Essay: 'Star Wars: Episode One—The Phantom Menace' (1999)

The tears of Qui-Gon

Photo: Disney

I did not know when I sat in a packed theater at midnight on May 19th, 1999, to watch Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace that I was going to be shown a vision of the future, an overwhelming, bittersweet look at what would be and what would not be.

This wasn't just a movie—it was the biggest cultural event of the year. Everyone was talking about two things: the 21st Century and Star Wars. The Phantom Menace was also a message from Hollywood: "Get out of the way."

A message to me. A young, struggling adult who had spent his short life dreaming of more Star Wars. I thought I would be reunited with all my childhood friends: the man-bear, the pointy-eared gremlin wizard, the beep-beep-booping robot trashcan. I thought, along with the rest of the audience, that my serene, Jedi-like patience would be rewarded, and I was wrong.

Twentieth Century Fox and LucasFilm took my money but pushed me aside. They were interested in a new generation. This is how it goes.

So there I was, 24 years old, stoned on cheap weed bought from a street dealer in the East Village. I had snuck in a blue box of Goobers purchased from a nearby dollar store (back when dollar stores sold things for a dollar.) Before fighting for a seat, I had stood in line with my ticket for almost two hours to get the best possible seat in one of Astoria, Queens's filthiest, most dilapidated theaters. The chatter in line was nonstop, and smiles were bright like lightsabers. Finally, the great spirit of capitalism would give Gen X exactly what it wanted.

What happened next is pop culture legend: the long-awaited prequel to one of the most beloved summer blockbusters of all time would profoundly disappoint countless loyal fans, all of whom had waited almost twenty years to be returned to the fantasies of their youth. The Phantom Menace was directed and written by Star Wars creator and high-tech auteur George Lucas at the height of his considerable powers, and, like the magical Force itself, Lucas' talents were split into light and dark. Lucas is a brilliantly creative filmmaker and a cunning marketer; both talents were displayed that night.

My story is the story of anyone my age who went to see The Phantom Menace on opening weekend. The charge in the air. The gooseflesh when the lights went down. The applause and cheering after the famous 'A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." title card; the tears of happiness once John Williams' triumphant score announces the words Star Wars in bright yellow, and then... silence? Muttering? Millions of pairs of eyes squinting and reading the opening crawl. The original trilogy was always vaguely political, but the specificity of guilds, blockades, and trade wars? In the first few seconds? Diplomacy?

It took an hour of Saturday morning cartoon-level dialogue and a frog clown blowing raspberries for me to realize the truth: this movie was not for me. I suddenly felt like a college freshman visiting his old high school during spring break. I was up past midnight, and this movie wasn’t for people who can stay up way past a reasonable bedtime.

I looked up at Liam Neeson's kind face: finally, a new Jedi, noble Qui-Gon Jinn, and he’s not interested in the affections of aging dorks.

***

George Lucas did not make The Phantom Menace for me, my friends, or those who had been lumped into one demographic hastily and lazily nicknamed Generation X after Douglas Copleand's 1991 novel about disaffected youth. Maybe once upon a time, he cared about us, but that was over.

Lucas was a child of the 50s and 60s and wanted to make a movie for the children of his generation, the fabled Baby Boomers, born after the war, when America was at its brightest and most fearsome. No group of people would benefit from the Allied victory over fascism more without having to shed any blood. That's what they call themselves by the way—the sons and daughters of the so-called Greatest Generation. They called themselves Baby Boomers, and I grew up watching movies and TV shows made by Baby Boomers celebrating the accomplishments of and adversities faced by Baby Boomers.

The Phantom Menace was for those born in the 90s and beyond. His Anakin Skywalker was a precocious little scamp with a bowl cut—that was his audience. No wonder I didn’t care about that character. I was a newly-minted grown-up.

Sure, he halfheartedly served the older fans—shoutouts to C-3PO and R2D2, Yoda!, and a mindblowing three-way laser sword duel. But we were almost afterthoughts. Lucas had his eye on tomorrow, and Gen X was already yesterday before we were ever today. Star Wars was always for little kids, but this all-new Star Wars was genetically engineered to stimulate the pleasure centers of the spawn of Baby Boomers.

