[6]

It’s shiny and exciting to look at, a gorgeous smorgasbord of fantastic sets, wardrobe, make-up, and visual effects. But it’s also grotesquely over-produced, almost turning these assets into something garish and distracting. It’s a shame the considerable talents of Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, and Natalie Portman couldn’t be put to better use. All three appear insufferably constrained in their roles. Jake Lloyd as young Anakin is just plain bad, and to a great degree, the movie rides on his incapable shoulders.

But the biggest problem is the script. Writer/director George Lucas knows story structure and mythology like nobody else, but he’s terrified of injecting the least bit of drama into these movies, insisting the genre can’t handle it. The result is the emotionally hollow Episode I, which is about stuffy non-personalities fighting in space and on distant planets over, well… taxes. Or trade negotiations. Something boring like that.

Even at its best, The Phantom Menace is just awkward.  There’s a lot of dramatic potential in Anakin Skywalker’s fall from grace, but there’s very little sign of it here. Instead of drama, we get a tedious amount of puerile jokes, thanks in large part to one mister Jar Jar Binks. On the plus side, Ian McDiarmid is back as the soon-to-be Emperor Palpatine, and for whatever reason, he’s the only cast member at home among the stilted dialogue, green-screen environments, and computer-generated imagery. There’s also amazing craftsmanship on display, especially from sound designer and editor Ben Burtt. The highlight of the whole movie is the Pod Race through the dunes and valleys of Tatooine, thanks primarily to Burtt’s amazing work recording, creating, and layering sounds — this is his show if you ask me. John Williams is also in peak performance, delivering a score on par with the originals. Trisha Biggar’s costumes, Doug Chiang’s conceptual designs, and ILM’s visual effects are all worthy of mention.

There’s enormous talent behind the scenes of this movie, and there are little moments here and there that are amusing, but the whole simply does not equal the sum of the parts.

Oscar Nominations: Best Visual Effects, Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing