May 28, 1999: the gun in the first act

Contains spoilers for The Phantom Menace

I saw The Phantom Menace today. I was quite disappointed. I think the biggest thrill of the movie was finally seeing "Episode I" scroll up the screen.

And, no, the problem was not that it didn't live up to the hype. I studiously avoided any exposure to any of the hype (which was easy, since I eschew exposure to most traditional media). I studiously avoided any exposure to any spoilers, great or small. Movies are a nonstop sequence of little surprises--encountering scenes that you've never seen before--and just watching a trailer would have robbed me of getting those surprises in context.

Also, I studiously avoided exposure to other people's opinions. I wanted to make sure I formed my own. I wrote all of this up without ever reading anyone else's comments. (This is a big deal for me, because I always wonder how much my opinions are my own and how much they are influenced by hearing the opinions of others.)

In the following discussion, you will have to forgive me for not getting the character names correct. Blame the scriptwriter, who didn't go to sufficient effort to hit us over the head with the character's names.

Effects

Let me get one compliment out of the way. This movie has great special effects. I couldn't decide whether Jar-Jar was a guy in a suit, a guy in a suit with a digitally composited head, or just entirely digital. The combat droid was a clever design--humanoid yet blatantly not a person in a droid costume--making the fact that it was an effect obvious--and yet, the effects are so good that it was easy to suspend disbelief and not spend all my time thinking about the fact they were an effect. I never really even bothered thinking about the flying trader guy--I just accepted him as part of the world.

But great-special-effects movies are a dime a dozen these days. (I admit, though, that this is the first one I've seen; I passed on the Jurassic Park movies, and only saw one of the Star Wars special edition movies.)

Context

One very satisfying element of the movie was the way Lucas "made good" on some of the context of the original movies. Most notable was his attempt at realizing the Jedi Knights in all their glory. Jedi Knights aren't the old feeble guys you might think from seeing Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first movie and Yoda in the second movie. Luke Skywalker was on his way to becoming one, and the epic battle between Luke and Darth Vader in the The Empire Strikes Back was the closest we'd seen to 'true Jedi action'.

That the Jedi were respected and feared was only hinted at in the first movie; in The Phantom Menace, it is carried to an extreme. Oh, sure, the intricate lightsabre combats between the Jedi and the Sith are to be expected--a souped-up version of what we've seen before, and lovely in their own right--but I refer instead to the way in which they simply decimate "ordinary" troops. When the Trade Federation members start panicking about the Jedi Knights wiping out the entire ship, your first instinct might be to think they're just a little overawed, but Lucas has managed to deftly create a nearly-workable situation: lightsabres lack ranged capabilities, but in return are powerful enough to cut through blast doors. The sight of the two Jedi Knights wiping out a squad of combat droids settles the issue once and for all; and Lucas wisely puts this experience at the very beginning of the movie.

On the other hand, the movie relies far too much on the other movies for context. For a movie set in their pre-history, this may seem surprising, since of course we get all the necessary introductions since we've never met these actors before.

But, for example, when the older Jedi tells the trader something to the effect of "Republic credits will be fine", the scene is borrowing heavily on the previous movies and our experience with "Jedi mindtricks". Moments later, the trader makes the necessary comments to explain what was going on to someone who hadn't seen the previous movies, but I don't think the scene will work. Like Harrison Ford reaching for his gun in the second Indiana Jones movie, the value of the scene comes from the audience expectations, letting the audience feel the same surprise when things don't work out as expected.

Also, the movie makes a careful, studied attempt to never allow you to identify the hooded Sith lord with Senator Palpatine. This is foolish, since the story constantly relies on the audience to know this fact for there to be any sense of pacing (e.g. a foreboding dread as you watch his plans in the Senate come to fruition). [Maybe this was actually explicitly revealed at some point and I'm forgetting.]

This bugs me, because I think the movie should work on its own. There can be little subtle bits that are only meaningful to people who've seen the others (e.g. all of the implicit tension about Anakin), but I don't think the basic plot ought to depend on them.

Characters

People seem to think Star Wars was an action movie, but I think they're fooling themselves. No doubt Star Wars was an epic space opera full of action and adventure. But what made the movie was the characters and their dialogue.

