What's up, Wisecrack, Jared again.
Now, you would think that after almost 20 years of some of the most intense fan hatred
ever, "Thumbs way down!"
"You didn't like it?"
"No, I think I deserve a public apology from George Lucas," there’d be nothing new to
say about the worst Star War, The Phantom Menace.
And yet, here we are.
After the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983, millions of fans begged George Lucas
to create a new Star Wars film.
Studio executives begged him.
Toymakers begged him.
And after constantly saying no, finally, in 1999, everyone got their wish.
George Lucas released The Phantom Menace.
Problem solved.
Except, not really.
Upon release, Star Wars fans rose up in fury and demanded the head of George Lucas on a
Tusken spike.
They rallied together in AOL chat rooms and Yahoo message boards and for the first time
in the short history of the internet - fans from across the world banded together in the
righteous cause of tearing George Lucas a new one for the unforgivable sin that was
making this movie.
And hey, look... they had a point.
The Phantom Menace, for lack of a better word, sucks.
Hundreds of articles, essays, and videos have been written about how it sucks (shout-out
Mr. Plinkett), "So, you might like the characters, you know, if you're stupid," and why it sucks.
So much so, that it has become a given that there is absolutely nothing redeemable about
this movie.
But what if that’s not entirely true?
Relax, I’m not going to argue that midichlorians were a great idea.
"It is possible he was conceived by midichlorians."
Instead, I want to talk about what The Phantom Menace gets almost right.
Because conceptually, there are some very promising themes at play, here.
Namely: Nazis.
It’s no secret that the original trilogy largely wanted you to conflate The Empire
with the Third Reich; from the costumes, to the use of color, and of course, naming the
soldiers stormtroopers.
But how did the galaxy get to be this way?
Like Nazi Germany, which descended into totalitarianism through democratic means, George Lucas aspired
to portray something immensely important with the prequels: how a peaceful republic can
democratically descend into full-blown Naziism.
So, what went wrong?
Well, let’s find out.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Editionon Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace: What Went
Wrong?
And uhh... can you spoil a movie with no plot?
Oh, and if you wanna hear us nerd out about the Disney Star Wars backlash, check out our
special episode on our movie podcast Show Me The Meaning.
You will smash that link in the description.
For everyone who hasn’t seen this in over a decade: Here’s a brief recap.
An organization called the trade federation is protesting trade taxes by... blockading
trade with the planet Naboo.
But I guess it doesn’t need to make sense, because really they’re doing it all for
their boy, Darth Sidious, AKA Senator Palpatine.
The Republic sends a certain Qui-Gon Jinn and his apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi to negotiate,
but the trade federation tries to kill them.
They flee to the surface of Naboo, which is now being invaded by the Trade Federation,
encounter the worst character ever conceived in cinematic history, — "Ex-squeeze me!"
— save the queen, and try to zoom off to the Galactic Senate where they can explain
what a bunch of jerks the trade federation is.
But they get shot up and have to find supplies on Tatooine, where they meet a nice slave-boy
with incredible force-blood.
There’s some light gambling, they liberate the boy, leave his mother to rot, and head
to the senate to plead their case.
There’s a battle, Qui-Gon dies, and Obi-Wan murders Darth Maul, and Palpatine is now the
head honcho of the Galactic Senate.
Also, Jar Jar is a general.
"General!"
Hmm.
The original trilogy, while wonderfully enjoyable, are not complex works of emotional art.
They’re not intended to be.
They are updates of the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials from Lucas’s childhood.
The heroes were good men who often wore white and the villains were evil men who often wore
black, just like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.
There is no ambiguity here, and that’s OK.
The Phantom Menace, on the other hand, is quite ambiguous.
Qui-Gon lies and cheats his way through most of the story.
He, as per the Light Side of the Force, quietly meditates before his final confrontation against
Darth Maul... and gets REKT.
Obi-Wan fills with rage, an emotion associated with the Dark Side, and only then can he effectively
avenge his master.
