The Phantom Mess
At the end of the movie Yoda makes Obi Wan a Jedi knight, although the opening crawl states that he is a Jedi knight. But anyway, so why are the Jedi Knights there? Again the opening crawl says they have been sent to settle a dispute over the taxation of trade routes. What makes the Jedi's experts in intergalactic trade laws anyway?
The trade federation has set up a blockade that prevents the Naboo from receiving space trade and this results in some sort of unseen crisis. Are we to believe that a lush fertile planet with a huge reactor under the palace cannot cope without space trade for a few days?
Greeted by a protocol droid, they are outed as Jedi by the droid to a thing that looks like something that has been left to grow in the back of my refrigerator. Although the only give away that they are Jedi is that they are wearing robes, just like every other character in the Star Wars universe. Are they all Jedi too? Going on the droids hunch that they are Jedi they are instructed by an evil hologram to kill them, so we can finally get to the mind numbingly boring action sequences that the fan boys crave.
Without warning, I mean, after they blow up the ship in the hanger, alerting the Jedi, visible white gas is pumped into the room. Qui-Gon tells Obi Wan that it is dioxis. How does he know that? I mean, did he sniff the deadly gas? Perhaps he only caught a small whiff. The Jedi now have to hold their breath, and then we get the most stupid line in the movie. The Neimodian guy says “They must be dead by now, destroy what’s left”. What? It’s only been like twenty seconds. You don’t think the Jedi can hold their breath for twenty seconds? Why didn’t they just keep them locked in the room for like five hours, and then if they tried to cut their way through the door, then shoot them in the face. What were the Jedi doing to try and escape? Did they know that they would open the door so soon? Why didn’t they try and cut there through the door with their lightsabres?
When they are released from the room after twenty seconds of holding their breath they have to face a squadron of battle droids. All the tension in the scene is drained when the Jedi cut through the battle droids with ease as though they weren’t there. When the Jedi find themselves at a stalemate with the rolling droids that have shields, Lucas has no idea of how to get them out of the scene. George resorts to the Jedi using force speed to escape. The force augmented fast running is never used again in the movie. It would have been really useful for Obi Wan to use when he's fighting Darth Maul with Qui-Gon at the end of the movie, you know the bit where he runs for ages to get to back to the fight just to be blocked off by the pink laser shield, right before Qui-Gon gets killed.
Qui-Gon comes up with the ingenuous plan that they are to warn the Naboo about the invasion force. How exactly are they going to warn the Naboo when the Jedi are landing with the invasion force? Makes no sense. Qui-Gon also suggests that they separate. In doing so they will increase their chance of being discovered by 100%, and if they are discovered they will have to defend themselves alone.
The planet of Boring
They land on the planet and it is at this point that the Phantom Menace is ruined, forever, the point of no return. We are introduced to a bungling cartoon rabbit, Jar Jar Binks. Probably the most hated character in the Star Wars franchise. Believe it or not Michael Jackson was in the running for the role of Jar Jar Binks, imagine that if you will. We are taking to the Gungan underwater sea world where Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan start making crap up. They warn the Gungans of the invasion of the Naboo, and how what happens to the Naboo will affect the Gungans. How exactly? How would what was happening on the other side of the planet effect a hidden, isolated, underwater community? Why do I say the other side of the planet? Well that toad looking thing tells them that the quickest way to the Naboo is through the planet core. This begs the question why would an invasion force that did not expect any resistance land on the opposite side of the planet. Why not land outside of the city or even in the city? So anyway, without any attempt of subterfuge the Jedi surface in the middle of an occupied city, smart move.
So for some reason the Neimodians want to force the Queen to sign a treaty to make the invasion legal. It seems a bit pointless forcing someone to sign something, you might as well just forge their signature. What if the Queen was a complete coward and signed the treaty straight away, this would foil Palpatine’s plan as there would be no need for a vote of no confidence, thus Palpatine would not be able to manoeuvre himself as the new chancellor, great plan Palapatine.
