#Star wars 1 movie
#Star wars 1 update

The fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance and Qui-Gon prefers to gamble with a junk-yard dealer than twat him with his lightsaber. In The Phantom Menace our heroes are waylaid by a faulty engine. From that moment it is a race against time (collapsed to provide greater unity) and a struggle just to stay alive. In A New Hope Luke and Ben, heading the other way, are already too late: Alderaan is gone. What Lucas later confessed was a вЂњjazz riffвЂќ of a plot wafts our heroes to the holy ground of Tatooine, all sense of urgency dissipated. After all, this film has at its hero a small boy вЂ“ it cannot visit the dark 12A places. Sadly, we never actually see any of the massacres that are apparently taking place, instead we land somewhere that looks suspiciously like the woods near Leavesden and meet one of the galaxyвЂ™s more annoying comedy sidekicks (although not as annoying as fans frantically searching for a scapegoat would have you believe). Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan quickly discover that things are mercifully worse than the credit crawl predicted, a robot invasion force is being unpacked, Naboo is under actual threat. (To be fair, Lucas waited a generation before spoiling his enigmatic myth with background material, the WachowskiвЂ™s jumped that particular shark in film two.)ДЄnd yet there is still much pleasure to be had watching our full-blown Jedi guides in action. The plot machinery lumbers through the gears, hampered further by the strange declarative dialogue and by an apparent disinterest in making these scenes visually interesting.Д¬ritics complained that Lucas had got yet worse at writing for humans in the twenty-two years since Star Wars, in fact it is simply that, beyond Alec Guinness talking about the force, the plot of A New Hope requires no exposition - The Phantom Menace on the other hand is all explanation, much of it, like the midichlorians, unwanted and unnecessary.

#Star wars 1 update

This arse-numbing inactivity recurs throughout The Phantom Menace: because the battles lines are not yet drawn and sides are still being taken there is always much explaining to be done, characters are forever having update meetings or being introduced to one another. In A New HopeвЂ™s famous opening salvo the bad guys fire first and ask questions later, in The Phantom Menace the Jedi are ushered into a meeting room while the semi-bad guys go into video conference with Darth Sidious about whether an invasion of Naboo is legal or not. The menace is still phantom.ДЄn inexcusably lazy establishing shot - the Jedi shuttle cruises past the camera - and lethargic opening sequence hardly help pick up the pace. Events are вЂњalarmingвЂќ perhaps, thereвЂ™s certainly plenty of вЂњturmoilвЂќ and we all know вЂњtaxationвЂќ is a thorny issue but the context is clear: like Anakin, this conflict still has some growing up to do.

Where Episode IV goes for the in media res jugular вЂ“ вЂњIt is a time of civil war!вЂќ - problems in Episode I are not quite so pressing. Things get off to a cold start with the much parodied credit crawl. It is a mistake from which the prequels never recover.

#Star wars 1 movie

But to accommodate this one action Lucas is forced to postpone every other key event to a later movie вЂ“ how could a nine-year old participate in the Clone Wars? вЂ“ and effectively botches up his starting position. To make his point painfully obvious Lucas arranges the action of his first movie since his separation from Marcia Lucas in 1983 around the discovery of a miracle child by a doomed father figure and the eventual passing of this boy from his natural mother to an adoptive parent who is perhaps not yet mature enough to master the task alone. Lucas risked his legacy based on a fatherвЂ™s simple conviction that bad things can happen to good people and a divorceeвЂ™s guilt that children from single parent families are more vulnerable than most. His name is Jett Lucas, adopted son of George, and seasoned Star Wars apologists should take note of his most insidious characteristic - he is around the same age as Jake LloydвЂ™s Anakin Skywalker.ДЄ great many fluffed details derailed the most anticipated movie of all time, but the miscalculation that undermined the entire prequel enterprise was George LucasвЂ™ insistence that when we first meet the future Darth Vader he is a little boy who cries when he is separated from his mother. You can glimpse the shadowy figure lurking in the background as Ewan McGregor gets his Padawan buzz cut. Around the 20-minute mark of Jon ShenkвЂ™s miraculous documentary, The Beginning, about the making of Episode I, the true villain of The Phantom Menace makes a cameo appearance.