This series is dedicated to matching memorable movies with the signature day each year upon which I could watch them forever. It may seem sacrilegious to debut this film before the original, but it makes the most sense thematically, and recent reevaluations of this movie and its sequels have shown that its legacy is worthy of the saga and enhances its overall appeal. May marks the month of Star Wars Day and this movie's original release, and so it must be:
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999, Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox, George Lucas)
Ep I opens with all the pomp and circumstance of a Shakespearean play. With crosswise swords and words. The strange austere nature of the Jedi's arrival to the Naboo system, sent on behalf of the Chancellor of the Galactic Republic to settle a trade dispute, is soon after ruined when the Trade Federation, who is performing a blockade of Naboo in protest of the planet's refusal to do crooked business, resolves to have them killed on the word of a hooded holographic figure with a sinister voice. This all advances past the viewer with pulpy, high adventure vibes, as the performances by Neeson and McGregor as Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi suggest they are above any of the dangers. This instills us with a confidence in our heroes, grounds the villains without making the outcome a foregone conclusion, and establishes some early stakes. The first twenty minutes of the movie play out like a solid episode of a limited series. There are three brief action scenes demonstrating the Jedi's abilities, several scene changes from ship bays to forest floors to underwater cities to decadent palace courtyards, and a daring rescue and escape that sends us into our first plot point. It's a breakneck pace, but it's primary intention is to bring all the major players together and give them reason to land on Tatooine, a core location important throughout the saga.The use of lightsabers and Force powers is effectively impressed upon the audience during the early scenes. Still, the challenges the Jedi face as they progress are not without risk. Star Wars paints a world where competent characters must navigate their problems with courage and planning and flexibility, not with sheer power and plot armor. Despite being the heroes, they aren't immune to sudden setbacks, and they're often set with entrusting their success in the world and with those around them. The whole incident whereby the Jedi meet the outcast Jar Jar Binks and negotiate his release from his superiors spotlights the Jedi as partners in their dealings, not overlords.
Before the half hour mark arrives, our heroes resolve to land on a desert world run by gangsters to acquire parts for their damaged ship from the escape. Ultimately, their goal is to reach the capital of the Republic, Coruscant, to deliver Amidala, the Naboo Queen, so that she can appeal to the highest authorities about the Trade Federation's transgression.
Chance intervenes on Tatooine when Qui-Gon comes across the child Anakin Skywalker while shopping for parts. The boy is evidently strong in the Force—from which a Jedi draws his power—and summarily has what they need to solve their other problems: shelter from an incoming sand storm, and knowledge of a big racing event that can offer our heroes the prize money they need to deal with the local economy. But Anakin's discovery creates its own new wrinkle in the plot: he and his single parent mother are owned slaves, and so can't be emancipated easily. So much of these circumstantial needs pilot the plot and give events a seemingly arbitrary nature of a world that hides a thousand intrigues. It's the same kind of world-building and scenario design that role-playing gamers and designers dream of—bringing elements from different walks of life together on a grand scale where all play some small part in realizing the truth of their togetherness. It makes one doubt the nature of how arbitrary things are and begin to wrestle with the idea of fate and destiny. (It is a story with an intent, after all.)
Qui-Gon gambles on the boy's prowess as a racer and manages to arrange a bet to settle Anakin's release also as a slave. Naturally, the boy wins—in what is still to this day the most imaginative multi-lap race scene put on film—but must leave his mother behind as the wager was only strong enough to win Anakin's freedom. In Star Wars, there's rarely just pure risk then reward without some further sacrifice.
In short order, paths are set for Coruscant as they continue on their original quest, but the added responsibility of training Anakin as a Jedi becomes a side-quest of increasingly equal importance. For you see: Anakin had no father—the product of a virginal birth—and Qui-Gon sees prophecy in the discovery. This invokes themes both mythic and mysterious, plotting a certain course ahead in the here and now flanked by an uncertain past and future. These ideas also align greatly with Qui-Gon's earlier insistence to Obi-Wan to focus on the present.
Take heed world: being unanxious about the before and after in the midst of many doings is a great message.
And again, in the midst of all these swirling, cascading plot elements, we meet R2-D2, C-3PO and Darth Maul—all franchise characters that get their origin stories here!
Padmé Amidala's wardrobes throughout are little fantastical takes on a variety of real-world royalty looks that give her character this kind of forbidden, forsaken princess vibe. At 14, she's not even an adult and I contend there's a delicacy behind her sterner words when she effects the "queen's voice" that is both a tell and a dodge.
What for more than an hour of the film has been a series of fetch and rescue quests gives way to political intrigues in the first part of the second half. McDiarmid's Senator Palpatine enters here, by all accounts a friendly fatherly figure who can ghost into Padmé's and Anakin's lives—both of which are conspicuously devoid of father figures—and provide them a solid rudder in navigating the glass and steel city-world that they've stepped into. It's great visual storytelling that much of the film previous to the Coruscant scenes is decked in richly lush or harsh environments that are in harmony with the natural world. Coruscant has no vestige of the natural world left to it. Lucas's work throughout the saga is replete with this kind of image messaging.
Padmé's real personality has been hiding in the background much of the film and her character turn occurs during the scene when (ironically, the outcast) Jar Jar provokes private feelings of belonging in her and she literally turns to Palpatine to announce her exit from his arena. She concludes that politics will only fail her and the best way forward is through self-determination. This, too, is analogous to Lucas's early career struggles against the "Hollywood system" and the founding of Lucasfilm and ILM. The saga may be as much autobiographical as it is set in a galaxy far, far away. I'm sure many of us, too, feel like we're living far away from reality, whether by choice or by circumstance. The symbolism goes deep.
The finale plays out across four major battle scenes: the invasion of Theed by Naboo resistance forces led by Padmé, the Gungans' led by Jar Jar in the Battle of the Grassy Plain versus half-a-million B1-series battle droids, the space assault on the Trade Federation droid control ship by Naboo N-1 starfighters assisted by Anakin, and Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan's duel with Darth Maul. Nothing that is shown is wasted, and just as each character has had to overcome obstacles to this point in the story each of them is given their final exam. Even Obi-Wan—to become the most famous of Jedi—who is mostly a supporting character here, is made to step out from behind his master and graduate to the level of Jedi Knight and master all at once. In many ways, Ep I is the story of how the events the mains experience catapult them into circumstances they are not entirely ready for. Who is ready? What does it mean to be ready in life? Are we prisoners of the actions we and those around us take, or do we exercise appropriate agency in the promises we keep and break?
John William's score sets a new bar and further plants the Star Wars soundscape into our memories with this film, in particular with the track "Duel Of The Fates". Lots of poetry here. Qui-Gon's moment of calm during his fight with Maul is the perfect picture of a Jedi vs a Sith. His has probably the most earned death in a film not based on a true or historical event that I can think of. And then the lightsaber exchange between Obi-Wan and Maul after Qui-Gon falls is everything anger-fueled lightsaber duels ought to be.
In the end, the phantom menace (Palpatine), thought to have been Maul, remains undisclosed in plain sight. The unseen phantom menace (time) continues to soldier on as light begins to give way to dark. In fact, all of the Star Wars trilogies work on this routine: day into night into a new dawn.
Ep I is equal parts whimsical, poignant, adventurous, and virtuous, much like the mains in its story. I've never once watched it and felt I was wasting my time. A winning entry in the canon!
