Since best beloved and I started watching The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, I’ve been tempted to re-watch Star Wars Episodes I-III. I’ve seen episodes IV-VI so many times I’ve lost count (having been 10 when A New Hope was released, I’m of *that* generation). On the other hand, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith I’ve seen only once each. Until today.

Yeah, I know I’m not going to complain about anything here that the fandom hasn’t been complaining about for 23 years. Adding my voice to the noise, I suppose.

Well, I watched The Phantom Menace (dir: George Lucas, 1999) over the last 24 hours. Is it better than I remember it? A little. Does that mean that in any objective analysis it gets more than two stars? No. It’s still lousy from many perspectives. Don’t get me wrong, so are most of episodes IV-IX, but differently.

The effects are great. The make-up is great. The fight and battle scenes: Also great. Ray Park’s Darth Maul: Fantastic. Sort of.

And this brings us to the main problem: The story. From the three-paragraph crawl at the beginning with its nonsense about the Trade Federation, to Queen Amidala and her double, to Anakin’s immaculate conception, to miti-chlorians to Jar Jar Binks. Lucas had about 13 years of notes he’d taken since Return of the Jedi and he threw every single one of them against the wall. I suppose some of it stuck.

Read the text crawls for the first three episodes. Boom, you’re right in the action, you know who’s important, and you know enough of what’s going on to be present as the rebel ship is boarded and we meet our important characters. As soon as The Phantom Menace starts, we get trade negotiations, blockade, a planet we’ve never heard of, and no idea who to root for. The problems, of course, only begin there.

It’s hard to feel for any of the characters. The actors, oh yes, we feel for them because they have to deal with Lucas’ awful dialog. Poor Liam Neeson. He so took the brunt of it that one had to wonder what Lucas had against him. Then we remember some of the dialog the inestimable Alec Guinness was saddled with.

I understand the reasoning behind having Queen Amidala require a double who plays as a member of her bodyguard (or something), but the story doesn’t give us any reason to believe it was necessary. Nor is there any surprise in it when the one character’s identity is revealed.

Then there’s the casual, and not so casual racism associated with several important characters. The two representatives of the Trade Federation have faux Japanese accents. Watto, the character with the huge hook notes who owns Anakin and his mother, is so obviously supposed to be a Jewish caricature that it’s painful to watch and listen to. And then there’s the awful Rastafarian parody embodied in Jar Jar Binks. Several years ago, I read an argument that was supposed to become an agent of the Empire in episodes II and III. There was such a backlash against Binks, that Lucas had to drop any idea of him having much of a role at all after Episode I.

When this movie came out, I queued up on opening day to see it at the Coronet in San Francisco, a single-screen theatre with a proper sound system. It’s also where I’d seen A New Hope 21 years before. I wasn’t ready to analyze most of this at the time, but one thing any fan of the franchise knew was that The Force was The Force. The joke about it being like duct tape, having dark and light sides and holding the universe together rang true because that’s all you needed to know about it. The Phantom Menace fell apart when Obi-Wan explains The Force with a blood sample and the nonsense term miti-chlorian. It sounded enough like mitochondria, a term we all learned in high school biology, to be possibly interesting. Explaining The Force away as something found in the blood makes all of our belief in what motivated the characters meaningless.

In addition, did Lucas really not realize how many fans had memorized the original movies? He honestly might not have done, but we know that Obi-Wan Kenobi says he doesn’t recall owning a droid in Episode IV. Fans arguing over on Substack suggest that Obi-Wan was lying when he told Luke this. In the same way he lies when he says Darth Vader killed his father? Possibly. But it’s another thing that shreds the continuity and credibility of the work. People shrug this kind of issue off when they say ‘they’re just kids’ movies,’ but kids also demand credibility and continuity, and it demeans them to deny it.

The main problem is that there’s a certain inevitability to the whole thing. That everything that happens, has to happen. There’s no tension, no Saturday morning serial thrill to it. Anakin has to be found and has to win, the fight with Darth Maul has to end the way it does, even though Maul has only one spoken line and we have no reason to consider him anything but a bad guy – there’s no motivation behind that on our part or on the character’s. The pod race, in which we see Anakin’s skills made manifest takes longer in this movie than the Death Star run in Episode IV and yet there’s only one possible outcome. The satellite battle at the end, in which Anakin participates by accident only has one possible outcome as well.

So, yes, I’m going to watch the other two, but I know I’m only in it for the effects and the fight scenes, not for the storytelling. Which is, in fact, the sad state of action/adventure films in general.