Zane's rant on Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
Abbreviations - TPM = Star Wars Episode 1 : The Phantom Menace
ANH = Star Wars Episode 4 : A New Hope
ESB = Star Wars Episode 5 : Empire Strikes Back
ROTJ = Star Wars Episode 6 : Return of the Jedi
First off - lets get this right from the start, I did like the movie. It is a rollicking adventure yarn, with great special effects, and will entertain you happily for its 2 hours and 30 odd minutes. It's just not particularly Star Wars.
The only actors who tried were Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), and Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid). Qui-Gon came across as being a jedi master, and Palpatine had an under stated I-know-something-you-don’t-know feeling that I liked. Everyone else was pretty much wooden. Obi-Wan showed a bit of anger/rage when Qui-Gon gets killed (the dark side?), Darth Maul could have shown _something_. After all he doesn’t have to keep control like the jedi, surely he could taunt them, show rage, fear etc.
Characters? talk about cardboard, no-one developed, and it seemed assumed you would know the archetype, rather than introduce them to you (ANH - who can forget Han Solo's one liners, and satirical smirks). I would love to see a break-down of screen time for characters in ANH and TPM. Because the bad guys didn’t get much, they didn’t inspire the sense of being worthy evil adversaries. While Vader was torturing, force-squeezing throats, and thinking up evil plans, Maul - stands around, does some more standing, ohh! and has a fight scene...
The movie also doesn’t stand alone like the others try to do. It doesn’t resolve much (and opens a lot of unresolved questions) and plays out more like a soap opera than the better paced ANH. Characters appear and disappear, and often seems more like those cameo filled spoof films, which means they do not endear themselves to you. When you come to the action scenes, do you care if this cardboard-cut out lives or dies? Too often the dramatic moments aren’t. You just cant care about the field battle, as its only a diversion anyway. And the space scene does not come close to the trench scene in ANH. The camera is either in-cockpit, or tracking from a distance. It just doesn’t instil that dogfight feeling the original, or the remastered ANH, does. The final lightsabre scene does hit the mark! with fighting that looks impressive, tension as the force fields open and close, and good merging of CGI and real life (although The Matrix is better). I liked the podracer scene, but you could feel those marketing tie-ins, and cash registers ringing.
On the whole, too many plot lines, too many characters, too many seemingly irrelevant action bits (those under-water bits!). Witty script? Anakin saying "can I go mom?" like he wants to go play at a friends. Atmosphere? lots of nice alien landscapes, but that MTV editing lets you only have a 3 second glimpse. No long panning twin-suns-setting as Luke ponders his future. Plot? hmm, a trade-war you say? not quite as emotionally inspiring as a small band of rebels fighting over-whelming odds. Storyline? too often I am now thinking, "why did/didn’t you do this, George?" .
The weakest movie of the series, and I think quality has gone down a little with each movie made. Lets hope Episode 2 isn’t full of cutesy try-hard comedy, sanitised violence, and 2-D characters...
"Your powers are weak old man. You should not have returned"
PLUS POINTS
SFX - Technically fantastic, almost faultless. In places so seamless you are hard pushed to spot that things are CGI (computer generated images).
MINUS POINTS
ROBOTS - Falling into the same pit as other "kids-action" movies (Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - cartoons) with the old "it isn’t really violence if its done on robots" mindset. I dislike this as in the Star Wars universe most robots are fully sentient beings, so its no worse than killing humans, just bloodless. They also did not appear very sinister (compare Stormtroopers!). Maybe because you don’t get the implied human moral corruption, and potential for evil.
YODA - With all the great CGI, why were the close-ups of Yoda done with a puppet?! I sat there tensing myself thinking, "ooohhh you can see the servo in his ears starting, there’s the movement, circuit ended!", and his mouth only went up and down. It had a very unnatural jerky-smooth-jerky motion, very poor.
JAR JAR BINKS - Aaarrrggghhh!
cd data\characters\jarjarbinks
del *.*
format c: /u
Such an annoying character, well done graphically, but.... I felt he was a waste of screen time. It was a rehash of the furrball Ewok Leia befriends in ROTJ, Meet alien-take me to your leader-form native army to fight badguys. He also did the same shot in the battle with the bola throwing. Also the comic relief never seemed to gel with the rest of the movie, and the rest of the series. Previous movies (except ewok scenes) had humour which was based on interactions, not complete slapstick.
MITERCLORIANS - Obi-Wan says in ANH the force is an energy field binding the universe together, Yoda expands this in ESB saying that it is everywhere in living organisms, in space (both atmospheric and interstellar), and in minerals. So why does TPM have these Miterclorians?! It just seems such a less plausible way for the force to function. How do these micro-organisms make "the force" function. Ok the sensory powers are reasonable still, but how does it let you lift objects? make noise? make lightning bolts?
ANAKIN - erk! Lucas was really going down the cute marketing path on this one. Luke invoked heroic inspiration, he develops in each movie. A 10 (?) year old kid, who destroys a battleship by _luck_ only invokes revulsion. He was only watchable in the podracing scene, and afterall it didn’t take much acting skill to pull a few faces.
FIELD BATTLE - why was this scene here at all? to show off SFX? the diversion plan seemed a little weak, and the battle wasn’t very exciting...
R2-D2 & C3PO - Originally the entire 9 episode series was meant to be based on the two droids experiences, 4-6 have very few scenes where they are not present. In TPM R2-D2 gets a lip service, and C3PO barely gets introduced. If Anakin built C3PO, you would think Vader in ESB would have done something when he captures him.
