Scream 4: Don’t fear the reaper

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Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Ghostface, Horror movie, Kevin Williamson, Neve Campbell, Scary movie, Scream, Scream 4, Wes Craven

I’d managed to forget Scream 4 existed. It came out in 2011, when I was busy transplanting my life south of the border. Had I still been in Glasgow, I’d have gone to see it with my friends.

When I heard it referenced a couple of weeks ago, I got curious, and took the plunge on the DVD.

I tell you what, folks – the move to Blu-Ray hasn’t half driven down prices. I bought the DVD of Scream 4, brand new out the wrapper, for £3. Cost you more for a mocha.

I wouldn’t call myself a fan, but the Scream movies were entertaining, and – didn’t they just know it – they were a bit cleverer than your standard horror film.

True, they boiled down to a masked killer with a knife, tormenting people by telephone before filleting them. But there was something sly, even subversive, going on. The killer or killers in every Scream movie seemed to know they were in a movie. By the time the mask comes off, you wouldn’t be stunned if they winked at the camera. A lot of teenagers’ first experience of the term “post-modern” would have come from these films.

I’m not saying that’s a good thing, I’m just saying that’s what probably happened.

Wes Craven was back in the director’s chair, with Kevin Williamson also returning on writing duties. Other familiar elements came into play.

First off, there were clever “shock” opening sequences and fake-outs using trailers for Stab, the fictional film-within-a-film which depicts the original Woodsboro murders. Anna Paquin follows in Drew Barrymore’s bloody footsteps as the best-known knife crime victim, and a few well-timed jumpy bits get you back in the Scream zone.

We soon meet tormented scream queen Sidney Prescott, played again by Neve Campbell. She’s returning to her hometown on the 15th anniversary of the original Woodsboro massacre for a book tour, promoting her memoirs.

The ghostface killer has returned along with her. This time it stalks her niece, played by Emma Roberts, real-life daughter of Eric, niece of Julia. My flatscreen telly has a problem with bright colours so there may be some distortion involved, but my god, that girl’s skin was so perfect that she seemed to be alabaster – almost too shiny-bright to look at. Luminous is the cliché that fits best.

Other returning characters are Gale Weathers, the ace reporter, looking for material for her own book. Gale is played by someone wearing a Courteney Cox mask. Then there’s Sheriff Dewey, played by Cox’s then-still-real-life-husband, David Arquette.

One of the new characters is played by a teenager who I recognised almost instantly as the wee boy from M Night Shyamalan’s Signs. “He’s too young to play that part, surely,” I scoffed. Then I remembered that Signs came out 14 years ago. He’s probably about 27 now, married with kids. Generous book deal for his memories of life in Hollywood.

I do this all the time. At a family funeral a couple of years ago, I was about to ask a younger cousin of mine about how he was getting on at school, before I remembered he was 30.

Anyway, bodies start falling, suspects are introduced then just as quickly bumped off, and the Giallo-ish whodunit element which made the original trilogy so compelling kicks in.

So, how up-to-date is the film? Well, in examining fresh ways of committing murder to find fame, Williamson’s script has an open goal, and he duly tucks the ball into the Net.

The world wide web and live video blogging is front and centre as a motive, but it’s never really followed up on. If these murders were really being streamed in real time, then the killer/killers would be pinpointed within moments. The idea is never properly explored.

To be fair, this was 2011 – most of a decade ago, although it feels like it was last week or something. Long before Periscope and Facebook live and Vlogging as an activity which actually makes people money. In six years’ time, god knows what our online lives will be like.

Another thing that struck me – in real-life America, police or no police, a guy running around in a mask with a knife would need to be pretty nimble to avoid getting Swiss-cheesed within moments of his first jump-scare out of the closet. “What’s your favourite scary-” BLAM. And credits.

Scream 4 is not great. Neve Campbell doesn’t get loads to do in this one; she doesn’t even punch Gale this time, or anyone playing her role. To say she’s phoning it in would be unkind, although it’d be ironic given the killer’s MO. But she has aged very well. I remember reading a news story about her father originally being from Glasgow, and her and her brother travelling to a family house party in a tenement somewhere in the city’s east end one night. The pictures were sold to a tabloid. It’s on a par with “Brad Pitt went to a party in Drumchapel in 1995”.

To look at Courteney Cox’s suspiciously lumpy features is to feel horribly old. Sad to report, the same is true with the “eye candy” – including one girl who strips down to her bra, Kevin Williamson’s cheeky wink at another scene in the film where viewers of Stab hope that the actresses will bare their breasts. (No dice, I’m afraid, but you probably knew that.)

God, they looked so young. “Be careful, girls,” I wanted to say, a concerned dad watching his daughter and her friends heading out into the unforgiving night. You wonder how an older guy like Wes Craven, old enough to be their grandfather, actually feels when he calls “action” and has to objectify beautiful young people to satisfy the lusts of the viewing public. My guess is, you’d get tired.

Sadly, Mr Craven is no longer around to ask.

Out of the four movies in the series, it’s perhaps third-best. It descends into a long chase through a conveniently remote, conveniently deserted house, with suspects and characters popping in and out of the story at convenient times.

The killings are horrible. It shows you how well-trained we are when it comes to camera tricks at the movies – how we come to expect certain edits. Ben Wheatley’s Kill List messed with this curious semiotic alchemy very well. When the hammer comes down on that guy’s head, you expect the camera to pull away, or the shot to change. But it doesn’t. You’ve got to sit there and watch. Through your fingers, if necessary.

Similarly, in Scream 4, you expect the camera to pull away at certain points to make it easier for you. Even allowing for retractable blades and other stage-prop trickery, those vicious stabs looked real.

I later discovered that the knife blades were pasted in by computer graphics – explaining how they achieved the seamless “plunges”. George A Romero once talked about how he wanted to go beyond the Hammer Horror aesthetic; how seeing the shadow of a knife rise and fall wasn’t enough. He wanted to show you the blade going all the way in, and not cutting away. Wes Craven does so, here.

I winced. I must be getting old.

Regarding the person behind the mask, you’ll have an inkling of who it is, but you’ll never know for sure until the end. It’s not a shocking reveal. As in some of the other sequels, Williamson plays with the idea of doing something truly shocking, and killing off one of his principals. This would have been a ballsy thing to do, and would have taken us out of our comfort zone, but he doesn’t quite go there. Nor does Wes Craven. And nor will he. It was the director who faced the final curtain quite recently, most likely bringing it down on the franchise along with him.

“Franchise”. I detest that term.

But you never know. Scream 4 doubled its money upon release. Add in another £3 from me to the cash pile. If there’s money to be made, they always come back.

