Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

I actually saw this a couple of days ago. (I’m writing this on the 23rd.) I can’t let this one go like I did Election, though. Let me just get that one out of the way real quick: Good movie. Lot’s of voice overs. Reese was great. Matthew Broderick was cool. Best movie MTV has made yet. Definitely made up for Varsity Blues.

Yes, there were previews. Not as many as I expected, though. And they all looked pretty good. One for the new Travolta movie, The General’s Daughter. Looks pretty intense if not wholly original. The new Austin Powers movie looks great (and so does Heather Graham–Oh behave!) Yet another Star Wars bit in the new trailer. Dr. Evil and Austin have a showdown

Dr. Evil: (breathing heavily in his space mask) Austin, I am your father!

Austin: NNNooooo! That’s impossible!

Dr. Evil: Well, maybe not. I have no proof to back that up.

Do it in their voices and with a small amount of pinky and it’s really funny.

And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for:

Dum-dum-duum-duuuum-dum-dum-dum-duuuum-duum!

The first part of the Star Wars Legacy has finally come to us! George Lucas has graced us with his presence! The full story is coming to us! We will know the whole truth!

But not yet. Right now we only know a little bit about how Anakin (er, Ani) grew up. He’s just a little slave boy on Tatooine who occasionally races pod racers in what I think was probably Beggar’s Canyon. Soon a couple of guys in robes come to his home planet to hide a queen from the Trade Federation. The Federation is getting too greedy and Queen Amidala is against them, so she has to run. Her protectors are, of course, Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Oh, I almost forgot: somewhere along the way, just before they meet the queen, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan meet up with Jar Jar Binks. He’s a weird looking rabbit type creature who generally says things like “How rude!” Not too intelligent or interesting. But he’s computer generated, so that’s pretty cool.

For some reason (probably because it’s a Star Wars movie) I really liked the film. The special effects were amazing. I’ve never seen so many computer generated characters who actually looked real. Jar Jar, Anakin’s owner, the Battle Droids, Jabba, etc. They all looked perfectly real this time. Much better than even the Jabba in the Special Edition. And then there’s Jar Jar’s home. Wow! It’s an underwater world that rivals the one in The Abyss for the beauty of computer graphics.

The battle scenes were also pretty amazing. From the pod race (which kind of counts as a battle scene) to the final battle between Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan and Darth Maul (one of the best sword fights I’ve ever seen with or without light sabers).

The acting was pretty good. Jake Lloyd wasn’t as annoying as I thought he was be as Anakin. But I really wish people would stop calling him Ani. I kept waiting for him to come out and say, “Listen! My name isn’t Ani! And if you don’t stop calling me that you can bet your bottom dollar that, when I become Darth Vader, the sun ain’t gonna come out for you!” I was kind of annoyed with how many times he said “Yippee!”, though. No one says that. No one ever said that. I’ll bet that, when George was looking at the dailies, he said to himself, “Why did I have him say that so often? I’m a moron.” Anakin was still more grown up than Luke was in the first two movies.

Liam Neeson was pretty cool as Qui-Gon. Think of a cross between Spock and the original Obi-Wan. I was pretty concerned with the number of lines he recycled from the original Obi-Wan and Yoda. “I feel a great disturbance in the Force.” I guess it’s kind of an all purpose line, though.

Natalie Portman was a perfect mix of regalness and Princess Leia-ness as Queen Amidala. The problem was that we never really knew who she was until half way through the movie. (Well, some of us did because we had seen the action figures and heard them “talk.”)

Then there’s Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi. I didn’t know if I would like him in the role, but now I know he was perfect. He does a great Alec Guinness impression. I’ve never heard anyone else do the voice so well. He’s also great with the action. He handles his saber well. In fact, according to the IMDb, he was so good that he kept making the noises as he was filming the fighting scene. Imagine being a 20-something in this movie with a light saber. You’d be making “vsh-vsh-CHKCHKCHK!” noises, too. Lucas, alas, had to edit them out. Oh well. No onomatopoeias for Ewan.

Samuel L. Jackson (as Jedi Council member Mace Windu), C-3PO and R2-D2 really didn’t have much to do. They appeared and disappeared, especially Mace and 3PO. R2 was pretty cool, though. And his first scene is a classic. It’s like playing pool with R2 units.

