So, one of my friends has never seen any Star Wars before, and as I have them all on blu-ray (well my brother does) she insists we watch them all over the coming weeks. Now, being that I want the experience to get better as it goes along, we're going in George Lucas order, and yesterday we started with Phantom Menace... a few things stood out to me:
- How fecking racist are those trade federation gimps? They are exactly like badly dubbed old chinease martial arts films... but not played for comedy.
- George Lucas is wank at naming things.... case point "Well these aren't just ordinary droids... they roll around and move fast... much like cars... in fact, I'll call them droidykars"
- Those rolly droid things are so powerful, why on earth didn't Vadar want them as part of his Empire? Oh wait...
- Not only is Jar Jar Binks awful, he now looks terrible on blu-ray. With all the humans being in HD, it makes it so blanatly obvious it's a CG creation... it might as well be Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
- Fake Queen Amidala actually makes the REAL Queen Amidala clean a droid... what the feck? That's your queen!
- Mind tricks don't work on that flying alien... mainly because they can't for the plot to progress and George Lucas is lazy... but also because he's a Toydarian... or something
- It really doesn't take much to have a senate reform. One vote of no confidence? Jesus christ... I realise such motions exist, but it usually takes more then one pissed of person to change who's in charge... surely?!
- Palpatine's plan is all over the place... he doesn't want her to leave the planet, but he needs her to leave the planet to vote no confidence? what?
- I could go on, but I'll leave with the most sinister thing... in pretty much the very last shot, 19 year old Natalie Portman turns towards that 9/10 year boy Anakin, smiles, and then bites her lip.... it's fecking weird.
Anyway, I conclude that this is probably the worst Star Wars film...
It falls apart after the first act. The second act (them fecking around on Tatooine) basically entirely undermines the idea that the Trade Federation are committing mass human rights breaches on Naboo because the Queen is basically content to get involved in some kind of intergalactic door to door knocking/local drag race over the course of a week or so instead of high tailing it to Coruscant to get help for her people.
Bear in mind by this point in the film we've seen Qui Gonn use the Jedi mind trick to
a) basically steal a submarine from the Gungans ("You will speed us on our way"), and
b) try and make Watto accept a currency that is entirely useless to him.
Especially given that a New Hope shows us that there is a trade in star ship charters on Tatooine the film basically grinds to a fecking stupid halt as soon as he doesn't immediately go and procure with money or mind trick another ship for them to leave on - it tells the audience that what is happening on Tatooine isn't really that important.
While I don't want to play the 'hey lets re write the prequels' game, they could for example have found a ship piloted by a hotshot pilot (and braggart slightly in the Han Solo mold) named... Anakin Skywalker. He could have given them passage to Coruscant, decided he fancied a bit of that Queen (who would NOT have been 14 for the purposes of this exercise) and that would have given him reason to fly back to Naboo with them afterwards (as opposed to the actual reason given by Lucas, which is that Anakin went to Naboo with them because Qui Gonn promised his mother that he'd look after him... by taking him into a war zone). Then he could have legitimately taken part in the battle against the Droid Control Ship, as opposed to accidentally crashing into it because he's barely out of nappies and destroying it from the inside out, which was fecking stupid.
ON a side note, and not to go on and on about how shit Phantom Menace was, but I watched it the other day with directors commentary (I've been working through the saga like this whenever I've got housework to do) and Lucas and whichever muppets were there with him commented that they wanted the battle against the Droid Control Ship to be as tense and climactic as the battle at the end of A New Hope. fecking fail. On two levels.
1. What were they trying to actually do? I think we're meant to assume that they're trying to destroy the ship, but how were they going to do this? This is important to convey to the audience because we have no actual idea how well they were doing at this before Anakin showed up and accidentally won the battle for them - there's no tension. There's no moment equivalent to Red Leader missing the exhaust port and telling the rest of the squad to go on without him before being gunned down by Vader - you get no sense of how the battle is actually going.
2. It was ultimately entirely fecking pointless destroying it anyway - by the time Anakin accidentally flew into it and accidentally fired his torpedoes into the accidental reactor, the Gungan army had surrendered and were being taken prisoner, and the Queen had already reached and subdued the leader of the Trade Federation (ie the guy in charge of the robots anyway).
It's an entirely pointless sequence.
* She was 17
Playing a 14 year old.
Which makes it even creepier (and the entire film even stupider)