Perhaps the fact that you can retell nearly all of Star Wars using motionless comic strip panels suggests a weakness: that Star Wars violates the show-biz rule "show, don't tell". I don't think so, though. We care about the characters, we care about their interactions. Yes, they're all stereotypes: the farmboy, the wise teacher, the rogue scofflaw, the spunky princess, or the wacky robots. But they have interesting conversations sparked by compelling performances from the actors. Perhaps Meat Wars only works because everybody's seen the movie four or five times, and reading the script conjures up the performances from the movie in our head. And maybe if I saw The Phantom Menace four or five more times, I might think The Red Menace would be just as effective a parody. Surely there must have been some memorable bits of dialogue, but my impression as I walked out was that they were far fewer. The Phantom Menace abandoned strong characters and dialogue for effects and plot.

Consider Darth Vader. Darth Vader was evil. He walks on, confronts a rebel ship commander, and kills him. Soon after, he nearly kills one of his own generals. You believe in him as a bad guy; he's not just bad because somebody says he is. You've seen it. Darth Goober just has funny paint on his face, and maybe he had a line or two. (While we're at it, George Lucas may have always intended 'Darth' to be a title, but for three movies it was associated with a particular character, and used in non-title ways, such as Obi-Wan's lines "You can't win, Darth" or "a young Jedi named Darth Vader". It just doesn't work anymore to use it as a title, even if that was his original intent.)

Also, it's nice to see that the only room for women in George Lucas' universe is as spunky royalty. Er, not. Female Jedi? No. Female senators? Not that we noticed. Female aliens? No, not obviously amongst Jar-Jar's warriors or the Trade Federation's people anyway. Of course there were the alien slaves (?) fawning over the pod racing champion. And the Queen's handmaidens.

It's also nice when he kills off the only character who I liked. I thought the older Jedi had that Sean-Connery-as-James-Bond charisma going.

Plot

The Gun in The First Act

to be written: comments on failures to establish first-act "guns", and situations where he did establish them needlessly

Luck

The good guys rely far too much on luck.

There are situations where it's ok for a writer to let chance cause the story to go where it does--generally just at the beginning, setting up the story that will be told. A few other situations are acceptable. If someone tells the story of someone who happens by the end of the story to be the last person alive on the earth, then it's ok if there are chance events that lead to this character's survival, since the implication is that somebody would end up being last, even if that was decided by chance.

In Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series of fantasy novels, it is the nature of the universe that the three central characters are lucky. Events constantly transpire around them--they get lucky or unlucky by turns, but events are often far more extreme than they would be on average. But this is an explicit device, an aspect of the universe, and other characters do not make use of it. One gets the impression that Lucas might intend for The Force to have a similar effect, but it's never stated, except for the comment about them not finding Anakin by chance.

The most extreme example of this is Jar-Jar, who is constantly screwing up but getting lucky as a result, mainly in the climactic battle between his people and the combat droids. There is something entirely unsatisfying about a victory gained entirely through the luck of an inept leader. (Lucas sidesteps this a little by having them lose anyway.)

Another is Anakin's "lucky shots" which manage to wipe out the enemy droid-control ship.

And there seemed no skill to the success at running the blockade, just good luck that that last droid didn't get blown away by the laser fire. Jedi Knights and their powers seem especially poorly suited for ship-to-ship combat.

Bad Plot, Bad Story

There's also just a fair amount of bad plotting and bad storytelling. The following list is in chronological order; trust me, they get better after the first few.

