what he was doing here. We know that he borrows heavily from the things he loved as a child, largely made in the 1930s and ‘40s, and much of that probably wasn’t exactly woke. But that he didn’t even notice the ways the tropes he was borrowing from included harmful racial stereotypes speaks ill of him. And it’s hardly limited to Jar Jar. Boss Nass is obviously ripped from colonialist portrayals of African tribe leaders. The aforementioned Watto trades very heavily in antisemitic stereotypes. The Nemoidians feel clearly drawn from Asian, primarily Japanese, archetypes, maybe a little from Lucas’ beloved films of Akira Kurosawa, but also probably from a lot of racist depictions in some of the World War II films he grew up with. Lucas seems to believe that subtext is only subtext if he intended it. This is obviously ridiculous. He messed up on this in a huge way, and there’s really no serious defence of these caricatures.

The Phantom Menace is an odd beast to reckon with. All the negative elements that everyone remembers are totally still there. Jake Lloyd is barely watchable, but somehow Natalie Portman is giving an even worse performance. The dialogue is the dialogue. And the positive elements heralded by its defenders? They’re all here, too. The film is playing with complex ideas and themes, as Lucas pulls all the way from Buddhism and Ancient Greek mythology to the trashy serials he loved growing up. It is all the disparate things that people say it is. And it can be such an odd beast because it came from Lucas, who remains such a peculiar figure in many ways. The Walt Disney Company will make a million Star Wars movies and most of them will be better than this one on a million different levels, but none will ever be as authored as The Phantom Menace. Francis Ford Coppola has lamented in the past that his commercial success led to us losing the experimental films that Lucas could have made. I’d suggest to Mr. Coppola that he look harder, because they’re right here. For better or worse.

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Thanks for reading! I had intended to get this up in time for the anniversary, but I am deeply disorganised, so you have it now. The plan is to write about all the Star Wars films gradually between now and The Rise of Skywalker coming out in December, so hope you liked this one.