Aside from marketing directly to grade schoolers—once-and-future consumers—soon to be called millennials,

Star Wars: Episode One—The Phantom Menace also announced the beginning of the Entertainment Industrial Complex’s new strategy of “give ‘em what they want, and lots of it.” Despite their successes, it's hard to explain how Hollywood genuinely looked down on genre movies. But the business changed after The Phantom Menace. Suddenly, studios started to genuflect before the wants of millennials. No one would ever crave a Star Wars movie again. Hollywood continues overproducing endless movies and TV shows about superheroes, wizards, and big-budget, special-effects-stuffed adaptations of beloved children’s books and cartoons. The only safe-ish bet in movies is remaking/reimagining/rebooting IP.

And then there’s Star Wars, so much Star Wars. All-you-can-watch Star Wars. Too much, perhaps. So much so that I rarely snack on any of the slick new Star Wars shows currently streaming on Disney. Twenty-four-year-old me would be stunned to hear that, in the future, healthcare will still be unaffordable but that the average nerd is rich with Star Wars programming—on both the big screen and the small screen.

Yes, movies are still being made for Gen Xers, too—reluctantly. Gen X nostalgia is usually filtered through millennial tastes, though, so today's revivals of rude 80s comedies, for instance, have to be sanitized to appeal to more prudish sensibilities—after all, Gen X the smaller demographic and, therefore, less lucrative. We were also more cynical and less trusting, to our detriment. Nothing succeeds like a good attitude, and Gen X had a bad one. Mennials whine, sure, but they're mostly agreeable. We’re the assholes.

While Gen X bitched and moaned about The Phantom Menace, their siblings, the millennials, annoying little brats that they were and continue to be, gobbled it up, eyes wide with wonder.

***

No one knew—at the time—that Lucas and The Phantom Menace would change Hollywood moviemaking over the next twenty or so years: the fan worship, the milking of IP, the talented actors forced to perform in green rooms and pretend to see sea monsters that animators would add later in post-production. I blame Lucas for popularizing the prequel, the most miserable movie genre. Thanks to The Phantom Menace, Hollywood has continually drilled the past of popular franchises and rarely struck artistic or box office oil. There is only one truly brilliant prequel anyway: Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part II from 1974, a movie about fathers and sons that hurtles back and forth across decades until tragedy stops time itself.

Some adults sat through Star Wars in 1977 and couldn't stand its moral simplicity and fairy tale story. I know this is reality: Star Wars is junk food.

And yet.

Lucas' first spaceship western was a technological marvel and a narrative Mulligan stew made from chunks of culture that captivated Lucas: Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Frank Herbert's Dune, and Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies, to name a few. He was famously influenced by the writer and professor Joseph Campbell, a sort of Jungian philosopher who wrote quite convincingly about mankind's ancient appetite for myths, so much so that we retell them repeatedly and have since the dawn of our species. His fascination with Campbell's theories always elevated Star Wars from a puppet show to an epic poem, but Star Wars is neither of those. It's an exciting, heroic melodrama that makes sense of our chaotic, confusing lives. That’s it. Like junk food, it fills you up and passes quickly.

The 1970s ushered in a new wave of American cinema—aggressive, visionary directors pushing the art form, telling complex stories in new and inventive ways with risk-taking actors interpreting literary screenplays. Lucas brought that all to an end with help from his colleague Steven Spielberg, who spoke multiple dialects of cinema but would, along with Lucas, make studios an unbelievable amount of money entertaining actual and perpetual adolescents.

Show business has never looked back. Lucas is one of their great prophets.

I can and will criticize Lucas, but the man had creative courage, and it's ironic that one of his legacies is executive boardrooms full of Hollywood decision-makers creating content based on obvious data points like "Star Wars fans like stuff like Star Wars." The 70s were full of artists surprising audiences, and fast forward to right now, everything is clicks and scrolls and subscribers, and everyone is afraid of not getting enough clicks or scrolls or subscribers. This system is not optimally designed to make anyone extremely happy except for, maybe, Netflix's C-suite and only Netflix's C-suite.

Lucas poured impressive quantities of creativity into every second of The Phantom Menace—the aliens, the spaceships, the city the size of a planet. This movie is the work of a singular artistic vision, not a committee, which is one way The Phanom Menace differs from modern Marvel movies, the current model of success on the West Coast. Marvel movies are immensely entertaining mega-hits that are mass-produced.

Don’t let The Phantom Menace’s resources fool you—Lucas was flying the podracer (that’s a reference to the movie.)