I got a nice cosy feeling in watching Scream 4, which is a strange thing to write about a horror movie. I don’t quite feel nostalgic about the 1990s yet. I should do. They were my time. They took me from the age of 13 to 23. But I don’t get that cosy glow about those years. The reasons behind this might take a whole book to explain, and no-one would want to read it. Anything good that happened was tinged by alcohol. Ditto anything bad. I seemed so happy at the time, too. Now I know differently.

However, I do feel nostalgic about the days when I didn’t have to worry quite so much about things. When I could go to the movies with my mates on a Sunday night, scoff nachos drenched in rancid cheese and jalapenos, and jump out of my skin at a man in a mask going “boo!”

It was a good way to finish the weekend and see the hangover out the door. It was enough. Just a bunch of kids at the movies. Not necessarily better times; just simpler ones.

Lights, jump cuts, shrieking strings, corn syrup.

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The Man In The Plasticine Mask

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Appearance, Books, Cover girl, Disguise, Face, Furry face, Handsome, Hidden, literature, Mask, Mystery, Pat Black, Pig, The Man in the Mask, Ugly, writing

Always on my mind, baby

I’m a writer. But I don’t use my own name. I don’t show my true face. I wear a mask.

My wife isn’t quite sure about this. “Psychologists would have a field day with you,” she says, during playful moods.

At other times, she is outright suspicious. I wonder if she thinks I’m like Kevin Bacon in that dirty invisible man film. Creeping around the internet with my mask on, cackling like a Victorian villain, tying decency to the tracks.

I have my reasons for this disguise. (None of these involve being a dirty invisible Kevin Bacon.)

First, I’ve always thought that, until it starts bringing in money, I’d be embarrassed if my workmates knew about my typing habit.

My job has a little bit to do with this – I’d feel demeaned if colleagues knew I wrote. Most folk would be supportive, I suppose, but it isn’t “most folk” that make the biggest impression in life – it’s the bastards.

It would certainly give some people ammunition to take a pop at me. I have a thick skin, but I know the laws of the jungle. You present a possible weakness, it gets exploited.

This also has a fair bit to do with my childhood, where my activities as a seven-year-old writer and comic book artist were laughed at by some family members.

“Why do you bother with that stupid stuff? Does that girl you drew have boobs?”

An older brother used to find it hilarious to steal the stories and comic strips I wrote and show them to his girlfriends and mates, then delight in telling me how much they laughed about it. When I was nine I wrote an entire illustrated Choose Your Own Adventure-style book about – what else, in 1986? – a Ninja. He was probably a crap Ninja, as I recall, because you could see him on every page. Having conversations with people, etc. He had a cool ninja mask, though.

It took me months. My brother stole it and I never saw it again. I saw him do it. When I asked him what happened, he swore he didn’t know a thing about it.

Where I come from, creativity is a bit effete. It was something I loved, but it became something furtive, something hidden, of necessity. In the closet, you might say.

Secondly, in a world where image is very important, my face isn’t an advantage.

It used to be that writers with actual writing careers could be faceless, an almost perfect scenario where you have a chance of success and even a level of fame while still being able to walk down the street, unrecognised. Nowadays, that’s becoming less likely for authors. You need an online profile to sell yourself, a face to go with the name.

I am increasingly horrified by what I see of my true face in photographs, the changes that time has wrought. Of course, you don’t have to be a writer to realise that you could be this month’s cover star for Faces of Fuck Magazine.

This feeling certainly involves some ego. To paraphrase a chilling statement uttered by  a female relative a few years ago: “When you were a wee boy, I used to think you would grow up to be the most handsome man. What happened?”

A while ago I was compared to former Doctor Who actor David Tennant by a drunken woman in a pub, which, while hilarious, I must admit I found flattering. To be clear, I don’t resemble him in the slightest, and I think the woman was off her head. I’ve got dark hair and eyes and a Scottish accent, but that’s it.

Well… I say it was flattering. That was only for a moment, until a friend I was with at the time made a more truthful comparison: “Yes, he’s like David Tennant… in a hall of mirrors.”

To counter this very favourable review, and to give you a more complete picture of what I look like, another drunken woman in a pub a couple of years prior to this compared me to portly breakfast TV host Eamonn Holmes. I should hope there’s no resemblance at all there, either… but she must have said it for a reason.

If someone had handed me a literal mask that day, I should probably have worn it. Certainly I stepped it up in the gym from that day forth.

The truth of my appearance, regrettably, lies in the centre of these two extremes.

So, a mask preserves some dignity.

But on top of that, I enjoy the mystique of the false identity; the hidden face, even though it is mostly in my head. Obviously, a stuffed Highland cow avatar isn’t quite as thrilling and mysterious as being Batman. And I’m not looking to solve crimes or bring justice to people, or indeed do anything remotely important.

But there is the thrill of being part of a conspiracy, no matter how small. And like the masked heroes and supermen, there are some people who do know my real name, the supporters and confidants. They help me get through, and give me a push to carry on.

The thing which some people find hard to grasp is that being Pat Black isn’t about putting a mask on. I feel as if I’ve taken a mask off.

I’ve written about topics and scenarios that I wouldn’t have dreamed of addressing had I written under my own name, out in the open. My writing feels more honest, more real, as a result – and in some cases much more personal, too.

Masks aren’t always a good thing, of course. We all know that internet anonymity can be corrosive, a cover for sadism, spite and jealousy. But rather than indulging my dark side, being Pat Black has set me free. There’s no pressure to be anyone or anything, and that’s liberating.

Pat Black feels like the real me.

This is a smudged picture of the man behind the mask. His identity is safe… for now.

Perhaps one day I’ll be able to take the mask off, and it won’t matter if friends, family or former colleagues know what I get up to in here and elsewhere, under cover of the night.

But for now… you’re stuck with the furry face.

No-one laughed at the monkeys

Tags

2001, A Space Odyssey, Arthur C Clarke, Bradford, Cinema, Hal 9000, Movies, National Media Museum, sci-fi, science fiction, SF, Stanley Kubrick

A review I wrote for a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the National Media Museum, Bradford, on December 30th 2014. 

Rock Hudson famously strode up and down the aisles at the 1968 premiere of 2001, demanding to know what the hell it was all about.

Going by some mutterings I heard at this re-release, his ghost may have been present to air old grievances.

Poor old Rock – the man who kissed Doris Day dozens of times without once wanting to – didn’t realise we’re not meant to know what it’s all about. There’s no clue as to what the black obelisks are. They just are.

My first exposure to Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece was on a 10in portable television in 1996… the National Media Museum in Bradford’s wide open spaces were a new dimension in comparison.

The special effects held up so beautifully on the big screen that I began to entertain conspiracy theories that would earn you a fat lip off Buzz Aldrin. Hal 9000’s unplugging was still tragic; you want Keir Dullea’s Bowman to let the fella sing a bit longer.