Anyway for some inexplicable reason the Queen is taking for processing, what’s processing? The Queen is the most important person to your plan, why not keep her in the palace under heavy guard. Instead they walk her through the city, where the two Jedi are still on the loose. But it’s okay, they send a whopping eight battle droids with her, and we have seen how effective they are. You know it really diffuses any tension when the opposing force is completely useless.
Escape! From the planet of Boring
So again the Jedi easily dispatch the battle droids and escape the planet heading straight for the blockade. The blockade open fire on the ship, the shield generator gets hit. How does the shield generator get hit when it should be protected by the shield? That’s like knowing what the deadly white gas is by sniffing it. Apparently they are “sitting ducks” if they don’t get the shields fixed. Are they implying that if their shield were operational then they wouldn't be “sitting ducks”. Does that mean that any ship with a functional shield will breeze past the blockade, kind of makes the blockade pretty pointless then. So the droids are sent out to fix the shield generator and they get picked off one by one. R2-D2 puts a thing in a thing and fixes the ship. If you notice from the moment R2-D2 fixes the ship they never get hit again, making the tension of the scene completely pointless. No emotion was shown when the other droids got picked off, but for some reason R2-D2 gets an audience with the Queen, to get a pat on the head I suppose. So the Queen orders one of her hand maidens to clean up the droid, to show their gratitude to the piece of equipment. Wait a minute, isn’t the Queen a decoy and the hand maiden the real Queen? Why did she order the Queen to clean the droid? It’s so we can get a scene where she is introduced to Jar Jar, makes sense.
By this point with the original movie we have been barely away from Luke. We had established Luke as the main protagonist. We have been on a journey with Luke, we had experienced his hopes and dreams and also his anguish. Now compare this with where we are with the Phantom Menace. I have no idea who the main character is and I don’t care about life anymore.
Return of the Tatooine
We learn that they need to make a stop to make repairs to the damaged ship. They arrive on Tatooine. Qui-Gon does not want to draw any attention so he decides to take Jar Jar Binks with him. Wasn't Jar Jar banished because he was clumsy, I'm sure he won't draw any attention at all. Qui-Gon suggests they try one of the smaller dealers in town. It just so happens that the first dealer they visit is the only dealer that has the part they need. It’s either Watto is using an older than dirt sales tactic or Qui-Gon can pick out the only shop that has the part he needs, perhaps it was the force leading him to Anarkin. At this point Qui-Gon’s morality has to be questioned. He tries to use force suggestion to make Watto accept a currency that has little to no value on Tatooine. He also uses the force to manipulate the roll of a dice to his advantage whilst agreeing on the wager of a bet. The bet is convoluted and it's difficult to keep track of what's happening, something to do with a racing pod, ship, money, a ship part and Anakin's freedom. When introduced to Anakin we are also reintroduced to C3P-O, we learn that Anakin has built him. This is wrong for so many reasons.
- Why did Anakin think building his mam a protocol droid would help her out around the house? Essentially they are nothing more than a translator. Why not build her a vacuum cleaner or something.
- Why build a droid that is abundant in the galaxy, in fact they are obviously mass produced, he could have built a cool custom droid.
So Qui-Gon wins the most convoluted bet ever and wins everything except Anakin's mother, even though at the end of the movie when they save the day they could have went back to Tatooine with the enough cash to buy her freedom, but they don't go back for another 10 years.
Midi-what?
So they go to Coruscant, and we are treated to some mind numbingly boring political scenes. The Queen gets impatient and pushes for a vote of no confidence and decides to go back to the Naboo and fight a huge invasion force alone. Lucas decides once and for all to destroy Star Wars and introduce midi-chlorians. Microscopic organisms that reside in cells and tell us about the force. The idea of midi-chlorians and why it is in the movie is so baffling to me. It is completely pointless and the idea is never explored or expanded on in following two movies.