And some “look for”s: Warwick Davis (Wicket W. Warwick and Willow) makes his fourth appearance in a Star Wars movie. He’s a face in the crowd at the pod races. If you know he’s there you’ll see him. He’s hard to miss and he’s shown twice. Also, from what I’ve heard, E.T. makes an appearance in the Federation trial scene. His people are in one of the floating jury boxes or whatever they are all the way at the bottom of the screen. We’ll probably have to wait for video for that one. Also, an R2 unit gets knocked over in the junk shop on Tatooine by, you guessed it, Jar Jar the Annoying. The bottom of the droid says THX-1138. I didn’t see the second two things, but I’ve heard that they’re there. I’ll look for them the next time I see it, though.

Now the problems. And there are a few.

What’s up with the characters? I really didn’t get a sense of any of them. Even Anakin, who was the most developed, was a little weak. Granted, having a movie full of Jedis is kind of like having a movie full of Vulcans: a lot of people walking around controlling their emotions and bowing. I still would have liked to have gotten to know Qui-Gon and Darth Maul. They just kind of drifting in and out of scenes (especially Maul) and didn’t do much to let us in. I think I knew Vader better by the end of the first one than I did any of the bad guys in this one.

Then there’s the fact that a lot of the aliens had very Earth-like accents. Jar Jar was Jamaican. The flying slave/junk shop owner was French. The two main bad guys were Asian/Transylvanian (don’t ask). Who knew that we had traveled that far that long ago.

Also, a lot of the stuff looked more advanced than the originals. The ship that they fly around in, though it doesn’t have as much character as the Falcon, looked like it was from a much more advanced universe. (Kind of like, well, ours. It looks like a Stealth bomber or something, as opposed to a hamburger with an olive beside it.) Why are they using droids in the new ones when they had to use humans in Stormtrooper uniforms in the originals? What happened to their technology? I guess the Clone Wars really wreaked havoc on things.

Also, how did they get through the core of a planet when they went from Jar Jar’s home to Naboo on the other side of the planet? That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I guess maybe it’s a world full of water.

Someone complained that the Tatooine landing scene looked like it was taken shot for shot out a documentary that they saw. Well, the Battle of Yavin was taken almost shot for shot out of (depending on who you talk to) Dam Busters and 633 Squadron. And the scene where Luke finds his dead aunt and uncle was strongly reminiscent of The Searchers. At least this time he found something a little more obscure to copy.

It gets a little political at times, too. We get a lot of discussion about the problems of the Trade Federation and the Naboo vs. Jar Jar’s people. A lot of this could have been avoided. The next one won’t need to be so talky. We’ll know what happened before. And speaking of talky, there was a scene between Qui-Gon and Anakin that kind of annoyed me. Anakin asked, point blank, what something was. I, personally, figured it out from an earlier scene between Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan. You see, the Jedi have more of a certain kind of cell in their blood. Qui-Gon took a sample of Anakin’s, sent it back to Obi-Wan and found out that they were off the charts in the kid. About half an hour later Anakin asked Qui-Gon what they were. Qui-Gon went into great detail about these cells. Lucas should have had his old buddy Lawrence Kasden look at his script to take out all the useless stuff…like Jar Jar.

Which brings us to the biggest problem. Jar Jar was really annoying. Oh, I laughed at him a couple of times, but not enough to make him useful. And, you may ask, what’s wrong with a character who says “How rude!” every other line? And to that I say, “Full House.” Say no more.

As much as I did like the movie, I can see where people who didn’t like it are coming from. There are a lot of flaws in it. It’s not nearly as good as the other three, but it’s still a major part of the Star Wars Universe. That’s what makes it worth seeing. For a geek like me, that’s what makes it worth seeing six or seven times. The way I figure it, it’ll make a lot more sense in the grand scheme of things. It’ll be one 12 hour movie. Even the weak parts will be necessary and we’ll learn to love them. After all, we learned to love Return Of The Jedi. And besides, it spawned one of the best movie posters of all time.

So, overlook the flaws and just enjoy the ride. Jar Jar or no.