As an aside, I wonder if Kubrick ever realised that 2001’s hero shares the same first name as the famously tough-tackling Dundee United footballer of the 1980s and 90s. I have wondered at the possibilities of this Dave Bowman unlocking the secrets of time, space and existence in a tangerine and black spacesuit. Perhaps his version of Hal 9000 would have the voice of Archie MacPherson.

As Bowman zoomed through the stargate, I considered whether Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke took a trip of their own in conceiving this movie. The multi-dimensional Ikea suite at journey’s end jarred, though; there’s something about the green velvety chesterfield headboard on the bed that gets on my nerves. Knowing Kubrick, that colour, that material and that shape would have been painstakingly chosen and realised.

But so what? Bowman’s journey might have been better concluded with a confrontation with an emperor with no clothes on. Played by Kubrick.

But let’s not get sucked into Rock Hudson’s orbit.

The star child wrung a tear from this most jaded of viewers, a sublime moment at the end of the year when my first child was born.

This peerless cinematic epiphany was 24 hours before new year’s eve, a time when you could throw a bottle in the air, only for it to land in the hands of a man wearing a monkey onesie.

We’re no nearer an answer to the riddle of existence than our flea-bitten ancestors. That, I suspect, was Kubrick’s great cosmic joke.

As for the screening, the Rock Hudsonites in the audience were in the minority. No-one laughed at the monkeys. A lot of the people in the auditorium were very young, and there for the same reason I was. 2001’s legacy is secure.

You can read my science fiction stories, Sail The Starry Skies, if you like. There’s really no need to do this Dave. I’m feeling much better now. 

Ethereal Lights & Magic

Tags

Christmas, Magic, Star Wars, The Force Awakens

Peeow peeeoowww

Our Christmas tree is just visible over the top of my screen. Every now and again, I glance up at it, and do something very childish. It’s almost a reflex reaction by now, something I’ve done since I was about six or seven.

If I squint at the coloured lights, it looks like laser beams are shooting out of them.

Flashing lights in the dark will be a big part of this Christmas in particular, especially in the cinemas. It was a shrewd idea to bring the new Star Wars movie out over the festive period. To me – and I suspect, to JJ Abrams, and millions of other people who grew up loving George Lucas’ silly space opera – Christmas and Star Wars are intertwined.

It’s mostly to do with the toys. My favourite Christmases involved tearing open the paper to find Star Wars men and ships. One year I got the Millennium Falcon. Another year, I got the AT-AT. I hugged it like it was a puppy.

In my best ever Christmas (1984; Band Aid; the year of the BMX bike), I got the Rancor monster and a Scout Walker. I still have the videotape from December 30^th, 1984, marked in my still non-cursive handwriting, when ITV screened Star Wars, and I taped it. The whole family came around to watch.

My birthday that year was ace, too. My sister got me a set of books, called Be An Interplanetary Spy. From these, I began to write my own books. There was the Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs game, and my mum, god bless her, telling me she had heard a story that a live dinosaur had been found in Africa. These are the most magical memories.

I remember my older brother, taking a picture one year (1982? 1983?). “Pose with the Millennium Falcon! Look shocked! Come on, look shocked! Imagine you’re Luke Skywalker!” I didn’t understand. “I’ve already opened it… How can I look surprised all over again?” I’m not sure he quite got it.

It isn’t just Star Wars, of course, and it isn’t just Christmas. I remember skipping down the road on my way to see The Empire Strikes Back when I was about four, my sister listening to me recount the entire picture at the end of it, despite the fact she’d seen it too. I remember Star Wars dinner mats – Yoda, and one with the Stormtroopers. Playing with my toy R2D2 in the suds of the kitchen sink, pretending it’s the scene on Dagobah with the monster that swallows him. An army of little figures, all set up to fight every night. My dark bedroom, lit up bright green with my spanking brand new lightsabre, a present for my seventh birthday; my brother, strong with the Dark Side, taking me on with a white plastic tentpole, and, I suspected, far too old for lightsabre fights (if only I knew!).

Flash Gordon’s in there, too. I used to imagine the Christmas tree was the lightning field, a starry cloak thrown around Emperor Ming’s city, under assault from War Rocket Ajax. I can do this now. I just need to glance up at the tree, and squint.

I know Star Wars is a massive, multibillion-dollar business. I know the toys are expensive, and that I was a very lucky lad to have them as a kid, especially coming from the depressed area I did. I know that it’s tied in with corporate culture (does Disney own everything, now?). But Star Wars is tied in with the magic of childhood, and Christmas.

That’s why I responded on a very deep emotional level when I saw that first trailer for The Force Awakens, and heard The Empire Strikes Back romance theme. Nothing to do with money. Nothing to do with being spoiled as a kid (was I really, in fact?). Everything to do with that feeling of magic that you forget about, as you grow older, uglier, more cynical, more disappointed, more traumatised. The excitement, that love of action and adventure, romance and anticipation, thrills and fulfilment. My old dear, who budgeted so brilliantly to bring me all those beloved Christmases is a quarter of a century in her grave. The older brother I clashed lightsabres with is gone, too; and the beloved sister who bought me all those Star Wars men, who took me to see The Empire Strikes Back, who did the Yoda impressions… she’s gone too, this past year.

So while I might bitch a little about the prequels, and while I’m all too aware of global financial markets and corporate monsters… Star Wars is special to me. I’m not alone in this.

I’m going to see The Force Awakens on Monday. I can’t wait. I know it’s just a movie. I know if I expect the best thing ever, it can’t possibly be the best thing ever. And Star Wars has a track record of being disappointing.

But for now, while the new film is still a mystery… while it has the power of myth in my own mind… while my imagination is still filling in the blanks… well, I’m as excited as I was when I first started making funny faces at the Christmas tree. When all was not so much Industrial Light & Magic, as Ethereal Lights and Magic.

I’m still squinting at the tree, trying to make the lights shoot lasers. I hope I always will.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace of May 1999. Episode Six

Tags

1999, Afghanistan, Amidala, Darth Vader, Ewan McGregor, George Lucas, George W Bush, Hayden Christiansen, Iraq, JJ Abrams, Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padme, Palpatine, Prequels, Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars, The Force Awakens, Tony Blair

You ever think an astro mech and a guy like me..?

The final episode: forgiving George Lucas.

You probably think I’m railing on George Lucas. You might be right.

You probably also think I’m enjoying it. That wouldn’t be true.

Anyone who was young when Star Wars came out, or who was born around about that time, owes George Lucas a lot. Respect is due. It’s about time I paid some. Even to the prequels.

Perhaps I’ve made it seem like he has let me down. And yeah, he was responsible for a disappointing set of movies. But there’s a bit more to these times, and this series of films, than meets the eye. There’s certainly a lot more to George Lucas than sitting back and counting cash.

We’ve got to be fair. We’ve got to accept where George Lucas got it right.

The story of Palpatine’s rise to power matches that of George W Bush. It’s spookily prescient, given that Bill Clinton was still in office when The Phantom Menace was released.

