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DISCLAIMER: Nope. Uh-uh. No way, no how. I am not about to take a chance on enraging hardcore Star Wars fans by peppering the review of Episode 1 The Phantom Menace with hints of negativity. Harlan Ellison tells a story about making unfavorable comments regarding the original back in 1977 at a record store in the presence of a couple kids, only to step outside later and find both sides of his car had been keyed. Those folks can be touchy. And, these days, a lot of them hack. If I came out and said the empire has no clothes, I might not be able to get into my checking account for a month. It's like criticizing the Bible. But if suddenly a Fourth Testament to go along with the Old, New and Apocrypha turned up, I'd have to say something, right?
It quickly became fashionable after the first advance screenings for reviewers to trash The Phantom Menace, largely because film writers make the mistake most adults do and forget how they looked at things when they were kids. Give them a couple years of film and/or j-school and, by god, they're not about to waste their considerable vocabularies on synonyms of praise to over-$100 million-budgeted movies. But I attended neither (if you're wondering, then how did I get this job, well, I hack too ), and for whatever reason, you're reading this to get my opinion, so here goes: it was pretty good. More than that, it was just fun to be back.
The Star Wars universe is a comfortable place from younger days. After 16 years this story may be set a generation earlier, but that's not how our minds work, and besides, all science fiction is a product of the culture and hardware contemporary to when it is created, not to when it's set, so any way you look at it, this is the fourth movie, not the first stepping back to that ancient, distant galaxy is like settling into some comfortable old clothes, let out to accommodate bigger and better things, that you haven't had occasion to wear in a long while. Sure, the spaceships still defy physics and fly like airplanes; we're cheering for a messianic little kid we know is going to grow up to have a resume that reads "Darth Vader: Planet Squasher;" and some of the effects, like a computer-generated main character who walks like R. Crumb's "Keep On Truckin'" cartoons and says things such as "Exqueeze me" and "we're in deep doo-doo now," seem to be there not so much because they make a better movie, but because George Lucas owns the best digital SFX company in the world and he was going to make his employees earn their keep. But the good stuff gives a charge that makes overlooking the questionable stuff easier. Best of all are Liam Neeson, who in lending the dramatic base once held down by Alec Guinness exudes assuredly good-natured Zen efficiency as young Obi-Wan Kenobi's mentor; and Ewan McGregor, sounding so much like a youthful Guinness it's spooky. Their duels with a demonic Dark Lord (who, like Vader, is played by a Scottish actor who requires a separate voice-over; unlike Vader, this one works out) finally invigorate the concept, which often looked rather tame in the other films, of the potential mayhem inherent in swinging a sword that can cut through armored walls like a hot audit through travel expenses. Of course, a whole lot more happens too, but where dropping a spoiler or two might be forgivable for the average, run-of-the-mill movie, you'll have to see this one yourself.
Whether or not it knocks off Titanic for box-office supremacy, The Phantom Menace is a fast-paced epic event that provides welcome history on some favorite characters (including The Force itself) while raising questions the next chapters will answer in 2002 and 2005. Speaking as a double-digit theater viewer of the first trilogy who had gotten jaded in the interim, I'm already anxious for Episode 2. B
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