In 2015, Disney bought LucasFilm for four billion dollars, producing three sequels without Lucas in the director's chair or as a producer, which, in retrospect, was a mistake. Say what you will about the prequels, when they fail, they fail as massive, slightly cynical, works of imagination. Lucas' imagination. The prequels have glaring plot holes, amateur performances, thrilling and inventive fights, and soaring moments of true tragedy. They are a mess, like a cheap meatball sub. Disney's lackluster, scattershot sequels resulted from beancounters, marketing whizzes, and executives hemming and hawing. The best of the three is routinely mocked because its director had a vision that the other two while handsome-looking, lacked. Lucas is a canny businessman, so what if he's not the best filmmaker of his cohort? He's enough of an artist to know that nothing beats chutzpah.

***

I have rewatched The Phantom Menace more than once, mostly on DVD, including a recent special 25th-anniversary screening in Manhattan last week. I had time to kill between a job interview for a job I didn't get and dinner with my girlfriend's parents, so I bought an eight-dollar matinee ticket and sat through Episode One again.

I was transported back to the sordid Clinton Administration and the dawn of a new millennium that promised so much—jobs, peace, the American dream, and new technologies that would bring us all together. If Gen X is unique for any reason, it's because we believed the new century was ours, and it wasn't.

The movie theater I visited was much nicer—pleather seats with recline and snack trays. I still got gooseflesh before Williams’ trumpets. I am middle-aged, so I took the briefest of naps on the planet Tatooine. I was momentarily shocked, again, by the sheer variety of strange, vaguely offensive galactic accents. Lucas wrestles with big themes that he quickly discards, like slavery and the biological origins of the Force. The droids are amusing cannon fodder. I appreciate how the fall of the Republic starts in its backwater, but the plot is still... swampy. Good news: the Sith are cool. Permanently.

I have also seen all the other movies multiple times. My record is The Empire Strikes Back, followed by The Last Jedi, the second movie of the third series. I’ve sat through those two flicks at least a dozen times apiece.

This time, I was more acutely aware that The Phantom Menace was the beginning of a trilogy of trilogies stretching over decades, a sad story, really, of intimate, personal, and vast civilizational decline, briefly ending every three episodes, with small sparks of hope like meteorites sparking in the atmosphere before disappearing. The Phantom Menace, more now than then, reminded me that Lucas' original opened during a time of great political turmoil in American history: the long, dark years following a failed war and presidency, a time of economic and social stagnation. The 70s were fertile for filmmakers, but the nation's soul suffered despite this golden age.

For the first time, as I was sucked back into The Phantom Menace, I saw Lucas' ambition beyond the popcorn as an inspired young man. He wanted more than boffo box office, and he got it.

The original trilogy was a sci-fi comic book, a toy commercial, and a demo reel for a special effects company. But it took on a life of its own, and even its creator couldn't control what it wanted to be; he tried to build a roller-coaster for nine-year-olds, but he couldn't sugarcoat the rise and terrible downfall of Anakin Skywalker, the boy who murders the world. The Phantom Menace refers to the evil Sith pulling puppet strings in the shadows. Still, it could also refer to what is to come: the fearsome cyborg cloaked in the night who will terrorize the galaxy on behalf of his mentor, the Emperor.

Liam Neeson always brings natural dignity to every role he plays, be it Zeus, a Batman villain, or a father who is also a super soldier. His Jedi Knight, Qui-Gon Jinn, is melancholy, a driven, spiritual warrior with an open heart. His compassion will bring about the destruction of the majestic, glittering Republic.

Ewan McGregor's noble, smirking Obi-Wan Kenobi will steal the next two episodes, but The Phantom Menace is Neeson's movie. His Qui-Gon Jinn is the soul of The Phantom Menace... and perhaps the entire series, all nine episodes. Qui-Gon Jinn is doomed, and he knows it. Sometimes, you must do the right thing, even if it means ruin. He does not belong. He is not a part of what is to come. This saga needs him at first but then doesn’t.

I think of Qui-Gon often: hair greying, brow furrowed, the weight of the universe on his shoulders. Qui -Gon, who worries about the future. Qui-Gon, who fights bravely but is struck down by a shadowy assassin. Sacrificed. Qui-Gon, who believed in a nine-year-old, who followed his heart. Qui-Gon, who hoped.

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Photo: Netflix