. . . TPM

What's wrong with:

STAR WARS

The Phantom Menace

Note: When I posted the review of The Last Jedi, I treated its release like a software development release, and its errors as defects a Quality Assurance (QA) specialist might uncover in the course of testing. I assigned severities to each defect to indicate how egregious those issues are.  I'll continue the theme with this offering. For a description of what I mean, see TLJ post. In brief- low, medium, high, severe and critical are the designations.

I’ve been mulling around the idea of cataloging the various Star Wars movie shortcomings since Attack of the Clones came out- #bucketlist.  I’ve finally committed to keep track because the list of offenses is getting long and eventually time will get short.  In most cultures, the aural tradition of storytelling yielded to written stories, an improvement nine times out of ten. Surely this is that other time.

People’s opinions about how successfully the various creative types who have helmed the Star Wars movie franchise have achieved the objectives of entertaining the audience while telling impactful stories can vary greatly.  If the Star Wars fan is just looking for thrills, tolerable story arcs and crazy looking aliens, as they’re transported to another world, then they’re probably transfixed with what they’ve seen over the last 5 installments.  However, if the fan is looking for puzzle pieces, meaning and adult story telling, well, those fans have been, and it appears given social media comments, and director interviews (of J. J. Abrams and Rian Johnson), will continue to be, supremely disappointed. 

Since I don’t think the objectives of entertainment and meaning need to be mutually exclusive, I’m going to write critically and expect more from the franchise than what we’ve been dealing with the last 19 years, and sometimes dating back to the original trilogy- to satisfy those apologists who blanket statement die-hards who are somewhat incapable of recognizing our own genuflection upon the original trilogy, by dismissing our perspective.

Start at the beginning.  When I started watching the movies with my then 6-year-old, there was no question I was going to start with the original, the one I saw in theaters when I was 6.  There was not a chance I was going to unleash The Phantom Menace (TPM) on him, and sour him on the whole series. The reasons I didn’t are detailed below.

If they preserved only the Darth Maul scenes and added them to Attack of the Clones (AOTC), and then burned everything else in TPM, they could dive deeper into more interesting subject matter (i.e. how A. Skywalker becomes D. Vader). Sure, it is a little more complicated than that. Below is a sample outline for the prequel trilogy, with the key being Anakin’s age(s) within that movie- since we’ve been told that was the organizing principle behind the first six movies- Lucas' original plan, that the story arc was more about Darth Vader than Luke Skywalker.

The Phantom Menace (new outline):

Show Annakin at 10 yrs. old for half the movie- but show him as a petulant, serious kid, not someone who jumps off a counter saying “yippee”.  In this first half, you would have no time for Jar Jar; insert 1-2 involved political discussions, written and directed by someone else, cut the rest of the movie, retaining only the Darth Maul material, adding more of it, and just don’t have him cut in half quite yet.

(Severe)  The Pod Race . . . burn the hell out of that business.  Nightmare 25 minutes; nightmare!  When I watched the deleted scenes, I laughed out loud when Lucas and those responsible for editing and pace belabored the cut of an additional 8-10 minutes of the set-up of the pod race. Hitler and his generals took less time to figure out how to invade Poland; the actual invasion of Poland took less time . . . and still would have if the Germans were blind, and had used just the idea of pod racers as their only means of transportation.

The interviews featuring virtual nail-biting, and an utter absence of self-awareness on the parts of Lucas and his minions, who perhaps were brainwashed into agreeing with him, both in terms of what he left out of the movie, but more importantly, what he decided to include, are comical. In that sentence I left the verb so far away from the subject that it was hard to read, and that is what makes TPM so hard to watch- the subject (Anakin Skywalker) is so far away from any demonstrable, character-developing action. In short, we don’t need 1/6^th of the movie (the length of the pod race sequence) to see how quick Anakin’s reflexes are.  The Last Starfighter was able to show how gifted Alex Rogan was in ¼ of the screen time over a couple of scenes, and did it even more effectively than TPM.

High

Besides, if this isn’t Anakin’s first pod race, even if he’s never finished one- wouldn’t the entire population of pod racing attendees (who paid/invested to get into the stadium, and those who couldn’t get tickets, as it was packed) suspect he had Jedi qualities? Wattu knows Qui-Gon is a Jedi, and knows some of the features (decision-making control), but conveniently forgets that when it is time to bet Anakin’s servitude on a roll of a chance die (which a Jedi could manipulate into a favorable outcome). Just another in a long list of questionable decisions that helps advance the story at the cost of discriminating people taking it seriously.

