I saw the new Star Trek movie the weekend it opened, and the experience reminded me that it was about 10 years ago that I saw The Phantom Menace. Needless to say, Phantom Menace was terrible, and I've spent the last 10 years vehemently denying that the first three prequels happened. (Seriously, they never happened. George Lucas considered doing another couple of Star Wars movies, but then he decided not to. They never happened. Am I right about this? Who's with me?)
This topic has been heavily mined over the last 10 years, so I won't repeat some of the more obvious complaints about Jar-Jar and metachlorians and the unnecessary nature of the entire first movie.
One small quibble... I think Lucas based the first movie around the "Pod Race" scene because he already had a deal in place to produce the video game. Which means that this movie should really be thrown onto the scrap head of terrible movies based on video games.
Now on to the more subtantial things that were wrong with Phantom Menace... What upsets me the most is that this movie had at least some potential, if some things were done a little differently. I feel the same way about Titanic, another movie that I hated, not because it was a bad movie (though it most certainly was), but because it had potential that was utterly wasted. Suppose Titanic, given its titanic production values, elaborate sets and costumes and makeup, and big-name cast, were done as a period piece where characters obeyed the norms of the 1910s. Suppose the evil fiancee wasn't a totally worthless and evil human being, but was a more sympathetic character who was a bastard because he was being the best man that he knew how to be. Suppose Leo DiCaprio's character was a tough, gritty lower class character, but had some darkness and violence to him, more like Stanley from "A Streetcar Named Desire" than a romanticized version of a 1990s teenager? And then maybe you could have a couple of other interesting plotlines related to the upcoming end of the long 19th century a couple of years later? That would have been a more interesting and challenging film to watch, at least for me.
So what potential does Phantom Menace, and by extension the other two prequels, manage to squander?
Well, for one, Darth Maul is a wasted opportunity. He's following in the footsteps of Darth Vader, one of the greatest screen villains of all-time. Vader is a huge, imposing, shiny gun-metal black bad-ass who kills his own crew with his mind and destroys entire planets on a whim. He was utterly terrifying to little kids of the early 1980s such as myself. Oh, as an aside, this reminds me of the Darth Vader nightlight someone gave me for my birthday---it was a ceramic bust of Vader painted glossy black with silver-and-red colored foil for his eyes and chest plate that would glow from the bulb inside it. It scared the hell out of me and gave me far more nightmares than I would have had without it, but damn, it was a beautiful gift and I wish I still had it!
Anyway, the point is that Vader is on par with Jason Vorhees and Count Orlock for scary, imposing, enigmatic villains of the silver screen, and following (preceding?) him is no easy task.
But, following up Vader we have Darth Maul. Maul is nimble and lithe and cloaked in black and red where Vader was big and synthetic and covered in black. Vader was faceless and masked, Maul was just ugly, with funny little horns and bad teeth. Maul seemed like a really good successor villain, but what exactly does he do in the movie? Does he destroy a planet? Does he choke a prisoner? Does he freeze anyone in carbonite? Nope. He shows up on Tatooine and sends out some annoying little probe-droids, then has a quick sword-fight. Would Vader have sent out roombas to do his dirty work? Hell no! Vader would have been out there torturing Jawas, ripping the arms off of droids, choking Tuskan Raiders with his mind, and wreaking various and sundry forms of havoc to find those renegade Jedi. No way Vader would have sub-contracted that type of work to a couple of roombas.
And so Darth Maul is a wasted opportunity to create a truly scary villain for a new generation. He was much scarier than Count Dookie and the emperor himself. I would have liked to see Anakin slay Maul to become the new big-bad.
The next wasted opportunity in the movie... At the end of Phantom Menace, Anakin the Yippie-Kid ends up destroying the single-point of failure for the bad guys, and they play it off like a big cosmic accident. The whole scene is mostly comic relief.
These movies are tragedy! Anakin should be Macbeth for the sci-fi generation. Imagine this alternate version: Anakin knows exactly what he's doing when he takes the ship into space to try to take out the droid mothership and save many lives, and he has some kind of discussion with R2D2 to this effect. Then when he does save all those lives, Obi-Wan and Yoda realize that he must be the chosen one, that they have to train him, and they inadvertently shower way too much glory on him way too soon. He now knows that he's the chosen one, that he's destined for greatness. And we see that the seeds of Anakin's self-destruction are inadvertently sown by his closest friends, with the best of intentions. That would be an awesome plotline! How did Lucas not see this? The plot elements are right there, he just needed to change some of the dialog a little. The scene practically writes itself!
The final bit of blown potential has to do with Anakin and Padme's relationship. The one point in the entire movie series that approaches drama is where Anakin slaughters all the Tuskan Raiders. His mother is dead, he's young, he's under pressure, he's powerful, and he snaps!
Upon returning, hurt and scared and angry, to Padme, he says something like, "I slaughtered them all, and not just the men, the women and the children, too!" At this moment, with this angry and scared boy becoming a powerful, wounded man before her eyes, I thought Padme would fall in love with him to heal him. She would be his caretaker, her love would assuage his pain, she and she alone in the universe would be able to tame the torrents of rage inside of him. At least that's what I thought would happen.
Of course nothing of the sort happens. Padme delivers terribly forgettable dialogue, there is no discernible reason for them to fall in love other than the fact that it's in the script, and the series never again approaches any real sense of drama.
But what if the movies had been a little darker? What if Anakin's arc were truly tragic? It's amazing to me how close, how tantalizingly close, some of the scenes of the movies came to actually being tragic, only to miss (avoid?) the opportunity completely...
Nothing better epitomizes the wasted opportunity of these movies than the juxtaposition of Jimi Hendrix playing at Woodstock with "Everybody Loves Raymond" from this article from cracked.com. The point is that the same generation loved both of these things, at very different points of their lives. Can we expect the obscure, angst-ridden artist who made Star Wars in 1977 make the same kind of edgy, ground-breaking art as a middle-aged kazillionaire in 1999? Evidently not. Look, there's nothing wrong with being happy and well-adjusted. It's just that you lose a bit of edge. Unless you're Joss Whedon, but that's a different story for another time.
And so we got three terrible films that made anyone who's taken a decent literature course scream in frustration at the obvious wasted opportunities and blown potential. Blech.
At least the newest Star Trek movie was pretty good! Though I can't watch Star Trek the same way anymore now that I've seen Firefly show what character-driven sci-fi is supposed to look like, but again, a different story for a different time...
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