Episode 1 – I Weep for Lucas

In preparation for the forthcoming episode 3, which I do find myself actually somewhat excited for, I’ve decided to rip open some old wounds by sitting down and enduring Episode 1 and 2 again.

Today, mildly hungover and sort of tired, I re-watched “The Phantom Menace”. As I remembered, this film is pretty much depressingly bad. And of course, legend has it that nothing gets the good old fashioned BitterMick in his trademark lather more than this limp piece of over-digitized Lucas tripe.

But in watching today, I wasn’t left feeling bitter so much as just defeated and accepting. This movie is bad. Its not the “worst movie ever”, or even close, but it has so many fatal flaws that it makes me sigh when I see the good name of “Star Wars” attached to it. Some thoughts, good and bad: (but mostly bad)

-Jake Lloyd is terrible. I mean horrible. Combined with pretty-boy Hayden Christiansen, this tandem highlights the biggest problem with these new films – namely that the most important and central character is acted out so poorly that it threatens to pull the rug out from underneath the entire endeavor. And it doesn’t help that Lucas continually sabotages his own agenda by supplying his characters with perhaps the worst movie dialogue ever. EVER. Combining bad actors with bad dialogue makes for (as Papa Stup would no doubt point out) a bad movie.

“Are you an Angel?”

“Yiipppeee!”


-Those “Asian Aliens” (“They were speaking another language…”) are absolutely ridiculous.

-Natalie Portman is hideous as the queen/Padme/lame plot device. And she’s a good actress. Another testatment to Lucas’s inability to write even reasonable dialogue. And what’s up with that on again/off again crappy accent?

-Jar Jar. (Shudders). This fucken thing is so wincingly bad that I’m left simply shaking my head (and hoping the DVD has some “deleted” scene where Jar Jar gets viciously slaughtered). I mean, is there a more annoying and lame character in the history of cinema? I’m serious about this question.

-One of my other big contentions with episode 1 is that, aside from jedi dealings, it is utterly boring. Nearly half the movie revolves around trade talks, taxation laws and blockades, senate bureaucrat bickering, gungan laws/tribals. Completely uninteresting stuff. Of the “exciting” scenes, I find that the pod race falls way short – it essentially feels like it was conceived to launch a video game. The droid war against the gungans is just terrible. I’ve never seen any conflict lack tension to this degree.

-Writing and thinking about how bad Episode 1 is bums me out. I could go on and on (and have in the past). One last thing, on the plus side:

-The only worthwhile things in Episode 1 are the following:
-Obi Wan (nails)
-Liam Neeson (nails)
-The relationship between the two, highlighting sort of how jedis functioned in the old republic. I actually enjoyed their subtle dynamic more than anything else in the film.
-Darth Maul was pretty cool, but atrociously underused.
-Palpatine is pretty sweet, too, only he is the victim of much of that boring bureaucracy mentioned earlier.
-I say the jedi council is ‘meh’. Samuel Jackson has the worst lines (aside from jar jar) and his delivery is terrible.
-Lightsaber fight.


Anyway’s, I’m beating a dead horse here. Episode 1 pretty much sucks. Thanks to Jar Jar and that effing kid – it’s nearly unwatchable at parts. On to episode 2 this week, I guess.