Obi Wan warns Qui-Gon that "The boy is dangerous", whilst Anarkin is standing right there next to R2-D2, I hope he didn't hear that.
With the threat of the re-emergence of the Sith, that was long considered to be extinct. The Jedi on Coruscant decide to not send additional resources to take on the threat. I suppose the other 500 Jedi think it’s more important to sit about and wait to see who will be elected as the new Chancellor, rather than eliminating the potential Sith threat.
Attack of the Boring
The return to the Naboo is made easier this time around as the blockade is gone and there is only the one ship, where have all the ships gone, and why? They get past the one ship with ease and land on the Naboo. It’s not until they have landed on the planet that they try to devise some sort of plan. The Queen seems to think that without the Viceroy the droid army will be lost and leaderless. How does she know that? What if the droids are programmed to keep fighting regardless of what has happened to the Viceroy. The Queen persuades the Gungans to join their cause, and attack the droid invasion force. The Gungan forces position themselves just outside the city to draw out the droid army. It’s obviously a trap, why would the droid forces want to leave their heavily fortified position where they hold a huge advantage over the enemy. Anyway, they take the bait, and the city is attacked. The Neimodian’s seem surprised when the city is attacked, these guys are idiots. Also when the evil hologram tells them to “wipe them out, all of them”, why do the droids take Gungans as prisoners? So Qui-Gon decides it’s a good idea to take a young vulnerable kid into a war zone, that’s a little irresponsible. To stay safe and away from the fighting Anakin climbs into the cockpit of a Naboo fighter. I wonder what’s going to happen here? And why is their a child size helmet and goggles in the fighter?
So we get to the over choreographed fight sequence between three guys we know nothing about and couldn’t care less about. The fight is devoid of any emotion and each swipe and step has already been carefully accounted for, and has been practiced a thousand times before. If we compare this sequence to the original between Obi-Wan and Vader we feel emotion, we know that there is some serious history between these characters and most importantly we care about them. The fight itself doesn’t have to have extraordinary choreography but it doesn’t need it to work. Vader is cautious, due to what happened in there last encounter, and Obi-Wan is rusty due to living as a hermit for the past twenty years. Okay so during the duel, Qui-Gon has been mortally wounded and Obi Wan looks pissed, he looks pumped, perhaps we are going to see some emotion now. Oh wait, no, just more over choreographed drivel. Now if you compare this to the Luke and Vader scene in Return of the Jedi, Luke is pushed to the brink of the dark side, he is emotionally charged, we see the passion from Luke, he lashes at Vader with big uncontrolled swipes, he just pummels Vader to defeat. This is how Obi-Wan should have been after watching his mentor cut down by Maul.
George Lucas doesn’t know how to conclude the movie and eliminate the droid army, so he resorts to using the mothership trope, as used in Independence Day and more recently Oblivion. At this point he ran out ideas so he gets Anakin to fly into a ship and destroy it from within, wait, how did he fly into the ship when they can’t penetrate the shields? Anyway, he destroys the donut ship and this causes all of the droids to shut down. I get it now, why the blockade was gone and there was only one ship there, it would be a real reach if the blockade was still there and they managed to destroy the one ship that controlled the droid army.
The End
Now we are at the end of the movie, and I don’t care about any of the characters or what is going to happen next in the saga. Now I have been very negative about this movie but there was actually a couple of things that I did like. John Williams is a class act. I have yet to listen to a score for a movie that he has composed that I do not like. Duel of fates is about the best thing in this movie. I also liked Darth Maul, he looked cool I suppose, but it was such a shame that we never learnt anything about him before he was killed off, and that’s it. Unfortunately with it being the first one of a trilogy we will have to put up with another two movies, perhaps Lucas will learn from his mistakes and get the next one right, or perhaps he won’t. I will give you a clue, he didn’t, although Revenge of the Sith isn’t nearly as bad as the Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones.
If you missed part one of this review, it can be found here.