![]() ![]() If Luke Skywalker’s narrative arc was taken straight out of the The Hero With a Thousand Faces, this was based on Joseph Campbell’s less popular follow-up A Thousand Faces Sitting Around Talking. Say what you want about Hayden Christensen, but at least by that point we knew who we were supposed to be focusing on. One of the most frustrating things about Phantom Menace, as opposed to the latter two prequels, is the fact that there really is no main character. It seems as if his character description was “like Alec Guinness’ Obi-Wan but with 60 percent more hair and 90 percent less personality.” We know nothing about him other than the fact that he is a Jedi and so when he dies it’s a bit like hearing that your neighbor’s pet gerbil passed away: Sad in theory, I guess. KS: I can’t help but feel bad for Liam Neeson here. Jar Jar gets the blame because of the racial stereotyping, but can we all agree that Qui-Gon Jinn is the single worst character George Lucas has ever created? This movie could have gone anywhere…and it went back to Tatooine? Darth Vader was born and raised in the same region of the same world as his son? He created C-3PO? F-ing midichlorians? You can feel an expansive universe constricting to a few boring characters sitting in a series of rooms talking about space politics. It’s shocking just how obviously bad Return of the Jedi is when you start watching it immediately after Empire Strikes Back.) So, as a recovering Star Wars megafan, I think the biggest problem I have with Phantom Menace is that the film seems utterly unimaginative about its own possibilities. (In fact, I don’t think I even conceived of the original trilogy as three separate movies until a marathon viewing session in college. I loved the original trilogy, but to me, they weren’t movies: They were vivid windows into a fascinating universe. I read all the books, memorized the canonic chronology from Tales of the Jedi through Young Jedi Knights, played all the Star Wars videogames, could tell you the difference between a TIE Interceptor and a TIE Interdictor. And for a character billed as the Next Big Bad, Darth Maul is given approximately 1/20 the screen-time as the movie’s true villain, Jar Jar.ĭF: We’re coming at this franchise from two very different places, because I grew up in the expanded universe. Good versus Evil somehow turned into Dull versus Boring. If A New Hope was a space Western, then this is the equivalent of a movie about the transcontinental train company’s financial records. Nobody cares about trade routes or a completely nonsensical political system that has a democratically elected queen taking part in a senate meeting. They were great movies, and I feel that after 16 years of novelizations, video games, TV specials, card games, action figures, toothpaste, and Yoda Soda you can drink out of your Mos Eisley Canteen, that Lucas lost sight of the things that people loved about the originals. To me, the original trilogy was so good not because of the various planets and species and governing bodies and uptempo jazz musicians, but because it combined lovable, just-stock-enough characters with Hawksian storytelling and phenomenal special effects. KS: I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the idea of the expanded Star Wars universe. ![]()
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