Out of Palpatine and Dubya, one of these two men reached the highest office in a dubious manner, started a costly war under false pretences and caused the start of an international dark age. The other is Emperor Palpatine.

The phrase that rings truest in Revenge of the Sith is uttered by Natalie Portman’s Amidala, as Palpatine basks in his ultimate triumph. “This is how democracy dies… with ringing applause.”

Lucas’ galactic empire rose at the same time as modern neoliberalism reached something of a crisis point, under the steerage of Bush and Tony Blair. The illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were the defining international events of this time, never mind the Clone Wars. The strings were being pulled by people in thrall to neoliberal capitalism.

George Lucas didn’t like what he was seeing, either in domestic or foreign politics, and he took aim at it. There are very few major league film-makers who addressed this illiberal, rapacious, technocratic trend (James Cameron, with Avatar, was the other notable exception).

Star Wars has been very good for George Lucas’ bank balance, but he isn’t wallowing in it. Lucas has gone down the Andrew Carnegie route, giving his fortune away to good causes. For this reason he should be applauded everywhere he goes. In a beautiful gesture, Lucas also gave over some prime real estate over to social housing projects, in defiance of property speculators who could only see dollar signs.

Part of me sees the George Lucas of 1997-2005 as being happier if he’d set a series of movies in and around the Galactic Senate, with all the political machinations, power struggles and, yes, trade embargoes that universe would entail. These are the sort of narrative toys an older man would prefer to play with, rather than the stuff of sword fights and shootouts. Who knows – he still might do it…

So for these reasons, let’s give due credit to George Lucas. He blew the prequels, but he’s still a good man, doing good things. And his credentials as a creator of fantastic, innovative entertainment are better than most.

I forgive you for the prequels, George. After all, it’s only movies.

Something to bear in mind as we head into The Force Awakens, in a matter of days.

You should expect a film, nothing more.

If JJ Abrams makes as good a job of it as he did with the Star Trek reboot, we’ll be entertained. That’s all you can ask.

Disappointment is a terrible thing.

It’s a big risk to hope, and I daren’t do it. But there is a chance – just a chance – that Star Wars will be magic again.

Here’s to hoping.

Fancy reading the whole thing from the start? Click here.

 

 

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace of May 1999. Episode Five

Tags

1999, Culture, Darth Sidious, Darth Vader, Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson, Movies, Natalie Portman, Non-Fiction, Palpatine, Prequels, Star Wars, The Phantom Menace

Takes years off you, honest

The prequels and wider culture, debugged:

The prequels’ worst crime was to become a template for how popular culture would unfold into the 21^st century. We are still suffering from their effects today.

They were terrible movies – yes, even Revenge of the Sith; stop kidding yourselves! – but they made some very serious money. Even today, there’s probably tickertape showing you how much these movies continue to rake in for the producers on a daily basis.

It’s our own fault. Even after Attack of the Clones – which was arguably even worse than The Phantom Menace – we still went back to this terrible franchise, its popularity unabated. We bought the books and toys and video games. We indoctrinated our children into it; non-discerning younglings who didn’t know any better, doomed to repeat our mistakes.

Producers and accountants took careful note. This proved beyond dispute that the quality of the end product didn’t matter, even if the film was a steaming turd. The bottom line was that if you had a pre-existing concept, with an in-built, loyal fan base, then it didn’t matter what you fed them – they’d consume it, in great numbers, and then come back for more.

We can see this manifest in the cameos issue, where some characters get walk-on parts to service fans’ desire to see them. It’s why we saw Chewbacca’s pointless appearance in Revenge of the Sith. It’s why R2D2 and C3PO were shoe-horned into the plot in the first place. Although some wonderful creatures and locations were designed, all three films were falling over each other to reference what had gone before instead of going their own way.

This is now endemic in our marquee movie culture. The Spider-Man movies were made, and then rebooted, in the space of just 10 years. Same story, played out again, with different actors. The same thing is happening with Batman, who is being rebooted despite the Christopher Nolan trilogy having a definitive ending (about the only bit he got totally right in The Dark Knight Rises).

It’s as if they think we’re stupid.

…Are we stupid?

Astonishingly, Peter Jackson made the same mistake as Lucas with his Hobbit movies – nothing like as bad as the Star Wars prequels, but nowhere near as involving as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, either. The Hobbit films, too, are falling over themselves to cram in references to characters we know, outside the framing of Tolkien’s original text. Legolas appears, although his character seems to be totally different to the one we know. Incredibly, the special effects were worse in many places.

Lord of the Rings felt like a banquet; The Hobbit feels like a binge.

Brand recognition is the key. It’s hard to launch a big movie without it these days – and turkeys like John Carter and The Lone Ranger, based on more obscure properties, have not helped.

Think back to the movies that were coming out 30 years ago in comparison. Ghostbusters… Back to the Future… Beverley Hills Cop… The Terminator… all original properties, all massive hits, all excellent films. Where is this generation’s Ghostbusters? Will a studio take a chance on an unproven tentpole movie again? You could make a case for Avatar, but it has James Cameron’s stamp across it; much like new property from Spielberg, that imprimatur means it’s guaranteed some financial backing and a turnout at the box office, come what may.

Even new movies with heretofore unseen elements on the big screen come with added brand recognition. Twilight was already entrenched in teenage girls’ culture long before the movies came out. I’d never heard of Guardians of the Galaxy, but it has the Marvel stamp on it, and that universe will tie in with the Avengers and all those other comic book guys. Godzilla, yet another reboot, has both feet firmly planted in popular culture across the globe.

A recent article on the BBC by Adam Curtis showed that there may be an economic reason for this stuttering phenomenon in mainstream entertainment. We can understand why a corporation would seek to make its risk as near zero as possible; but this is manifest in individuals, too. People not only enjoy this VHS-style “re-record and repeat” phenomenon, but actively seek it. It’s a cultural comfort blanket.

Curtis reminds us that the Blackrock computer programme analyses what’s gone before in culture or politics, and makes predictions based on that past knowledge – but this completely removes the factors which resulted in things like Star Wars making it out of some nerd’s brain and onto a cinema screen in the first place: inspiration and imagination.

We have all the creativity in the world, but nothing new gets created, because that would be unsafe for producers and consumers. So, what you get are retreads of what you already know. It’s safer that way, for us as consumers, and for the powers that be in government, entertainment, or wherever.

That’s why, in time, Keanu Reeves will make another Matrix film. That’s why Eddie Murphy will do Beverly Hills Cop again. You’d better believe that’s why we’re getting a new Star Wars. It’s the same with music. U2, the Rolling Stones, Bon Jovi, Springsteen, AC/DC… bands whose heyday was 30 years and more ago, and yet they are still the biggest draw in the digital age.

