Our ongoing series looking at movies that took the blockbuster genre into the realms of excess. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.
By John J. Joex
The Phantom Menace Rating: 1 ½ out of 5 Stars
The Attack of the Clones Rating: 2 out of 5 Stars
The Revenge of the Sith Rating: 2 ½ out of 5 Stars
In 1999, after a long absence from the theaters (Return of the Jedi bowed in 1983), the Star Wars franchise finally returned to the big screen with new movies when The Phantom Menace (aka Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace) introduced the series to a whole new generation. George Lucas had distanced himself from the franchise that had made him a genre mogul after he felt burnt out from all the time he had dedicated to it during its early years. At one point, he had vowed never to do any more Star Wars movies, but after about a decade (and as revenue still flowed in from the merchandising), he had a change of heart and began working on the prequel trilogy. These movies would take place several decades before the events depicted in the first trilogy of movies that came out between 1977 and 1983. These would focus on Anakin Skywalker, first as a boy and then as he grew up and became a member of the Jedi knights. And of course anyone who saw the first three movies knows that Anakin was fated to eventually turn to the Dark Side of the Force and morph into the evil Darth Vader. The prequel trilogy of movies unfolds this story across its three installments and fills in much back story about the Star Wars universe. But unfortunately, these movies lack much of the inspiration of Lucas’ previous movies from the series and end up delivering a special effects phantasmagoria that takes the viewer to the brink of visual overload while attempting to mask its vapid story, two-dimensional characters, and hackneyed scripts.
I had originally planned on tackling each film separately, but asked myself what’s the point? The problem with one is basically the same with all and each film does little more than pad out the story to deliver three full films that lead up to the ending that we all know is coming. Not that the foreknowledge of the culmination of these films is the problem; knowing what’s coming actually heightens the interest in this case. Many going into these movies wanted to see what events drove Anakin to that fateful decision to turn against the Jedis and join up with the dark forces that wanted to control the galaxy. That story promised to give us an epic, galaxy-spanning, tragic saga. Unfortunately, that’s not what these films delivered.
Instead, the prequels decided to take a kid-friendly, merchandising oriented, fx-gasm approach and throw in just a little bit of hackneyed story elements here and there to carry us from one CGI-overload scene to the next. Now to be fair, the Star Wars movies were never high on the originality scale to begin with, borrowing from such sources as the early movie serials, the pulp space operas, and even Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. But they felt new back in the late 70’s and early 80’s because they took the worlds we could only previously imagine and brought them to life in all their glory using the advances in special effects that had become available. And even though the story had many familiar elements, Lucas succeeded in giving it enough of a spin to make it feel energized and new. But that’s where the prequel trilogy failed, the energy and ingenuity was gone. The original Star Wars may have been a big budget film for its time, but the sfx technology was still evolving and they had to rely on their resourcefulness many times to pull off the desired visuals. And this sort of inventiveness helps spark creativity and that manifested itself regularly through the early films (most prominently in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back).
But by the time of The Phantom Menace, Star Wars had become an established brand with all the corporate mentality that follows from that, and Lucas showed little desire to take risks with his venerable franchise. We began to see this direction to some extent with Return of the Jedi (and you can read more about that at this link), but the prequels injected a whole new level of corporate cynicism. The story of Anakin’s journey to the Dark Side could have given us an engaging tale of the dangers of surrendering to our darker more primal emotions. Instead, this very pivotal thread from the Star Wars saga played very little part in the three movie story-arc up until practically the end. Anakin is portrayed as a brash, independent youth who regularly defies authority and strikes out on his own whims. But hell, that describes probably 90% of the protagonists of space opera and action/adventure tales. His brashness puts him closer to his darker emotions, but doesn’t give us enough of a justification for his eventual turnaround. Instead, Lucas tries to almost play down his change, coming as he fights to save Padme’s life and almost giving us reason to justify his actions. I believe this direction came about because Lucas never really wanted to portray Anakin as evil, seeing as there were lots of young viewers watching and lots of toys to sell. But Anakin’s turn to the dark side was the story of the prequel trilogy and could have delivered a riveting bit of drama while also elevating the saga to the next level in story-telling. Unfortunately, Lucas apparently decided to avoid that part of the story until the absolute last minute which resulted in the prequel trilogy failing to deliver on the promise that we saw in the earlier films.
These three movies also suffer from the bland characters along with the stilted dialogue they are asked to deliver. In the original movies, the main characters came alive on the screen and grabbed us immediately, even those actors accused of delivering wooden performances such as Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. But can you imagine anybody other than Harrison Ford as Han Solo or Alec Guiness as Obi Wan or Hamill and Fisher as Luke and Leia for that matter. But now, without consulting IMDB, tell me who played Qui-Gon? Who played the young Anakin Skywalker? Heck who played the older Anakin? Who cares? Can you even picture these characters in your mind like you would with those from the original series? These actors in the prequels just did not register and easily faded into the background amongst the sensory overload of CGI visuals. And the dialogue that they were given had no spark as it rarely rose above the expected genre copy-and-paste lines. Sure, the first three movies had their share of stilted dialogue, but actors like Ford and Guiness and James Earl Jones still managed to breathe some life into those scripts. With the prequels, the dialogue just fell flat all too many times.
Now there are those naysayers who point to one particular character and blame him for derailing the prequels to some extent (primarily with The Phantom Menace). But the problems with these movies go far beyond the inclusion of Jar Jar Binks. This character was just simply a misfire. Lucas wanted to create another comic relief character along the lines of C-3PO and R2-D2, and that’s a device that goes back to Shakespeare and beyond. But unfortunately he just fired blanks this time around. Another sign that his creative muse had mostly fled. But even if you take out Jar Jar Binks (as one fan infamously did with The Phantom Edit) you still have little more than a CGI-bloatfest aimed more at selling merchandise tie-ins than elaborating on the grand story promised in the early Star Wars movies. And Lucas’ attempts to retroactively work in characters from the original movies like C-3PO, R2-D2, Boba Fett, Chewbacca, and others also smacked of little more than blatant attempts to keep their toy lines viable.
On the plus side, the movies do improve as the prequel trilogy progresses. Attack of the Clones is a bit better than The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith notches up a bit more as well. Unfortunately, the last and best of the three never rises above adequate and I still rate it a full star behind Return of the Jedi, which I felt offered somewhat of an anti-climatic ending to the original trilogy. Still all fans of Science Fiction and Fantasy cinema will have to deal with these films at some point, so I recommend just getting a lot of popcorn and a big screen TV that you can crank up load. Because extravaganza is what these films are all about so kick back and enjoy the visuals at a sufficiently loud volume and be prepared to shut down your mind (lest these films will numb it) for several hours. Then you can say you’ve seen the prequels and you can move on to some better sci fi entries like the ones we have covered in our Must-Watch List and Anti-Blockbusters column.
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