Middling Menace
Assessing the Empire's new clothes
by Peter Keough
STAR WARS: EPISODE ONE, THE PHANTOM MENACE, Written and directed by George Lucas. With Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor,
Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd, Pernilla August, Ian McDiarmid, Ahmed Best, Ray
Park, Samuel L. Jackson, Kenny Baker, and Anthony Daniels. A Twentieth Century
Fox release. At the Cheri, the Fresh Pond, and the Chestnut Hill, and in the
suburbs.
Darth Vader conceived via virgin birth? The Force passed on by
infectious organisms that are like a Neo-platonic AIDS virus? These and an
underdeveloped C-3PO (Anthony Daniels), a racist amalgam named Jar Jar (Ahmed
Best) who's part Disney's Goofy and part Stepin Fetchit with a Rasta lilt, and
the most expensive flatulence joke in the history of cinema (may the farts be
with you?) are some of the more intriguing elements in a film that is largely
irrelevant after the marketing campaign that preceded it.
That hype now makes it hard to recall the original innocence and exuberance of
the Star Wars phenomenon. Not only did the first trilogy offer the
escapism of "a galaxy far, far away," but the bland Joseph Campbell soup of its
pop psychology notwithstanding, the Force had the pull of the Dark Side -- the
enigmatic charisma of Vader, the Oedipal ambiguity of Luke's lineage. Here,
though, at the story's supposed origins, the dark side is the down side. The
movie has no heart, dark or otherwise, only state-of-the-art accouterments.
Of Stars and Stern
NEW YORK -- Deep inside the well-fortified cinema at Broadway and 13th Street,
on the night of May 8, a resounding sucking sound could be heard. Only the very
privileged had been permitted to enter this
theater-turned-Star-Wars-shrine, and at that their tickets had to
be authenticated by hand-held black-light wands. Dry-witted film critics filled
most of the seats. A giddy Natalie Portman (Queen Amidala) was in attendance,
as was Samuel L. Jackson (a Jedi master) and Ahmed Best (Jar Jar Binks). But
the sucking sound was coming from Howard Stern as he ingratiated himself to as
many people, including security, as humanoidly possible.
Somewhere between the original 1977 Star Wars (which was largely
panned) and this year's The Phantom Menace (which has been inordinately
hyped), reality has taken a hard left. What began as a movie aimed at
10-year-old boys became first a fad, then a belief system, then a merchandising
tsunami. Now, Star Wars' creator and intermittent director, George
Lucas, is retreating from his L. Ron Hubbard status back to the safe harbor of
"It's just a movie." In a press conference at Manhattan's Regency Hotel
ballroom (which at first he declined to do and then agreed to), Lucas suggested
that though Star Wars is "designed to make people think about the larger
mysteries of life, there are definitely not enough answers in Star Wars
to constitute a religion."
But what about all the hype? Sitting under the glare of TV lights, Lucas cried
uncle. "I'm a little surprised at the imbalanced attention the film has gotten.
Actually we have tried very hard to not let the film be over-hyped, and it got
out of control and over-hyped anyway."
And the issue of fans worshipping at the temple of FAO Schwarz? Lucas awarded
himself an ecclesiastical indulgence: "Well, it doesn't seem to bother the
Church very much." Then he positioned himself as the underdog. "The movie and
the merchandising are two different things. They are not connected. I have had
to make sure that I have exploited everything I possibly can on the movie. It's
like being an Indian, when you kill a buffalo, you have to use everything. I'm
a very small company relative to the studios."
Late that same day, a different scenario was revealed by producer Rick
McCallum. Asked point blank whether the press was even needed, he answered,
"Not really, no." In other words, Star Wars is a project with no
downside, no risk, even with its $115 million budget. McCallum elaborated, "We
have a lot of other [related] businesses. We have the books, which are expected
to be huge. The soundtrack, which is expected to be very huge. And the toys are
huge."
Yet though the power of the cult, if not the Force, places Lucasfilm above the
critics, the filmmaker has not been able to extract himself completely from the
system. The usual understanding that reviews should not appear more than 24
hours before the release was breached, mostly at the behest of info-hungry
readers. Rolling Stone and the New York Post printed reviews two
weeks in advance. Lucasfilm feels abused.