Where is this generation’s Rolling Stones? Where is its Star Wars?

Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end… here’s the beginning.

And it ends right here.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace of May 1999. Episode Four

Tags

1999, Amidala, Darth Vader, Emperor, Ewan McGregor, Ian McDiarmid, Jake Lloyd, Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman, Obi-Wan, Palpatine, Prequels, Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars, The Phantom Menace

My hair is getting good in the back

In which we find out what was wrong with The Phantom Menace... like you didn’t already know…

Examinations of what went wrong with George Lucas’ return to Star Wars have been done better, and in greater detail, elsewhere.  Here’s my two galactic credits’ worth on the subject, anyway:

:: Anakin Skywalker: It doesn’t work to show this character as a child. Jake Lloyd’s performance isn’t very good, but then we must remember he was primary school age. When a little kid misbehaves in public, you might be angry at him on a superficial level, but ultimately he is the responsibility of his parents. In Jake Lloyd’s case, we must blame the man who cast him, and the man who thought it would be a good idea to make the nascent Darth Vader a wee boy. We just never engage with the kid.

What they should have done: Make Anakin about 19-20, like Luke was in the original Star Wars. Except that instead of having him as a whiny teen, make him an Errol Flynn type, the bad boy on the block, a brawler and a troublemaker, desperate to get off Tattooine and make something of himself. His bravery and skill would draw the Jedi’s attention… and that of the hidden Sith. There would be a natural contrast with the stuffy, somewhat arch Obi-Wan which would come to a natural conclusion. Confidence would turn to arrogance, and then darker still… that’s someone we could see becoming Darth Vader, alright.

He should have been old enough to not only form a bond with Natalie Portman’s Queen Amidala, but also to ruffle her headdress feathers a wee bit. Perhaps here they could have followed a template to better ends – taking in Han and Leia, and their initial antagonism, turning to something else.

Anakin and Amidala have to fall in love at some point; there’s absolutely no chance a teenage girl would look at an eight-year-old boy and think: “Yep. In ten years’ time, I reckon he’s the one.”

Heath Ledger had just broken through at this point – imagine him as Anakin Skywalker?

:: The animation: The effects are good in The Phantom Menace, but they’re not great. It’s too bright. During the droids vs Gungans battle scene, there is no point where you believe you are watching real things happen in a real environment. Lucas should have gone practical for the most part, with CGI where it was needed – out in the space scenes, maybe. It looked too clean, and, as in most green screen films, the animated figures didn’t seem to have proper weight and mass to them when balanced with the traditional photography.

With his mix of practical effects, sets, props and models to accompany the CGI, Peter Jackson showed Lucas how it should be done with the Lord of the Rings movies, which were at that point still being shot in New Zealand.

They bettered the prequel trilogy in every single way. Then, in a twist no-one saw coming, Jackson promptly forgot much of this for the Hobbit films, and made many of the same mistakes as Lucas (though I have warmed to those movies as time has gone on, in a way that I never did to the prequel trilogy).

:: Darth Maul: He looked the part. He was electrifying in his action scenes. But there was not enough of him, and he was gone all too soon. This was a film largely without a villain. He wasn’t in it long enough for us to have built up any sense of threat.

:: Midichlorians: Perhaps the most horrible alarm bell moment was when Qui-Gon Jinn started gibbering about special intergalactic algae. It was the moment the magic of Star Wars died.

The force was an ethereal construct, something that couldn’t be explained by simple science. It was something out of myth, something beyond the conscious, physical realm. “Magic” was all the explanation we’ve ever required. It needed to be ineffable, inexplicable, something that could be felt and seen, not something that could be accounted for like blood cells or lung capacity.

Surely someone reading Lucas’ script must have realised this. Surely someone had the authority to put a pen right through it and ask for a rethink.

Why didn’t they? Fear?

:: Poor design: Much has been made of the “clean” look of this universe compared to the original trilogy’s heaps of junk. The prequels harken back to the “golden age” of the Republic, and so it makes sense to have a clearer, more polished design, to contrast with the classic trilogy’s rough n’ ready aesthetic. However, lots of things just don’t work. Doug Chang’s battle droids… yes, I get that he was drawing upon ancient ethnic art concepts, but to me they looked like what they were intended to be: toys. They’re not scary. They’re not memorable. They exist only to be chopped up by the Jedi. Guilt-free cannon fodder.

That wasn’t the only area where the designers dropped the ball. The costumes were silly, particularly those they made poor Natalie Portman wear – a division up from Space 1999, but no more than that. Ewan McGregor’s Renton-style buzz-cut plus ponytail kind of worked, but in some scenes the continuity was off, with some sequences clearly shot, or re-shot, months apart.

Occasionally it looks like Obi-Wan has a ginger Scotfro. At other times he’s got the buzz-cut. The continuity jump was so jarring that some people burst out laughing when McGregor appeared – me included. It was like a parody sketch of The Phantom Menace, a skit you might see in French and Saunders, within the actual movie.

:: Plot: Trade delegations… embargos… what? Can we rewind the opening crawl, mate? I missed a bit.

:: Non-suspense: I wonder who that cloaked Sith guy is, that evil-sounding chap who’s giving Darth Maul orders… Wait! It isn’t Palpatine, is it? That guy who’s going to become the Emperor? Played by the guy who played the Emperor in Return of the Jedi? He never bloody is!

What a complete and utter waste of time. This was played as if it was some kind of secret, when everyone and their auntie knew what the score was. There was no subterfuge, here – nothing for the audience to discover, to be surprised by. It is storytelling slurry, total stupidity. This was a major plot point that the audience knew before they sat down in the cinema. Were we supposed to act surprised? This was a non-mystery that they stretched out for THREE FILMS.

This last point illustrates perhaps the key problem of the prequels: we know what’s going to happen. This is a story with an end point already in place. The Jedi die; Obi-Wan and Anakin have a fight on a lava planet; Anakin loses, and becomes Darth Vader; his twin children, Luke and Leia, are born and hidden away from him. Now, let’s stretch that certain knowledge out over THREE FILMS.

:: What they should have done: Imagine Palpatine – revealed to the audience as a Sith from the very start – was the apprentice to a hidden Sith lord in The Phantom Menace. We should have been up-front with this. Show his struggle to keep his secret hidden from the Jedi council, who should start out trusting him. He trains Darth Maul as his own pupil on the side, sure – but have that elder Sith as someone he will eventually usurp, perhaps using Anakin to do the dirty work. Imagine if Christopher Lee had played, say, Darth Plagueius, rather than Dooku?

:: The Jedi: Yoda seemed to have it all sorted out in Empire. He was wise, he was in tune with nature, he lived in a swamp, and he didn’t give a shit. Why, then, did he reappear as this uptight little whiskery pillock, sticking to the rules and ordering people about on the Jedi Council? Even Samuel L Jackson looked like he needed a poo for the duration of his screentime as Mace Windu – MACE WINDU, for god’s sake – in this awful film.

Did puppeteer and Yoda vocalist Frank Oz realise he was making an awful film while they were shooting it? Did Samuel L Jackson?

We wanted to see these Zen-like, serene masters of consciousness, spirituality and physicality. But in fact, the Jedi came across as prissy, uptight town planning officials. Something went badly wrong, there.

:: Cameos and cutesy touches: Yaay, here’s Jabba… Here’s some Jawas… Here’s Greedo… Yaay… “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” yaay. “Utini,” yaaay.

It’s like special guest stars on Happy Days, getting a wee cheer and a round of applause from the studio audience when they appear. They do nothing for the plot; it’s a tick-sheet for geeks, a little hit of what they’re after, something they recognise.

Imagine they’d shown Harrison Ford at the bar during the pod racing scene. “Hey, there’s Bingo Solo,” one of the characters would say. “How’s your boy doing, Bingo?” “Oh, Han’s a lively one,” Ford would drawl.

The audience would have shat themselves with excitement. And this is the problem. Instead of shitting themselves, they should have been throwing their nachos and rancid cheese at the screen. These little touchstones are childish and inert. It brings us no surprise, no novelty, only a pale imitation of what’s gone before, reducing it to a punchline. This is fanboy culture distilled down to the weak piss it is.

The hideous irony was that although The Phantom Menace used cutting-edge digital technology, the driving aesthetic behind this narrative recycling was strictly analogue: the VHS video cassette. Each reintroduction of familiar elements was like you’d recorded it again, and again, and again… with each recording slightly worse than the one that preceded it.

I won’t stick the knife into Jar-Jar, here, as he was one of the least offensive elements of this movie. The reaction to him was an early example of internet herding instincts. Once one or two people with high-profile platforms started blaming Jar-Jar for the whole mess, lots of other people piled in with questionable opinions.

“Jar-Jar is racist!” I still hear people cry. No, he’s meant to be from space. If there are space frog-people out there who are offended by the portrayal of Jar-Jar, then I will take that back. But he is a space person. Not human. Certainly not black. I suspect that people only thought to say Jar-Jar was racist because they’d read it somewhere, or someone told them about it. I do not see and hear Jar-Jar Binks and think: that’s a black person. Perhaps you need to have a good look at yourself if this is what you think. It’s in the eye of the beholder.

Also, Jar-Jar was not universally hated at first. He was loved by children at the time, including my own nephew, who was obsessed with him, which I guess is what Lucas was aiming for. (See also, Anakin as a wee boy. Maybe Lucas wanted to put someone in there for other wee boys to identify with?)

It only hit me recently what might have cut a little close to the bone when it came to Jar-Jar.

Jar-Jar was us. Over-excited, naïve, blundering in, bewildered, at the mercy of immense forces, and finally tossed aside and abandoned.

I think Jar-Jar was treated very badly out of all this. He was almost certainly meant to be a major component of the prequel trilogy, so the producers’ attitude to the character once they read comments from mouth-breathers on the internet – ie, cutting him dead – was a clear sign of what now seems obvious:

:: George Lucas didn’t have a plan.

He had a billion-dollar toybox at his disposal, with all the backing and control he could ever wish from a studio, with a ready-made audience. He had three big movies to make; one man at the helm of an operation worth billions and billions of dollars. It was one of cinema’s simplest open goals.

And he missed.

This is largely because he was winging it. Beyond “Anakin becomes Vader; climactic duel with Obi-Wan; Luke and Leia are born”, I’d be prepared to bet there was nothing concrete planned when George Lucas announced he was going to make these films.

What Lucas perhaps didn’t realise going into the project was that the opinions of children were less important than those of their parents, who had grown up with Star Wars threaded through their imaginative DNA; that these films would be consumed and dissected by grown adults the same way some critics might discuss fine art.

With Jar-Jar in mind, you can only imagine how R2-D2 and C3PO would have been received from the dark side of Star Wars fandom had they made their first appearance in the prequels.

“Who’s this golden ponce? Why am I supposed to care about a motorised alarm clock?”

There are good points. Yes, the lightsabre fight at the end was great. Also getting a thumbs-up was the pod race, even though it makes little sense and the wee boy looks stupid. How much more fun would this have been if you’d had late-teens Anakin, the cocky boy racer, instead of a little squirt with pebble glasses?

Ewan McGregor’s Sir Alec Guinness/Obi-Wan pastiche was rightly applauded as one of the better elements of the production, but Qui-Gon Jinn gives the film its heart. He bows out of the series a little too soon, and too cheaply. With the possible exception of Ian McDiarmid in Revenge of the Sith, Liam Neeson’s performance is about the best of the prequels. Through him we had a reminder of the Jedi as caring, intuitive, even human – instead of uptight, stick-in-the-mud space presbyterians.

The Phantom Menace and its two sequels went so badly wrong at a conceptual level that they couldn’t do anything but fail. Ultimately, did we really need to see Anakin Skywalker become Vader, and Obi-Wan facing off with him? These things were better left as they were – as backstory, as something near-mythical, told in the tones of legend. They were always much bigger in our minds than they were on screen.

Plus, Lucas contrived to get his own narrative hopelessly muddled. We’d heard about the Clone Wars in the original Star Wars. We also knew that Boba Fett had fought in these, that he wore the armour of some guys called the Mandalorians, who had a big say in it. Everyone assumed this business is what the prequels would be about. Here, surely, was where we’d see the Clone Wars brought to life – right?

Wrong. Despite starting work with the prime thrust of his three-movie narrative already right there in front of him, Lucas contrived to dance around the Clone Wars, utterly missing the mark in not one, but three films. We only saw the start of it in the conclusion of Attack of the Clones, and its very end in Revenge of the Sith. He did flesh things out in an animated series, which I’ve heard is pretty good. But this to me was unforgivable.

The Clone Wars was the conflict that should have provided the backbone of the prequels, and Lucas should have started these the same way he did with the rebellion in episodes IV-VI – in media res. The story should have been how Anakin rose in the ranks at the Jedi council and helped win the Clone Wars, and in the process became uncontrollable, egotistical, and finally outright evil.

Part five, you greedy devil? Here it is.

Read the whole thing from the start right here.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace of May 1999. Episode Three

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1999, Amidala, Darth Maul, Ewan McGregor, George Lucas, Keanu Reeves, Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman, Neo, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars, The Matrix, The Phantom Menace

When I dance, I dance to win

The story continues…

After it was over and the audience shuffled out on the foyer’s scuffed carpet, my sci-fi mate was ecstatic.

“That was everything I ever wanted to see in a Star Wars film. It was amazing. Brilliant.”

“I dunno,” I said. “The big fight at the end was great, but…”

“But what? Come on.”