The second half of TPM would show Annakin at 20 years old, we’d get half of the first half of AOTC here. We’d ditch the Pod Race equivalent of Anakin and Obi-Wan traipsing through the sky chasing after Zed, the bounty hunter, and replace it with a new action scene. The only part of that whole sequence we'd retain from AOTC is when Kenobi, while using Jedi mind tricks, is giving the space nerd a hard time about death sticks, and the nature of the nerd's existence- "you want to go home and rethink your life." Brilliant.

So many movies and movie genres, (science fiction, adventure, comedy, romantic comedy, mystery, adventure) make use of plenty of film making techniques that play with time, deal with pace- foreshadowing, flashbacks, etc.; those techniques are almost completely absent in the Star Wars cannon.

The Godfather Part II showed us two distinctly different ages of Vito Corleone;

Inception gave us 1, 2 or maybe 3 levels of storytelling;

Memento has 15-20 scenes shown in reverse order while black and white scenes are shown chronologically;

Vantage Point told the same story from different character points of view;

Big shows a boy one night and a grown man the next morning;

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade shows a teenage Indiana for the first 15 minutes of the movie and seamlessly transitions to our familiar hero as an adult;

A dozen super hero movies show a snippet of the character as a child (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider Man), or an old recorded tape of the hero’s father speaking about something crucial to the audience’s understanding of the hero (Iron Man) as a force to be reckoned with. 

(Critical) A. Skywalker- I’ll use this point to mention the biggest single problem with TPM. First, if the kid you hired can’t deliver the lines with some level of gravitas, even for a 10-year old, someone else should have been hired. Haley Joel Osment, with Bruce Willis’ help, carried The Sixth Sense. You don’t have a great movie without Osment performing so well; TPM should never have been released because of many things, and it starts with Jake Lloyd’s horrendous performance. His facial expressions and mannerisms show the complete amateur that he was. He twists his wrist in a scene as if begging for this to be the take that is acceptable enough so he can move on and take a swig from his juice box. Now, at 10, I wouldn’t have been able to act well enough to pass as Anakin Skywalker. At 47 I can still only convince my 7-year old that they’re out of toys at Target. It is true- I cannot act; just as true- I don't need to be Olivier to notice that someone else can't either.

Someone hired to play an angry genius needs to deliver on emotion, someone who can show anger, fear, someone who can show there has been suffering, loneliness, ambition, even at 10, is required. I would wager that philosophers, artists, inventors, authors and the vast majority of athletes who showed above average, superior and identifiable talents in their future areas of expertise came upon them naturally. These humans didn’t fall down and hit their heads, weren’t struck by lightning, or granted a wish to succeed by a genie in a bottle. They showed definite signs of their genius when they were 13, 10, even 6. Mozart was writing quality music at 5, Leonardo did not start painting, and thinking of airplanes, bicycles, Vitruvian Man and Mona Lisa only at 50 years old. Anyone think that the idea of the personal computer only started hatching inside Bill Gates’ brain when he was college-aged?  The building blocks were there; there were synapses, wiring, associations, building of ideas well before they were manifest. Wordsworth’s “The child is father to the man” is very telling.

Last paragraph I mentioned something about talents. There are average, above average and spectacular talents in all walks of life. Everyone's kid is destined to be a tremendous success, cure cancer or become a pro baseball player. We all know someone who is wicked smart, very musical, or incredibly athletic.  Those people are in the 10% of the population; people like Steven Hawking, Marvin Gaye, and Michael Jordan are in the .001%. These people are geniuses- if not intellectually, then in the manipulation and arrangement of musical instruments, or voices, or they've got impeccable hand-eye coordination, leaping ability or are incomparable interpreters of time and space. There are very, very, very few geniuses.  

