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

09 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by patblack in Film, Media, Movies, Non-fiction, Pat Black

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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

R2 and Darth

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

07 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by patblack in Film, Media, Movies, Non-fiction, Pat Black

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

Darthy

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 21st 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

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by patblack in Film, Movies, Non-fiction, Pat Black, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

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

Obi

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

04 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by patblack in Film, Media, Movies, Non-fiction, Pat Black, Writing

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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

20151204_091845

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

03 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by patblack in Film, Media, Movies, Non-fiction, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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

StarWars

“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 20th 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 20th 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.

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