Geek break: In defense of The Phantom Menace

I am in agreement with pretty much everything Eric says about the Star Wars prequel trilogy.  Regardless of quality, those films are morally repugnant, and they thoroughly cheapen Anakin's transformation from perky grade schooler to evil incarnate.  And I thank one of the commenters for linking to Patton Oswalt's brilliant routine on the subject.

That said, I do not think the films are uniformly bad.  "Revenge of the Sith," for all its flaws, I maintain, was superior to "Return of the Jedi," although I concede that's not saying much.  And while my early reaction to both "Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones" was that they were irredeemable trash, I have come to believe that the former actually has several kernels of quality film in there that just aren't fully realized.

One of the recurring themes in "Phantom Menace" is the idea of symbiosis.  Qui-Gon describes the midi-chlorians as symbiotic beings, living off our cells yet providing us with guidance from the Force.  We are frequently told that both Jedi and Sith travel in pairs -- a master and an apprentice.  Each needs the other. Beyond that is the suggestion that good and evil are never found alone.  The light and dark sides of the Force are, in a sense, symbiotic.

And yet the great irony is that the Jedi, while teaching about symbiosis, seem blind to these relationships.  The concept that evil might be nearby continues to escape them.  They are slow to perceive the Sith threat.  And Qui-Gon, for all his preachings, fails to acknowledge his dependence upon his padawan, Obi Wan.

This failure on Qui-Gon's part is best articulated wordlessly, through the three-way light saber duel at the end of the film.  This duel, by far the best and most creative of the entire six-film series, conveys story in a way that George Lucas' ham-handed dialogue cannot.  Darth Maul is fierce and talented, but he knows he will lose against two Jedi unless he can separate them.  This is his entire motivation early in the fight.  Rather than going for an early kill, he instead tries repeatedly to kick one of them away from the action so he can focus his energies on the remaining one.  He ultimately succeeds in this and lures Qui-Gon further away from Obi Wan, a task that is only possible because of Qui-Gon's short-sightedness.  Remember early in the film when Obi Wan talked about being mindful of the future, and Qui-Gon advised him to keep focused on the present?  That blindness killed Qui-Gon.  In later films, a similar blindness by the Jedi would lead to similar results.

All this is to say that there were a lot of interesting ideas and themes bandied about in the film that served the entire trilogy well.  They were, of course, buried under some pretty crappy filmmaking.  Lucas has a real knack for sucking the life out of actors.  The principal actors of the prequel trilogy were much more talented than those of the original series, but Lucas still managed to make them all sound like middle-schoolers in a class play.  And the film also gets very boring at times and generates needless plot holes.  And then there's Jar Jar.  But still, there's interesting material in here.  Attention must be paid.

"Attack of the Clones," by contrast, is pure shit.