Fan to Menace
Although there’s still much to admire and enjoy, myth has fallen out of the action and into the dialog, and Star Wars has fallen out of the class it created.
Tel Aviv, Israel
Wednesday, August 4th, 1999
The gloss of The Phantom Menace — compare Princess Leia’s simple white cloak to Queen Amidala’s extravagent displays — may be a symptom of an underlying weakness, which we’ll get to, but the fourth film’s style is spectacular, and moreover, a fine dramatic device. Rather than being asked to forget the lived-in feel of the original film, inescapable parallels invite us to keep A New Hope in mind.
As is customary, the heroes blow a hole in a corridor wall to escape during a firefight, but this time they make their getaway not by tumbling into a pool of waste, but by shooting bolts and levitating in calm unison up to a floor similarly sumptuous but bereft of enemy fire. By keeping us mindful of the original film’s battle scenes, these humorous parallels show us that when Luke, Han, Ben and the droids stumbled into the Death Star in the original film, Ben had already done all this before.
And just as some thirty years previously he had killed Darth Maul, avenging his own master’s killer, so as an older man he foresaw that his turn might now come, that he would be killed by his enemy and avenged by his apprentice as his master before him. “Not like this,” a character pleads about her meaningless death in The Matrix, released only weeks before Phantom, but Obi-Wan’s life has been gifted with symmetry. Completely integrated into The Phantom Menace‘s plot, Obi-Wan’s battle with Darth Maul is not just terrific; it revisits and adds resonance to the original film.
The Lost Droids
Unfortunately, it’s one of the film’s few bits of good sequelling; the droids in particular are misused. In the previous movies, R2D2 and C3PO are so joined at the artificial limb that it’s clear they’ve been sharing adventures for a long long time. Because they’re made of metal, we understand that they are pretty much immortal, constants of the Star Wars universe. Here, however, Lucas gives us the dubious treat of their all-too-recent origins. And it’s downright odious that C3PO is a hobbyist creation of young Annakin Skywalker. Is the galaxy that small? In the earlier movies, we felt we were being treated to a seat at its fulcrum events. Now, we’re led to believe that the galaxy only has half a dozen people in it anyway.
The droids’ first meeting is not only unrelated to the plot; it’s also an example of a problem that the film’s digital gloss cannot soothe. In an unsubtle twist on the tale of Adam, Eve and the serpent, the Queen tells C3PO upon his creation that he’s perfect, and then R2 tells him that he’s naked. An even more obtrusive religious reference is, of course, Annakin’s virgin birth. Such overt allusions to what are still our most official mythologies must be integrated very carefully, must contribute in some important way to the unfolding of the plot. Otherwise, why are they there?
Compare these undigested chunks from religious literature to the sequence on Dogobah in The Empire Strikes Back where Luke fights the apparition of Vader. I was frightened when he stepped into the jungle and frightened when I saw whom he had to fight, but I frightened much more coldly when Luke smote Vader only to see his own face behind the mask. Despite its title, The Phantom Menace lacks such resonant, dream-like terrors. Rather than incorporating into its plot those eternal human issues wrapped within dimly-remembered myths, Lucas has tacked on symbols from tales we’re taught on Sundays. Myth has fallen out of the action and into the dialog, and the franchise has fallen out of the class it created.
Someone Else’s Force
“The Force is all around us,” Obi-wan Kenobi explained to Luke in the first movie. “It binds all living things.” For those children who doubted the Santa Claus version of God, this was a seed for religious exploration. True, some embarrassed themselves trying to make pebbles levitate, but the Force did introduce the possibility that there was room between an anthropomorphic father in the sky and nothing at all. Somehow the universe is more than the sum of the parts, and what surrounds us is comprised not just of objects, but of relations between objects, and that these relationships, directly invisible though they may be, make the world go round.
The new perspective on the Force, however, flattens its mystery and truth. “Every living cell has mitoclorians,” Qui-Gon explains to Annakin. The Force is no longer an intrinsic part of every living thing, but instead a property of one particular lifeform. It’s no longer about the parts of the universe interacting, but about each part interacting with something within itself. The answer to the universe is no longer something intrinsic to it, and we’re back to the old unsatisfying idea of turtles sitting on the backs of turtles. Worse, these Force organisms also speak to us. Perhaps in the next movie we’ll learn some of their bad language and which soft drinks they fortify.
Nonetheless, there’s still much to admire and enjoy in Phantom. Much of the casting is superb and Jake Lloyd cannot be blamed for having been given too much pod-racing screen time. No epic is too grand for Liam Neeson, who exudes warmth and humanity as well as wisdom. The journey to the core supersedes the asteroid scene from Empire. And Natalie Portman’s stoic, stylized 14-year-old Queen slips magnificently from a lifetime of training into true leadership having barely moved her neck. Her request to Boss Nass for assistance against the Trade Federation is both the movie’s climax and its best scene, combining suspense, surprise, and recognition. It reminds us that a true storyteller is at work.
The Gungans, whom Boss Nass leads, and various other alien characters, have come under fire for being racial stereotypes. This is undeniably true; the Star Wars franchise has remained a cut above Star Trek partially because it eschewed unsubtle and forced allegories. In none of the first three movies is it ragingly obvious who is the African, who is the Jew, and who those Arabs, er, Tuskan Raiders are jumping up and down with their rifles in the air. The first movies created images that captured emotional states and psychological issues — the twin sunset on Tatooine; Han Solo frozen; the loss of a hand over a bottomless well. This movie, however, tends to borrow from established conventions. We have fallen from the grace of archetype and the power of dream imagery to the chortle and tedium of stereotype.
Brave New Portrait
Casting a dim but giant shadow over this film’s failings, however, is Lucas’ brave ambition to tell in the next two films what may be a new story under the sun, that of a different kind of hero, a Christ figure who ostensibly fails. All the problems — the droids’ youth, the Force’s dilution, the general shrinking of the Star Wars universe — could be offset by an uncompromising look at how the gifted curdle.
“Annakin skywalker, meet Obi-wan Kenobi,” Liam says to the 9-year-old, his good cheer casting us forward to their classical denoument. Ah, what events will bridge their meeting and their fatal parting? Darth Vader is already subtly discernable in this little boy. When Annakin first meets Queen Amidala, he twists a bottle of some kind; he makes the same excited gesture when he goes after the x-wing fighters in the climactic battle of A New Hope.
And Yoda gives us a capital insight on the boy: he’s afraid, afraid of losing his mother. From stereotypes of Africans and Japanese, we’ve returned to the psychological and universal. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus undergoes similar rites when he goes off to Clongowes, his boarding school: “His mother had told him not to speak with the rough boys in the college. Nice mother! The first day in the hall of the castle when she had said goodbye she had put up her veil double to her nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes were red. But he had pretended not to see that she was going to cry. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried.” And later: “He longed to be home and lay his head on his mother’s lap. But he could not: so he longed for the play and study and prayers to be over and to be in bed.” Joyce’s book is based on his own life, but its power is that it is contains elements of everyone’s. So, we hope, will Annakin’s.
For those for whom Darth Vader was the greatest monster, it’s a gift to revisit him 20 years later as a little boy. If Lucas can no longer master many of the elements binding his galaxy, may it be because he is now devoted to telling the tale of one man. May we be awed, afraid and animated again by Annakin Skywalker — not by his mask this time but by the story of his life.