Watched: Star Wars: Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace
When I expressed my distress at having spent two hours and ten minutes of my life on this overwhelmingly average film to my fiancé, her response was “pod racing tho”, which seems more and more pertinent in the light of the wider film. The pod racing sequence works, not just because there are vaguely-sensible reasons for it, but because it has all the emotional hooks and tension you want from a race. It’s just a shame that the other two hours completely forget this.
The film is coherent, just about - but it feels horribly cobbled together, a series of scenes and subplots that really have no business being in the same film. It wants to be a comical farce, a political thriller and an action-adventure film, and because it keeps veering from one to the other it fails at all three. Jar Jar Binks, hilarious to me as a 9-year-old, grates through 23-year-old eyes. Anakin, who I had a crush on at the time (and hasn’t aged too badly either), is a child actor in the worst sense of the word, all cutesy yippee-ing with the emotional resonance of a potato.
There are, of course, moments where it delivers - Ian McDiarmid plays sinister well, and the brief scene where he and Queen Amidala address the Senate is mesmerising to watch. Excellent, too, is the fight sequence with Darth Maul at the end, full of aerial acrobatics and unexpected twists and turns.
The problem is that the best parts lack the necessary grounding to feel their full weight - we’re given no real background on Maul, besides a Sith lackey, and so many characters - including major ones - are only given a couple of lines before disappearing altogether. It’s terribly put together. As a film on its own merits, it veers from boring to outright incomprehensible; as a prequel to the (far superior) original trilogy, it’s a grave insult.
Like Attack of the Clones, I’d only seen this once before (I’m yet to see Revenge of the Sith, and I remember being confused at the age of nine; fourteen years on, it makes a little more sense but is just as unsatisfying.