I don’t think Freud is a genius. I don’t think Edison is a genius. Einstein? Yes; Michelangelo? Yes. The latter made marble look like cloth. Anakin Skywalker was meant to be a genius; he was supposedly immaculately conceived, with talents, as recognized by anyone who ran into him, after he got off Tatooine, and by some while he was on it, as a genius with abilities surpassing any of those that had come before. Is there even a chance, that with that origin, that specter of the possible, and the idea he was a lonely slave, that the genius mixed with the desperateness doesn’t make for one compelling little man? Anakin was Mozart mixed with Tiger Woods and Lucas has him jumping off of tables saying “yippee”. No! Lucas . . . is no genius.

Note: I was going to continue with the rough outlines of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, but I’ll tackle those in their turn after I’ve re-watched each of those movies.

It is hard to build a list of the most egregious mistakes authored by those in charge of creating, maintaining, or contributing to the Star Wars universe. Should I track them by severity, chronologically, by category? Here is that list, beyond the terrible treatment of Darth Vader’s youth, restricted, for the purposes of this summary, to TPM.

(Severe)

1) In the history of Hollywood there have been hundreds of films that range from between tolerable and majestic, without much in the way of action, and are rather carried by what happens in a courtroom (12 Angry Men), a diner, a bar, a library (The Breakfast Club), a living room (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf), a hot tub, for christ’s sake.  Since the action thing didn’t really happen in TPM, the responsibility fell on the dialogue. There was nothing redeeming about the dialogue in TPM.  Epic fail. 

(Severe)

2) I’ve seen book title jackets with two names on the cover and thought, it took two people to write something this horrible?  This is applicable to Nute Gunray and the other amphibian. I would rather the writer of the movie give rise to less gullible allies. We need villains we can at least respect, and find creative types inventive enough to legitimize the story, to move the story along (more on this below) despite how intelligent those characters are, good or evil.

(Severe)

3) If I were an amphibian, and learn, or suspect, Qui-Gon, and Obi-Wan, are Jedi, why in the world would I open the door to a room they're trapped in, which is filling with poisonous gas? Opening that door is their only means of escape?  This is clumsy storytelling, and the first in the prequel trilogy that makes us roll our eyes in disgust. In order to get the weight of how formidable the Jedi are, you need villains with some intelligence to overcome. Having two morons open that door is exactly the same mistake as having two losers not blow up the space pod in the original.

(Low)

4) Pathetic droids- I don’t know why this one bothers me. If this were a list in severity order, it would appear lower than the number preceding it. The amphibians have any intelligence at all? Historically, like in the real world, have there been shadow governments like that that paid for and “led” such incompetent soldiers? The droid army is the most ridiculous set of “warriors” I’ve seen on film. Sure, Palpatine planned it that way, but who is trusting the servitude of pylons like those to defeat anything more advanced than an army of dust specks? Would any reasonable amphibian pin his advancement chances on sticks with legs; I would have demanded Palpatine provide a destroyer droid army, (the rolling guys with force fields) at twice the price and half the number- you know, to keep costs down. Surely Palpatine gets the concept of planned obsolescence. There are frogs collecting in the void of the egress window behind me who look more capable of recognizing they made a mistake hopping down there and when I went to rescue one of them last week it screamed in terror that I might be hurting it. At least it was conscious of its own mortality.

(Severe)

5) Written dialogue and verbal delivery. I think that only Ewan McGregor, among the cast, avoided sounding like a robot, and he had the benefit of an English accent. That said, he was as good a choice for Obi-Wan as Chris Pine was for Captain Kirk from the Star Trek reboot.

(Medium)

6) I think I heard the line- “battle-hardened federation army” spoken by someone. The droids are “battle-hardened” in the same way that President Trump is qualified to be CEO of the United States.

(Critical)

7) Jar Jar. Jesus H.

If time travel were a thing, in addition to attempting to prevent the rise of Hitler and keeping John Wilkes Booth from assassinating Lincoln, a trip to Lucas' office at Skywalker ranch to extract the idea of Jar Jar out of his head, by any means necessary, would be an additional use of such a machine.

(Low)

8) Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon emerge from the watery descent to Gungan City in three layers of wool clothing without being completely drenched. Apparently we stopped spraying Scotch-Guard on new furniture, but its back (or still there) and better than ever in the galaxy far far away?

(Low)

9) One of the cadre of meaningless eunuchs points out that communication has been disrupted, but somehow those unable to push a message through to Coruscant are unable to come to the same conclusion.