Not quite the black-and-white morality of the first three films.
But most notable is our benevolent heroine, Queen Amidala.
She spends The Phantom Menace trying to save her people.
But for all her noble intentions, she mostly gets manipulated by Senator Palpatine and
even proves integral in getting him elected Supreme Chancellor.
When good leads to victory for evil, we’ve entered the realm of the morally ambiguous.
In his essay “Art and Moral Education," philosopher Christopher Hamilton expounds
on the richness of such moral ambiguity insomuch as they force us to confront our own moral
beliefs.
It’s a sign of great art.
So, did the Phantom Menace give us that gut punch that comes with us re-evaluating our
own moral beliefs?
Of course it did, right!
Right???
Okay, just kidding.
I felt nothing all 20 times I’ve seen this movie.
Ambiguity is a great idea when dealing with complex political systems, trade federations,
planetary autonomy, solving humanitarian crises.
So, why didn’t it work?
Because the characters have no agency.
Author Chuck Wendig, who has written extensively on the subject, defines agency in fiction
as “a demonstration of the character’s ability to make decisions and affect the story.
[They have] motivations all [their] own.
[They are] active more than [they are] reactive.
[They push] the plot more than the plot pushes on [them].”
In contrast, he writes that “characters without agency tend to be like little paper
boats bobbing down a river of your own making.
They cannot steer.
They cannot change the course of the river.
The river is an external force that carries them along — meaning, the plot sticks its
hand up the character’s cavernous bottom-hole and makes the character do things and say
things in service to the plot.”
In The Phantom Menace, it’s almost like Lucas took this rule of bad writing and ran
with it.
Qui-Gon, and Anakin, and Padme, and Obi-Wan, and, God help me, Jar-Jar Binks are nothing
but little paper boats.
They have no internal conflict, no external life, no personal obsession outside of what
the film dictates.
And that river pushing them along?
It’s the darkside.
"The dark side clouds everything.
Impossible to see, the future is."
And the biggest casualty, besides the time you just wasted being bored, is the political
message itself.
The best example of this is the story of Queen Amidala.
Padme, along with many of the other characters, are mere pawns of Palpatine.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
But as we’ll see, Palpatine’s manipulations quickly turn into “How To Cover Up Bad Writing
101.”
Here’s what we know about Padme: She’s a queen, who doesn’t want to submit to some
invader, because that’s what queens do.
She also likes democracy, because, hey, she’s not evil.
So, in Star Wars, how does a queen who likes democracy lead to the eventual downfall of
said democracy?
She gets manipulated.
Palpatine creates a crisis on Naboo, which mirrors the prototypical “false flag”
attack of the Reichstag fire, and she has to plead to the Senate to intervene.
But Palpatine, since he’s smart, knows they’re feckless bureaucrats and will do nothing.
He plants a seed in Amidala’s mind, "I must be frank, Your Majesty, there is little chance
the Senate will act on the invasion," she sees his warning come true, "This is where
chancellor Valorum's strength will disappear."
"The point is conceded.
Will you defer your motion to allow a commission to investigate the validity of your accusations?"
And calls for the Supreme Chancellor to be ousted, "I move for a vote of no confidence
in chancellor Valorum's leadership."
So that a real statesman can take charge and cut through the bureaucratic red tape.
That real statesman just happens to be our ambitious senator and future Emperor, Sheev
Palpatine, aka Darth Sidious.
Here’s where our paper boats become a problem.
Characters without agency are, well, boring, but in this case of trying to get into the
complexity of not only how democracies fail, but how well-meaning people are implicated,
paper boat characters rob us of our ability to reflect on what’s actually happening.
Beat for beat, it makes sense.
Palpatine warns her of something, she sees his warning come true, so she falls for the
deception.
It even sounds good.
But maybe because Lucas was too busy cramming in 8,000 dumb lines for this guy, it falls
flat.
Each beat could have confronted our character with a choice.
