The Phantom Menace: 25th Ani
The Force was wrong with this one. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (Image by Nick M.W.)
Time has been kind to the Prequel Trilogy, but old heads have long memories.
We don’t need a time machine to take us back to 1999 to relive how underwhelming The Phantom Menace was. We can queue it up on Disney+ or pop in the physical disc copy any time we want to torture ourselves and reminisce about the collective “womp” that was the first episode of the Prequel Trilogy. I’m not here to sever the limbs off a corpse, though. Old head Star Wars fans have beaten a hole through that drum. Many of us, who were in our teens (at our youngest) when The Phantom Menace was released, hated it on sight. It didn’t take me more than the first five minutes of the movie to get a bad feeling about what was in store for the rest of the ride. Oh, we were teased by the trailers with a pod race, and we got one. We were teased with the promise of the Sith and some badass named Darth Maul, with a double-sided freaking lightsaber. We got those things and another excellent score from the legendary maestro, John Williams. We got Liam Neesen and Ewan MacGregor owning their roles as Jedi Master and padawan, forever in our hearts. What we didn’t get was an entertaining movie.
There were some other good things that came from The Phantom Menace, but those things were bogged down by boredom, immediately. A New Hope opens with the Empire catching a rogue ship suspected of harboring traitors and the stolen (secret) technical plans for the Death Star. We get to meet Darth Vader within the first two minutes of screen time. He and his stormtroopers wreck the crew of the Tantive IV and take a princess hostage. Never mind the droids and that the set up for the rest of the film are introduced succinctly and (most importantly) in entertaining fashion. The Phantom Menace opens with a lot of talking about a blockade and eventual invasion of Naboo during a failed negotiation between Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn and his padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi and the representatives of the Galactic Trade Federation. Snoozefest. Not even the assassination attempt on Qui-Gon and Kenobi during the movie’s opening is exciting. It set the tone for a movie that felt more like a drag than a drag race, and I left my first viewing of it grandly disappointed. Seven of my friends were with me that night. We had camped out the week before to get tickets for the midnight showing. We watched grown men have lightsaber battles under the moon in the parking lot. Someone was dressed as Wicket, walking around giving the people camped out high-fives. All of us there thought this movie was going to take Star Wars to another level of incredibility.
Younger fans—those knuckleheads still in elementary school in 1999—tend to have fond memories of The Phantom Menace. This movie is the first in “their trilogy,” referring to the notion that the Original Trilogy was made for old heads and the Prequel Trilogy was for a different generation of fans. They’re right in all the ways that The Phantom Menace went wrong, from my certain point of view. This movie was made for the 12-year-old who was actually twelve when it came out and not for the middle-aged fans who feel in love with Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewie. But, again, I’m not here today, to retread that bulldozer. I’m here to celebrate this moment, its 25th anniversary, by tipping my cap to the best thing about this movie: the hype train.
Rumors began to swirl around 1993-1994 that the “Big Dick Daddy from Cincinnati” himself, George Lucas (who is from Modesto and not Ohio), was working on a new Star Wars movie. I joined the Star Wars fan club in 1996 and subscribed to Star Wars Insider from then until 2000, and those sources kept their lips tighter than a penguin’s butthole in a blizzard. We got nothing about anything related to The Phantom Menace until the first trailer was released sometime around Thanksgiving ’98. These were the Pre-Internet Days, so the world wide web wasn’t what it is now back then, which meant that this trailer was everything. I heard it was being shown before Meet Joe Black—that lame duck of a romance with the double-barreled smoke show of Brad Pitt and Claire Forlani. I had a car, a job, and a girlfriend, so I had the means, method, and reason to go out and see that piece of shit Joe Black and not feel like I spent $10 just to see the Phantom Menace trailer. As it turns out, half the theater for the screening my girlfriend and I attended was only there to see that trailer. In that moment, I wish I had been as brave as those middle-aged men. I was but a mere 16-year-old on a date at a bad movie, and my girlfriend wanted to stay. I obliged. It was worth it to see the trailer.
I could have waited to see it at any other point in time, bought a ticket for a better movie, but I had to see it ASAP. It was the zeitgeist. People at school were talking about it. We were riding that hype train, and it was a fun ride until the movie came out and the train went off the rails. Pepsi Co. had a deal with Lucasfilm, so all their brands were pumping out collectible merchandise. Toys, toothbrushes, trading cards, stickers, clothing flood the market. This was the machine that George Lucas had built 22 years prior to The Phantom Menace, and it was raging back in 1999. As it happens, so much hype can be hard to live up to even when the movie is good. When it’s not, the hype seems silly. That’s what The Phantom Menace is: a silly entry in the Star Wars franchise that has become a bit of an endearing slice of nostalgia. When I watch it these days, I still cringe at Jar Jar and try to rewrite the story in my head as it unfolds on the screen before me, but I also appreciate what George Lucas did. He got rid of that damn creepy Yoda puppet! That, and he created another era of Star Wars lore and made his mark on a new generation of fans, many of whom defend The Phantom Menace. Impressive. Most impressive.
It's always hard to imagine that so much time has passed when you take a look back at a moment. I’m sure the 17-year-old version of me didn’t think the 42-year-old would be writing sentimentally about The Phantom Menace 25 years after its release, but I also never imagined that I would reach a point in time when I would enjoy watching this movie.