(Medium)

10) Qui-Gon is unable to use the force to sense a giant fish about to devour the escape sub Obi-Wan is piloting. That force sensitive ability is really hit or miss. “How convenient!” closed-circuit to the church lady. Also, the sub surfaces in the middle of a city that is supposed to be occupied by tens of thousands of “battle-hardened” federation troops.

(Low)

11) As Padme, or the queen, is overlooking the invasion of Coruscant, my son pointed out there is a chord plugged into a wall socket illuminating the bulbs at the bottom of the dress.

(Medium)

12) Did Han Solo’s command of “never tell me the odds” get applied retroactively, and en masse, and served as a directive borrowed, and implemented, by the federation leader amphibians? With an army of droids occupying the city, the ratio of federation droid “soldiers” guarding the rebel prisoners is 1 to 1; there were more twigs, with a far greater capacity to guard prisoners, on Charlie Brown’s christmas tree.

(Medium)

13) In the fighter hanger there were 10-15 droids keeping tabs on 20 (hopefully trained in combat) fighter pilots, who were not restrained.  Again, if you make both the heroes and the villains prevail against worthy adversaries, the onlookers will have more respect for both.

(Medium)

14) When the ship gets through the blockade, no ships follow it. They’ve done their job by picking off 3 astromech droids and making a hero of R2.

(High)

15) Those that can get over how little Darth Maul is actually on screen, might bring up the excruciatingly painful length of the movie due to the political scenes. Often enough, when there is something that takes a lot of time and people can’t invest in it, I would loan them some money and ask them to get an attention span- but holy jesus there are some ridiculously long scenes; and you thought making it through this rendering of the movie itself was torturous. Maul is on screen no more than 15-18 minutes. Misusing Maul like that is equivalent to filming an Incredible Hulk movie where he only ever appears as David Banner, and until the recent iteration of Avengers movies with Mark Ruffolo playing Banner, Maul was a much, much better character. Apologies to Bill Bixby, Edward Norton, and Eric Bana and Lou Ferrigno.

(Medium)

16) Qui-Gon senses a force disturbance on the outskirts of Tatooine but somehow not on board the federation ship when he’s acting as an ambassador hoping to negotiate to prevent a war. His temporary oversight advances the story to the benefit of people not intelligent enough to notice.

(Low)

17) Don’t want to draw attention, but ahhhh . . . an iguana, droid and a petite girl heading into a haven of scum, is only going to draw that attention.

(Severe)

18) Before he leaves, Qui-Gon tells Obi-Wan: “don’t let them send any transmissions.” The head of security and Obi-Wan are out looking around at the Tatooine wasteland, when head of security tells Obi-Wan we’re “receiving a message from home.” You either need to make it clear that it is Maul trying to trick them, or Obi-Wan in a panic that someone aboard the ship would actually pick up the phone. If it is the former, is no one on the ship wise enough to check the caller ID? These people wouldn’t get it if someone wanted to bet them on the result of coin flipping- “ok, so, we agree right, we’re betting $100- heads I win, tails you lose.” Instincts be damned, we must clumsily advance the plot. If I were on the run from the authorities, I’d avoid using the ATM, disable the "find my Iphone" feature, and wouldn’t buy plane tickets with my Discover card- you know, because- technology.

(Medium)

19) We’ve seen almost no evidence the boy has Jedi reflexes.

(Low)

20) Immaculately conceived? Disbelief suspended- if hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people keep inheriting this fallacy generation after generation and think it true in this real world, who am I to question the use of it in something I know is fiction. Moving on- this is a science fiction movie, but for a franchise that relies so heavily on an unseen spirit world with an archive of invisible actions (force jumping, electricity shooting from fingers, manipulating objects to make them hurl across the screen), perceptions, instincts made available to them, you decide that a blood test will tell you that your Jesus-Mozart has arrived.

(High)

21) the pod race- even 3PO makes a comment about the duration- “he has to complete two more circuits- oh dear.”  Exactly.  Something tells me, after watching the interviews from the bonus content, that my point here would be lost on Lucas, et al. At least 3PO gets it.

(Low)

22) Too much mopey sentimentality and another “yippee”. #shakingmyhead SMH for the kids out there.