• The blockade is deployed in a circular orbit around the equator, rather than a sphere surrounding the entire planet.
• The two Jedi Knights just happen to randomly run in the same direction after planetfall.
• The reasoning for heading to the underwater city seemed a bit trumped-up.
• The references to modern popular culture were jarring. "Ex-squeeze me" and the pod racing announcer(s) were the most blatant of these. They should never have been in the movie. Also, there were too many goofy accents. It took me a long time before I could make sense of what Jar-Jar was saying.
• "Giant fish deep underwater" totally lacks the imagination of "giant monster in an asteroid that looks like it's just a cave".
• When the Jedi Knights free the Queen, their assault is still somewhat believable. One can imagine that nobody gets hurt because the droids only shoot at the Jedi, who are able to defend themselves. From then on, the combats are no longer believable. Other people now have blasters but no way to defend themselves from incoming fire. One would expect the droids to shoot at them as well. If we are to believe that the Jedi have sufficient reach to shield everyone with their lightsabres, we need to see it.
• I guess the first act of The Phantom Menace is them getting to Tatooine. If so, it's just too long. Too much action, too little meaningful character interaction. Because the two Jedi have been together for some time, their interaction isn't particularly dramatic. Even on Tatooine, it's slow. Anakin becomes the central character, but because he's a kid, it just doesn't lend itself to real drama, e.g. his interactions with the the "handmaiden". Not until the initial meeting between R2-D2 and C-3PO do we get an intersting interaction, and even that is a bit tedious at this point. (Indeed, there's no apparent reason why R2-D2 was brought along except to allow for this meeting. Given its slow rate of movement, it made no sense.)
• The older Jedi gambles everything on Anakin succeeding at the race. Given Anakin's past failures, this seems in the end to be relying on luck again. Sure, the character may be fated to eventually pull it together and win one race... but why this particular one? In general, characters are too easily convinced that some particular approach is the only right one. The trader claims he's the only one with the necessary parts; but he's a conniving trader, why should we believe him? A similar situation occurs later with the Queen's reliance on Senator Palpatine.
• So who ended up sending a message back to Naboo which got traced? Arguably, it's not important who did it, since "someone was bound to", and it's not important to see exactly how Obi-Wan failed to prevent it. On the other hand, having somebody particular do it, and having that person forced to admit it later, and having that character learn why it was the wrong thing to do, and letting that character grow and change would have actually been a bit of character development. And what were they doing, anyway? The Queen wasn't there--she was off at the settlement; so who would have taken it upon themselves without her around to decide? (Arguably, this is a plot hole that is likely to slip by the audience since they don't realize the Queen is not who she seems to be at this point.)
• Part of the way Star Wars achieved an epic scope was by making you believe there really were "little people", using Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru to give you a sense of the "ordinary" citizenry. The jawas served this role, too, to a certain extent. The Phantom Menace has none of this. The prime opportunity was with Anakin's mother, but instead of being an ordinary caring mother, she was super-philosopher-mom, not to mention having apparently immaculately conceived Anakin. All her scenes rang false for me because of this.
• What did the apprentice Sith lord see in his binoculars? The settlement and the spaceship? I saw two blobs. Then he sent out his droids, but we never got any closure on what exactly his droids found.
• The race. Ho hum. Video game. Boring. It was just lame in so many ways, I can't even attempt to describe it in complete sentences linked together coherently.
  • Anakin's pod is sabotaged, and then has trouble starting. Was this because of the sabotage or just a coincidental problem? It turned out later that the sabotage caused another problem, so this was apparently unrelated. That's stupid, since it ruins the pacing.
  • Why were the Tuskin raiders only shooting at Anakin?
  • Why did the sabotage just happen to go wrong during the final end bit of the race?
  • How can being sent up the service ramp save time? The fastest route between two points is a straight line.
  • Random petty slaughter.
  • No human dimension. (Think of Luke's struggle (and failure) to pull his harpooner from the snowspeeder before the oncoming AT-AT crushes them both.)
  • Anakin's ability to hack around the sabotage and then to go even faster than before made no sense. (Moments before the breakdown, he was having trouble keeping his lead. Races are always problematic for being both realistic yet dramatic because of this sort of thing.)
• The older Jedi collects his winnings (the engine part), takes it out to the spaceship, then goes back to pick up Anakin. There is no reason apparent fictional reason why he takes two trips; he simply announces he'll do it. The reason becomes apparent: it allows him to have a climactic solo encounter with the Sith while allowing the engine to already be prepped and ready to go, thus allowing an inconclusive resolution to their battle.