“It was… alright. It took a wee bit too long to get going.”

Sci-fi guy wasn’t listening, although he bristled at a piece of prime devilment from another pal: “It wasn’t as good as The Matrix.”

The world lost its marbles somewhat over The Phantom Menace. I’d last encountered hype on this scale just over 10 years previously, with Tim Burton’s first Batman movie. My feeling upon leaving the same cinema after The Phantom Menace was much the same.

We were enthused about it all and had been dazzled by the technical wizardry on show, but our expectations had not been met. How could they be? If you expect something is going to be utterly amazing, then you rob it of a key component – surprise. That’s why The Matrix was truly amazing when it came out, and why Tim Burton’s Batman could never be.

I remember lying to myself and to some of my pals about Batman at the time, enthusing that it was the most amazing film ever, when I knew in my heart that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was a superior film in every way. I imagine a lot of people felt the same way in summer 2012 when The Dark Knight Rises landed with a limp, broken-backed thud.

The 1989 Batman still has its defenders, incidentally. The Phantom Menace does not.

The Matrix was new. Its effects were jaw-dropping, its story intriguing. In contrast, the new Star Wars looked and felt like you were watching a Saturday morning cartoon. Which you were.

I’ll discuss this in more detail in Episode Four, but one of many astonishing things about the prequel trilogy was how it seemed hell-bent on tarnishing previously good ideas. One example of this was assigning values to the beautifully abstract concept of being a Jedi.

The Phantom Menace took all the fun out of being a Jedi. In contrast, The Matrix took a well-worn philosophical problem – what if everything you experience is merely a simulation, and you’re actually just a brain in a tank? – and turned it into a blockbuster movie with guns, kung fu and Keanu Reeves. I’d never seen anything like it before.

A sign of the times, I remember being somewhat confused by The Matrix the first time I saw it. Its notions of a self-enclosed fantasy world running through microchips, electronically connected to the brain and determined by trickles of lurid green machine code, was too much for my mind to take in, first bite. I know others felt the same way. You have to remember that computers were all over our workplaces and in many of our homes, but they were not ubiquitous, and the internet was in its infancy as far as mass appeal went. No-one had heard of Google.

Just 16 years later, with Oculus Drift, smartphones and frighteningly immersive video games, The Matrix doesn’t seem all that far-fetched; in fact, I wonder how I could ever have been confused by the idea in the first place.

I took a trainee haematologist to see it, and we’d both said to each other: “What the hell was that?” It fired my blood though; hers, I don’t know about. Sadly, this union wasn’t long in the making. But while our paths diverged, and that lovely girl perhaps always thought that The Matrix was a load of bunk, it stuck with me. I wanted to see it again, and I did. What a bold piece of film-making, I thought; what a terrific statement to make about the movies and virtual reality.

Two bloated, self-important and over-wrought sequels tarnished the name built by the Wachowskis, but the original Matrix is still worth watching whenever it appears on the lower-division digital channels.

I can’t say the same for The Phantom Menace.

Episode four? Right here.

You want to start at the start? Here’s Episode One. 

 

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace of May 1999. Episode Two

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1999, A New Hope, Amidala, Anakin Skywalker, Darth Maul, Ewan McGregor, George Lucas, Liam Neeson, Lightsabers, Lightsabres, Luke Skywalker, Midichlorians, Natalie Portman, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, Ray Park, Star Wars, The Force, The Phantom Menace

“We’ve decided to make it official. I know this is difficult for you, Han,  but please respect our wishes.”

The saga continues… 

Ever since trailers had appeared the previous winter, The Phantom Menace had blotted out just about everything else on the cultural landscape. I think I’d first seen the trailer attached to Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic, or maybe the previous Star Trek movie, Insurrection.

It was breath-taking. It could not have looked bigger or more spectacular, a rush of gigantic monsters, zooming pod racers and Jedi knights clashing lightsabres, accompanied by the John Williams music we know so well.

Watch it today, and you’ll still feel a residue of excitement, a reminder of a time when you could be nakedly enthusiastic about a film coming out in the pictures. The baddie, Darth Maul, with his iconic evil tomato make-up, looked terrific, and the brief glimpses of lightsabre duelling had a gymnastic elasticity that couldn’t have contrasted any more sharply with Alec Guinness and Dave Prowse’s arthritic three-point turns in the original Star Wars.

The new film had been seeded in my mind much earlier, thanks to my aforementioned sci-fi mate, who was then studying for a postgraduate qualification. He’d gotten hold of some production pictures out of one of the American magazines, perhaps Entertainment Weekly, and they looked terrific on his office wall – Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan, and Ray Park in full Darth Maul costume, taking a flying leap at each other in the desert.

An image which would not appear in the finished movie.

Before this, of course, had been the Special Editions of 1997. Now routinely abused by people pining after the original cuts and hand-made effects, these palimpsests were instrumental in rekindling interest in Star Wars and also priming a new generation for what was to come. The children who had grown up with Star Wars – people of my generation – were now in their late teens and early twenties, college age. While there was an element of ironic appraisal in reliving these relics of childhood, in keeping with the tone of the Britpop/Grunge era (certainly we all went to see The Empire Strikes Back with a few drinks in us), it nonetheless triggered a fresh appraisal of the series.

Also in 1997 there was a documentary from the BBC, possibly by Alan Yentob, released in tandem with the original movie’s 20^th anniversary. It followed Ewan McGregor during his first day on set of The Phantom Menace, getting his hair shorn and meeting Jake Lloyd. There was also footage of him sat alone in a cinema, watching a screening of the Special Edition of Star Wars – or, as George Lucas insisted we should call it, A New Hope.

“Look at the detail, there,” McGregor said, when Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen’s barbecue spare rib corpses appeared on-screen. “That’s horrible.”

I’d dug out my battered VHS video copies of the original trilogy as far back as 1996. I am not sure whether news of the forthcoming Special Editions, and rumours of a new trilogy, had prompted this. I do know I was in the middle of an intense movies phase, gorging myself on cinema, a kind of tertiary education to my ongoing studies in English literature. Coppola, Scorsese, De Niro, Polanski, Spielberg and Nicholson were my tutors, my idols, at this time. George Lucas was part of that awesome wave of 1970s film-making, and so I reviewed Star Wars with a keener eye as an older youth, and not just for nostalgia purposes. It had been years since I’d last watched the films, perhaps as far back as when I was 11 or 12.

A curious thing to note about my love for Star Wars when I was a kid: although I watched the films again and again, and the toys were my favourites, I never warmed to Luke Skywalker. He was a bit of a whiner, a teensy bit pathetic. I much preferred Han Solo’s buccaneering style and swagger, not to mention the fact that, ultimately, he gets the girl.

And who didn’t want that girl?

I definitely favoured the random and clumsy action of a blaster to the elegant, civilised strobe-swishes of the lightsabre (though I had a lovely green lightsabre toy when I was seven).