McCallum has seen the light and it's emanating from the monitors of computer
screens. "There are 1400 Star Wars Web sites now with an average daily
involvement of seven or eight million people. Worldwide, on peaks like when the
trailer comes out, there's 30 to 40 million people. You can have a kid write an
article that eight or 10 million people read in a week. That's five times the
subscription rate of Time or Newsweek." Bottom line for McCallum
is that this will probably be the last time the press gets a whack at
previewing a Star Wars movie.
Meanwhile, this imbroglio over hype and control has produced a counter-swing
subcult embodied in the single persona of Howard Stern. So sycophantic was he
at the screening that he rearranged the gravitational pull in his immediate
vicinity. When he next got on the air, however, he did an about-face, reaching
the by-now hardly original critical conclusion that Stars Wars is not as
good as it gets.
-- Cynthia Amsden
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As for the story, the prospects dim with the unscrolling of the torturously
written introduction -- trade routes? tax disputes? bickering congress? It's
like recent headlines without the sex scandals. The planet of Naboo on the
galaxy's fringes is at the focus of a nebulous conflict between the blundering
Republic and the Federation, the corporate precursor of the evil empire to
come. Sent to negotiate the dispute are the Jedi knight Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam
Neeson, more dispirited than detached) and his apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan
McGregor as the younger Alec Guinness seems more sour than tart). But the
noseless, mandarin-like Federation representatives (shades of the green menace)
have a covert invasion and more in mind, and the Jedis must flee with
kabuki-coiffed Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman, lost in ornate costumes,
hairstyles, and a pointless subplot lifted from Kagemusha) to the
familiar desert planet of Tatooine.
How to combine an update of the Ben-Hur chariot race, a cameo from
Jabba the Hutt, and the appearance of the future Darth Vader? Strapped for cash
to repair their ship, the Jedis decide to bet that nine-year-old Anakin
Skywalker (Jake Lloyd, more Dennis than menace) can win a "pod race" held by
the obese, slug-like crimelord. Qui-Gon notes that the young slave boy has an
overdose of the Force and decides that he is "the Chosen One" who will restore
balance to the universe, a conviction supported when Anakin's mother (Pernilla
August) shrugs her shoulders in answer to questions about the boy's paternity.
When the skeptical Obi-Wan objects to his master's affinity for the precocious
stranger, Qui-Gon points out that there is no such thing as coincidence, at
least not in a movie with such a contrived plot.
Be that as it may, the resultant race is one of the film's most thrilling
sequences, and aside from the phallic and vaginal imagery (whether he knows it
or not, Lucas rivals David Cronenberg in that regard) one of the most
gratuitous. But it does get Qui-Gon and company off the ground, and what
follows is a multi-front engagement, related in laborious parallel editing
backed by a portentous John Williams score (though his climactic Carl Orff-ish
and Wagnerian strains are memorable), that's a reconfiguration of The Return
of the Jedi. While friendly fighters attack a prototype of the Death Star,
the Jedi and Queen Amidala sneak up on the Federation usurpers in the throne
room, and Jar Jar and his Gungans -- a Caribbean version of the pseudo-African
Ewoks -- wage primitive warfare (Lucas's anti-technology message consists of
delivering a neutron bomb with a catapult) against hordes of android warriors
(like the skeleton army in Jason and the Argonauts, but less scary).
One major development from the previous episodes is that, except for some
mano a mano between the Jedi knights and bad guy Darth Maul (a
charismatic Ray Park, whose red-and-black-patterned face and horns make him
look like Satan or a cheap carpet), no humans are injured in the course of this
movie. Menace's reliance on computerized creatures not only lets Lucas
get away with the racial stereotyping of Jar Jar, the Asian-inspired Federation
bad guys, and a big-nosed housefly of a slave trader who seems like an outtake
from Aladdin, it also lets him engage in wholesale slaughter with
impunity. Legions of androids are dismembered, many by young Anakin at the
controls of what looks like the galaxy's greatest video game. Given the kid's
destiny, not to mention the recent nightmare in Colorado, this Phantom
might be more menacing than it seems.
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