• Jumping onto a (slow) moving spaceship seems like it would be a pretty obvious dramatic move. I'm not going to buy into it fictionally, especially that the Sith didn't see it coming and block the move or make the jump himself, unless you actually show the event to me so it makes sense. Instead it seemed to happen subtley off-camera; he had made it onto the ramp by the time the camera switched to show it. It almost looked like they had cut out a crucial shot from the scene, perhaps because they couldn't make it work.
• Somebody should have explained sooner that Senator Palpatine was the Naboo's representative. I was too busy thinking of him as a crazy power-mad guy who was just sticking his nose into their business, which made me wonder why they were so trusting of him. (And, really, being somebody's representative doesn't make them trustworthy. Why didn't the Queen ask the Jedi's advice? They had said they were the representatives of the Chancellor/Councilor whatever they called the leader of the senate, so they probably would have had an opinion on the wisdom of the no-confidence vote.)
• Uh, I'm not sure when the best time to launch into this spiel is, but, uh, what's the deal? The true Queen reveals herself to Jar-Jar's people, but she lets the decoy speak to the Senate?! Or was she sometimes the real Queen? Which one did Anakin talk to when he showed up at her quarters to say goodbye? (Continued below.)
• As a story, it's unsatisfying. The Jedi escape with the Queen, take her to the Senate, she gets no satisfaction from them and goes home and solves everything on her own. The end result: a wasted trip which just managed to get Palpatine on his road to power. Obviously, if this were a tragedy you could accept that as the point of the story, but it's unsatisfying for them to manage to resolve things on their own in the end, then. And let's not forget that this was apparently nothing like what Palpatine had planned. It would have been a brilliant plan--cause trouble in your home sector, undermine the authority of the existing leader, and get the job for yourself--but there's no evidence that this was his plan. He didn't want the Queen brought to the Senate. Oh, you could argue that that's what he told the Trade Federation, but he knew they would fail, but all the evidence implies he really was trying to stop her. After all, he sent his apprentice to recapture her.
• The fictional programmers of those combat droids did a great job at making them walk in perfect synchronization over uneven outdoor terrain. Nice job. Maybe they should have spent some time getting them to fire their weapons with the same accuracy. Stormtroopers were more convincing this way, since at least they were supposed to be humans underneath the armor.
• What was our plucky real Queen doing out there on the front lines shooting her blaster and relying on the incredibly poor aim of those combat droids for her survival?
• How much like the decoy Queen was the real Queen supposed to look? (I couldn't really tell because of the Queen makeup.) One would tend to assume "not very much" from the way the plot unfolded, until the Trade Federation guy "recognized" her as the Queen (and then moments later changed his mind). The fact that the minute she's been revealed to us she becomes recognizable to others was a horrible plot move; even if there is a fictional justification (e.g. she was never apart from the Queen around people who knew of the Queen before then), it's just not something to take chances with confusing viewers about.
• Why was Anakin's fighter auto-pilot programmed to take him to the enemy space ship? There was no evidence that they had previously pre-programmed the fighters, e.g. through a computer break-in. The fact that one of the other fighters bumped the hanger door while taking off suggests that they were taking off under manual control.
• The timed force doors in the big light saber battle were goofy mainly because I didn't know what they were. At first I thought it was some sort of trap.
• The choreographed light sabre battles aren't actually very convincing. Too many dramatic spins, too many big swings which leave an obvious opening.
• Obi-Wan's climactic move is totally unsurprising--where else could he go? Of course he can make superhuman leaps. With reflexes like that demonstrated by the older Jedi on Jar-Jar's tongue, the apprentice Sith lord had no excuse not cutting Obi-Wan in half during that jump. His surprise and shock and failure to block the attack were entirely unconvincing.
• Gee, let's blow up yet another big spaceship that's threatening to destroy all of the good guys by flying a fighter inside it and blowing up some critical component. Since the rehashed Death Star is my biggest complaint about Return of the Jedi, it shouldn't be surprising that seeing it rehashed yet again was a disappointment.

I think there were more but I'm getting bored. I'm going to post this even though I haven't written the "gun in the first act" section. Maybe I'll finish it later.

I guess this just may sound like I'm being picky--that I disliked the movie and am looking for reasons to pick on it. I don't know. I have trouble even getting started with a list of things like this for the first Star Wars movie.

Again?

I wouldn't want to see The Phantom Menace a second time. Just thinking about it makes me impatient about the idea of having to sit through:

• Jar-Jar
• special effects scenes showing lots of swarming flying craft
• the giant fish encounters
• the pod race
• Anakin's mother
• the big battle between Jar-Jar's people and the droids
• the fighters versus the droid-control spaceship

Unless I miss my guess, six of those seven items are entirely computer generated. The evolution of movie special effects may have enabled George Lucas to tell the stories he really wanted to tell, but they're not the stories I want to watch.