Shaun de Waal Big-budget movie of the week
`See it again!” the Star Wars faithful are urging each other on the Net. “It gets better!” This is partly to ensure that Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace breaks Titanic’s record, but also to help them get over the disappointment of the first viewing.
Disappointment is inevitable after the unreasonable expectations. This is not the second coming; it’s just a movie. And not a very grown-up one, at that. The quasi- mystical mumbojumbo that sounded good when you were a teenager in 1977 sounds rather silly now. Some unpronounceable substance that provides a kind of blood-count of the Force – I mean, really! And what exactly is the Phantom Menace, apart from an evocative phrase?
It’s easy to pick apart the most eagerly anticipated movie of all time, even without paying it the obsessive attention of some fans. The dialogue is generally bad; it is sad to hear some of what Ewan Macgregor, possibly the finest Anglophone film actor of his generation, has to say. Perhaps that’s why he speaks in the slightly prim tones of a minor English aristocrat. Is this his best Alec Guinness voice? Or is he trying to make a sly comment on the fact that the evil flat- faced aliens sound half-Asian, the flying spare-parts dealer Watto sounds slightly Yiddish, and the Gungans speak some kind of unintelligible Caribbean-American patois?
The film undoubtedly entertains. The action is compelling, and the special effects are awesome. The cities writer-director-wizard George Lucas conjures up are extraordinary. The animated creatures are generally good, too – armies of robots going to war on the planet Naboo, a gallimaufry of grotesques on Tatooine. (The names Lucas gives things …) There is pace, as in forward thrust, but no real pace as in highs and lows, as in rhythm.
There is no romance, let alone sex, which is a wasted opportunity given Macgregor and Natalie Portman (she’s the elected queen of Naboo -at age 14) in the same film. Anyway, it would be complicated with everyone swathed in such heavy outfits, from the samurai-monk chic of the Jedi Knights to the queen’s elaborate regalia – in her case, one expects a yashmak at any moment.
The Star Wars Universe is as sex-free as a Disney movie: Portman, like Carrie Fisher before her almost the only woman in the film, is girlishly presexual yet also, it seems, set on playing mother to little Anakin Skywalker. Of course he will become the villain Darth Vader in the future, perhaps her seducer in episode II or III. This is another of Lucas’s crossed family/romance relationships – if his Star Wars films bricolage bits of old westerns, war movies, swashbucklers and space operas, they are also family dramas.
Jake Lloyd as Anakin is irritating in the way only cutely precocious (“the Force is strong with him”) movie kids can be, but he’s not nearly as irritating as the computer- generated comic-relief figure, Jar Jar Binks, a kind of amphibian with a strange flapping pimp roll of a walk. It would be better to have humour supplied by a human in an interesting role, like Harrison Ford’s Han Solo in the other Star Wars movies. And Lucas would need some help on the script, too.
For cult movie columnist James Sey’s verdict, visit ZA@Play at