I thought Darth Vader was even better than Han Solo. I didn’t see any moral problem with Vader emerging victorious, kind of, in Cloud City, although I was confused at the time as to how Vader could be Luke’s father as they weren’t exactly dead ringers.

Fast-forward to the age of 19, and I could relate much more to Luke Skywalker’s journey. We always strive for meaning and relevance in art in relation to our own lives at impressionable ages, and I was still enough of a fantasist to see some correlation between my own voyage through academic life and Luke Skywalker’s journey from dirt poor farm boy to stone-cold, black-clad, intergalactic badass.

Naturally.

Except that I couldn’t lay claim to great deeds, heroism, or even any romance to speak of.

Go forward a bit further, and in spring 1999 I was in the midst of what some people these days recognise as a crisis among a population that is better educated than ever before, but not necessarily cleverer or better-off than previous generations. Uni has finished; working life has begun; your previously upwards trajectory has flattened out into a wavering straight line towards mediocrity.

In retrospect, what I should have been doing was learning to drive, staying out of the pub, minding my pennies and saving a deposit for a flat. But it’s difficult to say this to guys aged 21/22, of course, as your life revolves around leisure, particularly drinking. I look back on this as a waste, but I did have fun.

Girls… you want to know more about them, I guess. Hang on for a wee bit. I’ll come back to them.

I was working under a total prick, a caricature of a boss straight out of a badly dated sitcom, while his number two managed to combine stridently feminist principles with sitting on middle-aged bosses’ knees at corporate parties. I came from Glasgow, I lived in Glasgow, and I worked in Glasgow, but I was the only Glaswegian in the office, and I felt very much like the outsider. “Going nowhere fast” was my theme.

And so, in the midst of this, came The Phantom Menace.

I had an absurd sense that I might die before getting to see it. I joked about this with friends beforehand, but the scenario became something that actually made me anxious. It was reminiscent of Nick Hornby’s fear that he might expire mid-season in Fever Pitch, the final reckoning of league tables and raised silverware unknown. Imagine waiting all this time, and not getting to see The Phantom Menace?

But the day finally arrived, balmy and bright. There were four of us in the squad. My sci-fi mate was antsy as we shuffled into one of four screens showing the movie, but settled down when he realised that we were bang on time, the deflector shields were up, and we were not to be denied. The cinema was packed out. We had plum pre-booked seats, right in the middle of the theatre. We scoffed our nachos and rancid cheese before the static adverts on screen had ended.

The trailers came and went. The title card came up. A few people cheered. My pal’s legs beat a faintly obscene tattoo. He was still young, and like the rest of us, I’d bet he never thought he would see a brand new Star Wars film in the cinema.

“Lucasfilm” flashed up. Then came the 20^th Century Fox overture.

Then, in familiar pale blue script, amid a hush almost crackling with energy, came the legend: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

Hey… you’re in media res. You want to read Episode One first, don’t you?

Or, you can go about your business with Episode Three. Move along. Move along.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace of May 1999. Episode One

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Darth Maul, Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, Ewan McGregor, George Lucas, Jedi, Memoir, Natalie Portman, Non-Fiction, Obi-Wan, Oh God the Prequels, Qui-Gon Jinn, Samuel L Jackson, Sith, Star Wars, The Phantom Menace, The Prequels, Yoda

Oh, is there a new Star Wars movie due out?

I’ve got lots to say about Star Wars. It feels like it’s in my DNA. Not everything in one’s DNA is good, of course…

Here’s something I wrote about Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. It was just kicking around my computer. There’s a lot of it, so I’ll make it a series.

It can be read as a warning as The Force Awakens approaches… And perhaps, a wee celebration, too. It’s Star Wars, for Zuckuss’ sake! 

None of us had mobile phones. The organisation had to be done in a way which must seem like smoke signals to today’s 15-year-olds. Our data travelled by landline, and our social lives were marshalled by making note of times and dates, and sticking to them.

Roughly speaking.

We had to memorise whole telephone numbers. Sometimes we even resorted to putting coins in public phone boxes. None of us turned into Superman in these booths, though the thought did cross my mind from time to time.

One of my friends, the biggest sci-fi fan I know, was especially tense a couple of days beforehand. “We’re doing this by the numbers,” he said, finger pointed, glaring. “If anyone’s late, we’re not waiting.”

The rest of us sneered at this, in that way only lads in their early 20s can, but he was on the right lines. Time was a critical factor.

It was exceptionally difficult to get tickets for The Phantom Menace in the first few days of its release. When the movie finally arrived, on Wednesday May 19^th 1999, it was sold out at most evening screenings the length of the city – and all its satellites. I know; I checked. We could only get tickets for a showing on the Tuesday night afterwards in the cinema nearest our home town, a situation which even now seems ludicrous.

I cannot think of any other film that was more hyped in my lifetime.

As the release date came and went, it became tortuous, waiting at our workplaces or places of study, knowing that the movie was being screened everywhere; that millions of people had already seen it… and yet, we had to wait.

The internet was already around and spewing spoilers, of course, but I wasn’t yet well versed in the world of movie websites like aintitcool.com and CHUD. I was on a dial-up internet connection at my dad’s house on a computer I had paid £1,000 for, and AOL hadn’t yet started charging a one-off monthly fee for internet use. After the first eye-watering phone bill, I’d restricted my time online accordingly.

Work for me was still a wall-to-wall grind from 8am to 4pm, with little time spare for screwing around online – something we take for granted now, but a novelty back then, and seen as a real risk to your job if you got caught. My personal email of choice was Excite. There are teenagers on the internet now who will not know what Excite was. Sometimes I wonder if my account is still out there, collecting spam in cyberspace much as junk slowly accrues in orbit around the Earth.

One benefit to this old-school network set-up was that I’d managed to stay relatively spoiler-free. That was, until a well-meaning but goofy lad in my office blundered in on Saturday May 22nd, cheeks bright red with spring sunshine, and maybe something else.

“Oh, Star Wars – it’s great, absolutely brilliant. Have you seen it yet?”

“No, mate.”

“You’ll love it, absolutely love it. There’s some great lightsabre fights in it.”

“Ah, great. I’m going on Tuesday. Looking forward to it.”

He paused. I thought he had digested this information. But then he licked his lips, and continued: “There’s this one bit, right, where Obi-Wan and Darth Maul are fighting, and Obi-Wan chops…”

I was literally out of my seat, hand held out as if to Force-clamp his fat trap; or perhaps simply to strangle him the analogue way.

“For fuck’s sake!” I bellowed, snapping up heads all around the office. “Aren’t you listening? I said I haven’t seen it yet!”

Even I had to admit I was starting to take this Star Wars business a bit seriously. But then, Star Wars has always been a serious business.

Episode two? It’s right here.