‘Star Wars: Episode 1–The Phantom Menace’ Is the Most Important Movie of 1999. Seriously.
Derided in its time and savaged over the years, George Lucas’s first prequel was a strange, if inevitable innovation: the cinematic origin story for an advanced pop figure. And an inauguration of a glorious future. Maybe making Darth Vader cuddly wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
Welcome to 1999 Movies Week, a celebration of one of the best years in film history. Throughout the week, The Ringer will highlight some of the year’s best, most interesting films, and in this series, make the case for why a specific movie deserves to be called that year’s best. Next up is Star Wars: Episode 1–The Phantom Menace, George Lucas’s much-maligned first prequel.
The Phantom Menace really does begin with a bug-eyed alien speaking, in a mock-Japanese accent, about a commercial trade dispute. It all begins—it really does begin—with Obi-Wan Kenobi (!) and Qui-Gon Jinn (?) sitting down for tea together as a craft-services droid tries to murder them.
The aliens—a Neimoidian consortium known as the Trade Federation—launch a blockade over Naboo, a wealthy planet that the Trade Federation plans to invade. The Galactic Senate dispatches the two Jedi to mediate the dispute between the Trade Federation and Naboo. The mock-Japanese accents, as reprehensible as they are, get me thinking about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria: In September 1931, the Kwantung Army fabricated a Chinese nationalist attack on a Japanese railway in order to deceive the League of Nations about their subsequent invasion of the Chinese mainland. In The Phantom Menace, the Trade Federation misleads the Galactic Senate to obscure the Neimoidian invasion of Naboo. George Lucas’s turning a 20th-century atrocity into a movie about intergalactic tariffs, but then turning the movie about intergalactic tariffs into a movie about underage romance, minstrel rabbits, and motorsports: It’s such a perfectly George Lucas thing to do.
Naboo’s monarchy resolves the planet’s sovereignty crisis by dispatching a precocious 10-year-old boy to blow up the Trade Federation’s doughnut-shaped space station with his slick, silver gunship. (The Japanese occupation of Manchuria ended with the U.S.’s nuking two cities and the Soviets’ routing the Kwantung Army.) The boy Anakin Skywalker would become Darth Vader. The boy Jake Lloyd, who played Anakin Skywalker, would become a pariah. So, too, would George Lucas.
The Phantom Menace was maligned in its time, and it goes disparaged in posterity, if only because The Phantom Menace launched the long and infamous phase when Star Wars, a cherished saga, kinda sucked. There’s a United Nations subcommittee and a Hague tribunal dedicated to resolving our planet’s grief about these movies, which demystified so many lofty concepts and characters while disgracing several actors. Natalie Portman, Ewan MacGregor, and Liam Neeson survived the prequels, but George Lucas, Jake Lloyd, and Ahmed Best may never live them down. In May 1999, The Phantom Menace nearly cauterized Star Wars as a 20th-century phenomenon that incinerated upon contact with the 21st. The Star Wars prequels are, in sum, quite bad, though bad for reasons that largely exceed The Phantom Menace in particular. Attack of the Clones is a script-and-acting disaster in its own right; and Revenge of the Sith, a better-designed drama, struggles to overcome soap opera stasis in pursuit of a substantial, tragic conclusion. It’s more fun to overthink Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, and to argue about those movies, than to sit down and actually watch the young Obi-Wan Kenobi investigate a rainy, gray planet for several consecutive minutes or Yoda and Mace Windu discuss various emergencies with all the urgency and passion of a C-SPAN interview. Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith disgraced The Phantom Menace far more than The Phantom Menace disgraced itself.
But The Phantom Menace is, and has always been, better than the Phantom Menace discourse. It’s a bonkers movie that dared to transform one of fiction’s great monsters, Darth Vader, into a fun-loving, freewheeling dumbass who suffers no chaperones. The Phantom Menace enlists Portman to play an undercover queen who, as a minor subplot, must occasionally pretend to be a hand servant while trading places with a body double (played by Keira Knightley). The movie also requires Portman to speak in a stiff, formalistic diction that counterintuitively allows her to address the byzantine political intrigue with some memorable conviction. The original trilogy presented the Sith and Jedi knights as, well, knights, and then Lucas transformed these mortal enemies into dueling glow-stick ballerinas. The Phantom Menace is far more simplistic and delightful than the later two prequel movies, starring the older, moodier Hayden Christensen, would allow. Anakin Skywalker—as played by Lloyd—is the heart, if not the star, of this movie about diplomacy, lineage, and duty. The Phantom Menace was a strange, if inevitable innovation: the cinematic origin story for an advanced pop figure. The Phantom Menace sure was something to watch.
The movie’s many demerits—the minstrel accents, the Gungans, the battle droids, the doughnut ship, the Battle of Naboo, the Jedi Council—they’re all so prominent in the earliest Phantom Menace trailer; and the earliest Phantom Menace trailer was nonetheless exciting. There was a time—a prerelease window—when Lloyd cut an enigmatic figure. There was a time, I shit you not, when Lucas was unambiguously proud to introduce Jar Jar Binks to Star Wars fandom. Ceremoniously, The Phantom Menace marked the end of George Lucas’s harassing Star Wars fans with nothing but “special edition” edits to the original trilogy. For 16 years, Star Wars fans rationed fan fiction and Super Nintendo adaptations. The original movies raised a generation of science-fantasy obsessives, and so, too, did the inexhaustible glut of toys, games, and paperbacks inspired by the original trilogy. Finally, the prequels cultivated a second generation. There was new Star Wars, courtesy of Lucas, who, at last, spared no expense.
The Phantom Menace inaugurated peak fandom—a century so far defined by maximum serialization. The Phantom Menace is a rough and fumbling movie; it’s also a glorious movie, which we are, in some sense, always watching. For better or worse, George Lucas taught everyone else how to make movies, and how to watch movies, in the age of sprawling blockbuster fandom. The Phantom Menace endures as influence, despite all its own humiliations. To watch it now is to see the new century in fantasy blockbusters and Marvel origin stories flashing before your eyes, a dismal past and a joyous present, childhoods ruined, box offices demolished despite good sense, critical dissent, and fan backlash. Through Lucas’s countless apprentices, the empire endures.
