Retrospective | Twenty Years On, ‘Star Wars: Episode I’ Remains the Strangest Blockbuster
Last year, I watched all 33-and-counting Godzilla feature films ahead of the release of Godzilla: King of the Monsters. This year, I’ve undertaken a programming schedule that is much more manageable in scope, but even closer to my heart. This is The Road to ‘Rise of Skywalker’ Rewatch!
December sees the release of Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker, billed as the conclusion to the episodic “Skywalker Saga” that’s formed the backbone of all Star Wars media for over forty years. This is to some extent Hollywood marketing puffery. George Lucas had considered his work finished in 2005 with the release of Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, which closed out the prequel trilogy and brought things full circle from Episodes I to VI (1983’s Return of the Jedi). But over the years, he’d spoken publicly about loose outlines for a third and even a fourth trilogy, and we now know that before his sale of Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, concept artists had been ginning up ideas for what eventually became the sequel trilogy that kicked off with 2015’s Episode VII — The Force Awakens. So exactly what the shape of the “Skywalker Saga” was has always been in flux, and as the appetite for new Star Wars continued unabated, its scope has unsurprisingly grown.
When the first film dropped in 1977, there was no saga to speak of. There wasn’t even an episode numbering system. Star Wars: Episode IV —A New Hope was, initially, just Star Wars. But three years later, The Empire Strikes Back arrived with a subtitle, announcing its place within the promised canon as “Episode V.” (When original-flavor Star Wars was theatrically re-released in 1981, its iconic opening scroll was re-shot, with a new subtitle affirming The Film Formerly Known as Star Wars’ status as the fourth part of an ongoing serial.)
A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back provided plenty of internal justification for their sudden placement in the middle of some larger imagined canon, apart from Lucas’ stated desire to invoke the aesthetic of episodic 1940s serials. Both films are so rooted in their own backstories: The connective tissue which draws characters like Luke, “Old Ben”/Obi-Wan, Darth Vader, and Princess Leia together paints a picture of dramatic events in times gone by. Talk of the “Clone Wars” early on in Episode IV suggest Tolkeinesque world-building just begging to be fleshed out. The fascistic Grand Moff Tarkin speaks of the last vestiges of the “Old Republic” being swept away at last. And of course, Vader’s paternity revelation to Luke at the climax of Empire sets up a narrative promise that’s simply too juicy to leave unfulfilled. From the start, Star Wars has been a project too big to be crammed into one runtime. Had Star Wars been less of a hit, the story would’ve continued in the form of Alan Dean Foster spin-off novels and comic strips, before petering out and perhaps one day being rebooted by Fox as familiar-enough IP available for a low price. Instead, Star Wars became Star Wars, arguably the largest ongoing transmedia work of collaborative narrative ever composed.
Because I was a child of the mid-nineties, by which point the prequels were already on the horizon and many, many paperback novels and comics had expanded the timeline forwards and backwards, the multi-generational story-building aspect of the series was always a core part of its appeal for me. Star Wars just seemed bigger, richer, more important than whatever other properties were the talk of the playground — the franchise was already the stuff of legend, its lore only growing deeper all the time.
There’s a long-standing question among fans as to whether “release order” or “episode order” is the proper way to view the mainline saga films. For millions, especially those of a certain pre-prequel vintage, there’s no question that the movie they pointedly and steadfastly refer to only as Star Wars is the unquestioned beginning of the series. The prequels be damned, in their estimation — Lucas’ later movies are sequels whether they like it or not. But I’ve never been particularly interested in this take, because it seems to leave on the table what Star Wars does best: the sense of a unified, ever-unfolding grand tapestry stretching out in all directions as it explores an entire galaxy.
“But the prequels ruin the Vader reveal!” the purists cry. Eh, even if we accept that our hypothetical virginal viewer has somehow remained completely untainted by the most famous movie spoiler of all time, they’re likely to find Anakin’s sudden heel turn in Episode III a bigger twist than his paternity reveal to Luke in V. It’d be like if halfway through Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry became Voldemort’s apprentice, killed Dumbledore and Hermione, helped install a fascist regime over the entire wizarding world, and ended the movie a limbless husk in bondage gear after Ron put third-degree burns over his entire body! Revenge of the Sith is wild.
So with that in mind, I’m choosing to embark in a chronological — not release-order-based — rewatch of the entire Star Wars cinematic oeuvre to date, both the so-called Skywalker Saga and its side stories.
Week One | Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace
The biggest argument against starting a Star Wars newbie in chronological order is the fear that you’re going to lose them off the bat by subjecting them to the most infamously disappointing high-profile trilogy in contemporary popular art: the Star Wars prequels, those propetual ire generators which have given us countless hours of snarky YouTube essays and even an entire feature-length documentary.
But there’s a flip side argument to be made here: Hey, if you start at the bottom, you can only go up from there, right? And, at the risk of showing my hand, I’ve come to suspect that a lot of actual first-timers don’t mind the prequels all that much. The vociferous rage against The Phantom Menace that began twenty years ago looks a lot less proportionate to the actual (still numerous) flaws on display, especially in a moment in which we’ve become so much more accustomed to readily identifying the excesses of overheated fan backlash. (Put another way: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is light-years worse than the weakest Star Wars film, but who’s still banging that drum?)
Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace arrived when I had just turned ten, by which point I was already a Star Wars lifer who’d watched A New Hope on tape hundreds of times. I was in the exact demographic bullseye George Lucas was chasing with this movie. Yet I never saw myself in a ragamuffin like mopheaded little Ani — any ten-year-old boy would rather be Obi-Wan!
Phantom was, let’s face it, miscalculated from the start. It felt and looked different than the old trilogy in a way no one anticipated or asked for. It was, at best, a head-scratcher. I was aware of the backlash, mostly from adults, against the movie, and it certainly was never my favorite of the series even as a kid.
A decade after its release, I was twenty years old — a demographic that’s so far and away from a bullseye for this movie, it might as well be on the other side of the barroom. I remember revisiting Episode I for George’s characteristically stubborn 3D re-release in 2012, by which point Star Wars felt dead as a doornail to me.
I sheepishly headed to a late-night screening by myself to watch a movie I’d come to believe was a huge, childish embarrassment. The film’s opening sequences of a diplomatic encounter gone wrong were, to my surprise, better than I remembered, a mix of simmering intrigue with snappy action. But as soon as our Jedi ambassadors made landfall and had a fateful encounter with a clumsy Gungan named Jar-Jar Binks, a quiet dread crept over me. For the next two hours, I noticed all the instances of strangely languid editing that only made worse often flat line readings of clunky dialogue. Jarring tonal shifts, from Dune-like mystical space opera to literal fart and poop gags, were almost hard to believe. As many have noted, “the taxation of galactic trade routes to outlying systems” is hardly an auspicious start to the Star Wars saga. I felt somewhat depressed and very tired after the showing. I hit the sack quickly, to try to sleep off the mild headache and eye strain the 3D conversion had given me.
There’s plenty to rightly complain about that weighs this movie down. But now The Phantom Menace is two decades old, and I’m thirty. My priorities as a person and as a filmgoer have changed since that screening in 2012, as has my understanding of what Star Wars means to me as a source of continuity in my life. I no longer see only the flaws in Phantom, I also see everything it does right: incredibly bold production design which has stood the test of time; effects which also hold up surprisingly well and which remind us of a time when state-of-the-art visual wizardry could still feel transportive. And, of course, there’s Darth Maul and “Duel of the Fates,” maybe the only things that came out of this movie that were unqualified hits from day one (besides the film itself, which had no problem doing business in 1999).
I appreciate that Episode I tries to do something different structurally, tonally, and stylistically than the original trilogy, rather than re-treading old ground. The problem was that by 1999, fans were starved for genuine big-screen Star Wars, and had no interest or patience in following George down whatever weird rabbit holes his creative muse was taking him. Twenty years on, it’s now apparent that Disney will happily keep making Star Wars that “feels like” Star Wars, whatever that means, for a very long time — and in that light, Episode I is fascinating to think about, as the most expensive bit of independent auteur filmmaking ever sold on the promise of consumer product riches. If nothing else, The Phantom Menace is looking to establish its own corner of the Star Wars universe.
Furthermore, dammit, I like space politics in my Star Wars. Give me senatorial conspiracy and parliamentary procedure! We live in an age where a million Palpatines could be lurking in the background, waiting to step up with a promise to resolve our various circus sideshows, while only accelerating the rot to their own purposes. The timelessness of Lucas’ parable, inspired by history from Napoleon to Nixon, is as relevant as ever.
Not so timeless? The Orientalism of the Trade Federation and the Shylock-like Watto, which somehow track even worse today than they did upon first release. But I contend that Jar-Jar’s more Roger Rabbit than Stepin Fetchit, the former almost certainly being a big point of reference for the kind of live-action/animation VFX work he was designed to showcase. To reduce Jar-Jar’s mannerisms and voice to racial stereotypes is unfair to Ahmed Best, who nearly died in the aftermath of the character’s public evisceration; it’s also somewhat perplexing, when there’s the aforementioned, far more galling issues at hand with the decision to base the “alien accents” of the mercurial, scheming Nemoidians on Thai speech patterns, something happily admitted at the time as a bit of considered world-building and not, you know, wildly insensitive. (Fun fact: in the German dub of the film, the Nemoidians apparently sound French). On the other hand, the intersectional lesson in the symbiosis of the Gungans and the Naboo is pointedly progressive in a way that undermines the accusations that this film is some kind of science-fictional Der Stürmer cartoon. I guess what I’m trying to say is, the social politics of this movie are a mixed bag.
Yes, it’s weird and lumpy and the performances are wooden. Yes, as Red Letter Media pointed out, there’s no central protagonist — but think of how many modern serialized TV dramas employ an ensemble structure that likewise lacks a central hero in a given episode. Episode I failed to live up to the (unreasonable) expectations placed upon it in its original release context. But while its smallness in stakes and attitude seemed weak in 1999, I’m warming up to the idea that its oddball nature gives it personality and, for a project of its scale, an unusually auteur-driven quality not found in today’s shareholder-obsessed film industry. Maybe that’s nostalgia setting in; maybe it’s just that after decades of American popular culture being saturated in apologetic ironic detachment and corporate timidity, what once felt only like an out-of-fashion and plodding installment in the series now also feels notably earnest and refreshingly weird.
