Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

Our Review

Twenty plus years of waiting for more Star Wars, and this is what arrived: a movie about trade negotiations. The Phantom Menace is not the disaster of its reputation, but it is a crushing disappointment, a film where George Lucas traded the mythic simplicity of the original for senate procedure and a nine year old who says yippee. The plot involves a blockade, a tax dispute whispered about in committee rooms, and midi chlorians, an idea that explained the Force and thereby broke it.

And yet chunks of it are excellent. The podrace is a genuine set piece, fifteen minutes of pure speed and sound design that holds up against anything in the franchise. Darth Maul is a masterpiece of design held back by roughly three lines, and the three way duel at the end, set to Duel of the Fates, is the best choreographed fight of the prequel era. Liam Neeson carries the whole film as Qui-Gon Jinn, a maverick Jedi who deserved a better movie, and Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan is a promising seed of what he would become.

The problems are structural. Jake Lloyd is asked to do more than any child actor should, Natalie Portman is pinned under costumes and regal monotone, and Jar Jar Binks remains an exhausting miscalculation in every scene he touches. There is a great thirty minute movie stretched inside a two hour sixteen minute one. Worth watching for the race, the duel, and Neeson’s gravity. Five out of ten, graded kindly.