They might deliberate over, struggle with, or at least talk about this choice.
She might argue with Palpatine, she might confide in a friend, she might reach out to
an outside government for help, she might deny Palpatine’s bargain at all costs until
the toll on her citizenry gets too high.
But in the Phantom Menace, things just kind of happen.
Because everyone is a pawn, not a person with agency.
And that destroys our ability, as the audience, to reflect on these issues.
When we identify with the characters, we identify with their dilemma, asking ourselves, “what
would I do?”
When, in the Dark Knight, the Joker rigs two boats with explosives to give each one the
power to obliterate the other before they get obliterated themselves, "At midnight,
I blow you all up.
If, however, one of you presses the button, I'll let that boat live," we bite our nails
as we debate the merits of killing someone else to save our own skin.
There's no such tension in The Phantom Menace because Padme is just Palpatine’s puppet.
And what’s the deal with the other senators?
What are their motivations?
Who knows, we’re just told when, and how, they side with Palpatine.
And to make matters worse, at no point does Padme regret the decision that would eventually
destroy democracy, in the Phantom Menace or in the later movies.
If her initial decision to remove the Supreme Chancellor from power gives us no room to
empathize and think, at least we can empathize with and think about her regret.
But no.
For a woman who later says this: "So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause..."
You might at least expect her to sob quietly in some corner because she literally made
this happen.
By contrast, consider Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones.
He was a loyal guard to the Mad King.
Except, when the Mad King tried to incinerate all of his citizens, "Burn them all!"
Jaime broke his sacred oath and murdered the person he swore to protect.
"When the king turned to flee, I drove my sword into his back."
Jaime is haunted by this decision as he’s derisively called "Kingslayer" for the rest
of his life, and while he probably made the right choice, he is also acutely aware that
he is more or less responsible for the current sh*tshow in Westeros.
He takes responsibility for the choices he made, and that allows us to identify with
him.
Or we can even look at Rogue One, where a good character’s involvement in the creation
of the Death Star is put front and center.
Not only does this lack of agency rob meaning from the “how democracy dies” theme in
the Phantom Menace, but it also makes all of Lucas’ topical and timely takes on news
of the decade more or less meaningless.
The Phantom Menace came out in the late 90s, just years after governments in Serbia and
Rwanda had committed genocide.
So, when the Queen of Naboo is pleading to an international, er, interplanetary government
body to intervene in the slaughter of her people, George Lucas’s inspiration was pretty
obvious.
On a narrative level, do we care?
Not really.
Vague shoutouts to current events don’t a good political allegory make.
You need choices.
Instead, we understand it as just another step in Palpatine’s greater machinations.
When the senate fails to do anything, we don’t understand their motivations for doing so,
or their personal failings, aside from a line or two from Palpatine describing them as ineffectual.
And then there’s the trade federation.
Talk of taxes and trade in the opening crawl was likely meant to invoke contemporary debates
about globalization and free trade, right on the heels of NAFTA which passed in 1994
and anti-globalization protests.
So, what does the trade federation want?
Why did the senate pass taxes on trade?
Who the f**k knows.
It’s also worth noting that, aside from the politic themes, characters getting pushed
along the narrative stream with no choice is everywhere.
In the case of Jar Jar, he literally succeeds via incompetence.
In the battle of Naboo, his fumbling and carelessness accidentally releases whatever these are,
which destroy a bunch of enemy droids.
I think this is what business people mean by "failing up."
And then there’s Anakin, who pushes a bunch of wrong buttons, which ferry him to the droid
ship, where he can press a few more buttons to save the day.
"Now this is podracing!"
So, what if this the real curse of The Phantom Menace.
Because it could have been a powerful movie.
More importantly, it could have been a powerful children’s movie, and joined the likes of
Harry Potter as “kids fiction covering horrific political history.”
But it’s not.
Not even close.
Just mark it down as another example of grandiose ambitions ending
in a faceplant.