To commemorate its 25th anniversary, the much-maligned movie is back in theaters. Previously a rare blemish on the cosmic scene, it is now far from the sole stench in the canon.
Can it be that some Star Wars fans, who previously saw George Lucas’s Episode I – The Phantom Menace as the epitome of everything that went wrong with the enduring space saga, now view it as a genuine classic ready for resuscitation 25 years later? There are whispers in the air that millennials, and maybe those even younger, are ignorant of how much of a disaster the much-maligned 1999 picture was as it makes its way back to theaters this weekend. But then again, maybe we who were there when it first opened in theaters ought to get used to hearing from a different generation. Was it really all that horrible after all?
Part of the difficulty is that, although it was once a rare blemish on the galaxy, a Star Wars film that fell short of the grandeur of the first trilogy, today days it is a long way from being the only bad movie in the canon. The Phantom Menace is closer to the mean average for the saga than it is to the bottom of the Dagobah swamp when comparing films like the terrible The Rise of Skywalker, the mediocre Solo: A Star Wars Story, and the two agonizing prequel follow-ups.
Previously astounded that anything so blatantly racist, prosaically bloodless, and tonally misguided could be associated with the well-known title, we now have the Star Wars Holiday Special to serve as a reminder that things can get worse. Before YouTube, when all but the most ardent of geeks were blissfully ignorant of them, few of us knew that misfires from the 1970s and 1980s even existed (see also Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor). When I first became aware of Star Wars in the early 1980s, I had to either hope against hope for a catch-it-or-miss-it TV broadcast or watch the original trilogy in a movie theatre. Yes, we had Betamax or VHS, but everything looked awful when it was recorded off the box, and the complete trilogy was not available for home video viewing until 1986. The story consequently exuded a remarkable grandeur, as though we were all breathing rarefied Tatooine air every time it aired on television.
It therefore took some of us some time to understand that The Phantom Menace was a different kind of Star Wars when it finally came out in theaters, 16 years after Return of the Jedi appeared in 1983. Yes, with its lighthearted, teddy bear aliens, and hazy, retroactive allusions to possible incest, the original trilogy had always been comparatively kid-friendly. This time, though, the main character appeared to be a real kid (albeit one who was meant to become Darth Vader) with a gratingly clichéd comic sidekick. It felt more like a cheesy 90s TV rip-off of the 1940s matinee adventure serials about Lucas’s early fever dreams.
For decades, a lot of us have imagined what Anakin Skywalker would look like beneath that gothic, gleaming black armor. Few, I think, ever anticipated that his descent into evil would start with a whiny brat who liked to yell “yippee” and tell strange angelic tales. Nor did we anticipate that the tale of the galactic republic’s demise—which included trade embargos, dull senate speeches, and horrific CGI robo-battles—would be so dull and technocratic. While Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi had the worst rat tail since the split of New Kids on the Block, even Yoda lost all his glitter when he was navel-gazing at the Jedi council.
Although the first trilogy has few overtly racialized clichés, the cod-Caribbean Jar Jar Binks, the blatantly antisemitic Watto the slave owner, and those hideous pan-Asian peeps from the Trade Federation are all incredibly twisted caricatures. It is hard to fathom how, in a few decades, Lucas went from praising Japanese masters with wide eyes in the late 1970s and early 1980s to creating a stupid space fantasy filled with the worst caricatures known to the universe.
Through my fingers, I see The Phantom Menace again, little details seeping into my brain. If you squint hard enough, all you can remember is the opening scene, when the Jedi coolly dispatch a pair of lightning-quick, rapid-fire droidekas, and the greatest lightsaber battle of all time (Kenobi and Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn against Ray Park’s demonically balletic Darth Maul).
But a couple of exciting set pieces do not equal a legendary Star Wars film. A heads up that it’s just as awful as you recall if you’re seeing it again at the movies this weekend.