Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace
[youtube=http://youtu.be/gC6w15OwK08]
Tagline: See It On The Big Screen
Ask yourself one simple question about the re-release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in 3D: Are you (or is anybody you know) remotely excited? As far as Friday Flicks is concerned, our heart sank back in 1999 (at midnight on opening night to boot) when the opening crawl mentioned the word “taxation” in the second sentence. Taxation! If we wanted to know about that, we wouldn’t have gone to the movies in the first place.
The passing of time hasn’t done much in the way of reevaluating George Lucas’s Phantom Menace: the story of young Annakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) coming under the tutelage of Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and his apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), was as much of a snorefest as it sounds. And don’t even get us started on Natalie Portman’s performance (though all was nearly forgiven thanks to Black Swan).
The funny thing about the Phantom Menace isn’t that the hated figure of Jar Jar Binks (who was always there as much for the sake of keeping young children happy as for the marketing opportunities it afforded) ruins it as a spectacle – the LA Times called him “a major miscue, a comic-relief character who’s frankly not funny” – but that the film’s so mind-numbingly dull throughout. And no amount of high-tech pokery can mask over the woeful dialogue and wooden acting (what’s more, the most interesting character, Darth Maul, isn’t in it nearly enough).
But if you haven’t sat through the first part of the Star Wars franchise, you’ll probably want to know what’s been said. The freshest review comes courtesy of Little White Lies: “One more dimension for the fanboys to get all hot and bothered in.” But is that unfair? TIME’s Richard Corliss (we’ve yet to ask him if he’s a fanboy), nailed the madness surrounding the event in 1999, by noting that “The Phantom Menace — surely the most avidly awaited, assiduously hyped film since Gone With the Wind 60 years ago — is a space-age vehicle that creaks.” J. Hoberman, then of The Village Voice, went one step further, stating that “There is nothing in this noisy, overdesigned bore to equal the excitement generated by the mere idea of the trailer.” And even Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, who surely lends his name to more raves on posters than any critic in the history of cinema, was unmoved: “The actors are wallpaper, the jokes are juvenile, there’s no romance, and the dialogue lands with the thud of a computer-instruction manual.”
LIST: 10 Things We (Still) Kinda Hate About The Phantom Menace