(Medium)

23) They need proof of army occupation? Video surveillance, holograms, com-links, hyperspace, two dozen force sensitive Jedi sitting around . . . the technology and the means don’t seem to be lacking.  You can’t pretend something doesn’t exist when it isn’t convenient to the story.

(Medium for now)

24) First inklings that Sith are involved- a mystery that lasts at least 10 years. Force sensitive beings that have no clue that significant evil is afoot? Wayne Campbell: “no whay”.  There is no excuse to make the Jedi so conveniently ignorant, except that it keeps what the creatives think are precious plot points intact.

(Low)

25) Somehow the rebels know the Gungins and Naboo are allies but not that Coriscant is occupied. Technology improved a lot in 10 minutes of screen time, and since we know there is only one way to tell a Star Wars story, straight through, reconciling this convenience is not possible.

(Low)

26) Rebel soldiers decide to engage in firefights in the middle of the street, or in the middle of the hanger, not behind a wall, or a stack of boxes. Droid “soldiers” programmatically march and engage in rows like British soldiers; if I’m Palpatine, and looking to take over the galaxy, I’m thinking I would need to sell it more; if I’m a “rebel” I’m thinking I should find a place to hide as I fire my weapon at walking twigs.

(None)

27) 3 words- double bladed lightsaber. And the creative people and story development folks allow it to remain double-bladed for an appropriate amount of time. Usually, when they find something that doesn’t work they accentuate it, and when something works they kill it (Grievous, Boba Fett, Darth Maul) and not in a way that would hint they have any idea about what they’re doing.

(Low)

28) Anakin pilots a spaceship- so this is what the 25 minute pod race was for- so we could see him accidentally choose all the right buttons to fire a canon, get a ship off the ground, move it forward, and eventually bring down a miniature space station. Here again Lucas exchanged wow, for huh.

(None)

29) Excellent use of the series of timed force fields to create suspense for the three combatant lightsaber duel.

(what's the point?)

30) Jar Jar again.  Mother of god.  Yeah, someone would need to have found religion to even tolerate that character rather than wanting to kill it. He is Chaplin-esque; in an adventure, sci-fi, war movie- not a complement. Wait, I meant Kramer-esque (Kramer from Seinfeld, a brilliant character from a situation comedy)- still not a complement.

(High)

31) Maul waits until Obi-Wan cuts him in half. Maul has shown that he’s too quick to die with the move Obi-Wan put on him. It wasn’t because Maul was tired- Kenobi was the one hanging from a protrusion down some vertical shaft supporting all of his body weight just before his leap up.

(Severe)

32) The entire Jedi council objects to Qui-Gon training Anakin. No one diligent, mindful and experienced master of a religion is going to agree to that, let alone two dozen of them when they all sense what A. Skywalker could turn into. The Jedi needed to listen to their actuary (a professional who assesses risk for a living). Further, the collective Jedi especially wouldn’t relent because the more qualified teacher has died and turns over young Skywalker to Obi-Wan, who would have just passed the Jedi master trials? To use Obi-Wan’s words- “I don’t think so.”

The deleted scenes

(None- they removed more pod race material)

33) “relevant material”, “screen time is precious” and “pod race did go on quite a while” are words that actually came out of Lucas’ mouth. The pod race isn’t the car chase scene from The French Connection, hell, it isn’t the car chase scene from Toy Story. The only good thing you can actually say about the pod race is that it didn’t upset the mounting tension, excitement or momentum the movie was producing, because there already wasn’t any of that; but if there had been any, the pod race definitely would have killed it.

(None)

34) Took a Jar Jar scene out.  That was the second best decision you made (to the creation and inclusion of Darth Maul). Unfortunately, you only made the decision to cut a Jar Jar scene out one time.

(Critical)

35) Greedo: The deleted scenes for TPM were mostly horrific, with one exception. Lucas and company should have included the deleted scene in the movie that shows a young Greedo and Anakin rolling around in the sand fighting. It is foreshadowing for Greedo’s end, and shows your main character willing to violently mix it up. It would have needed more context. What was the fight about? Hinting at a violent end for the main character of six movies, making us believe his transition to the dark side has another layer because the genius was always shown to be petulant, selfish, whiny and above all, alone, would have been wise. Lucas “didn’t think it was essential to showing his character.”  There was nothing included in the movie that was more essential than that.

To use Jar Jar’s words- “my give up.”