Star Wars - Episode One: The Phantom Menace - A Jar-Jarring Experience!

The Phantom Menace - Every Journey has a misstep.

George Lucas is insane.

Neither serious student of film, casual viewer, nor movie fan can deny this simple fact. Many artists throughout history have been lunatics AND geniuses. Even a lunatic can create a great work. However that is not the case with STAR WARS - Episode One: The Phantom Menace, the long awaited follow-up to Lucas’s wildly popular and infinitely better Original Star Wars Trilogy.

What’s wrong with The Phantom Menace? Well, in a word; everything, or almost everything.

The first and most obvious flaw with this movie is the fact that it is a PREQUEL, which means it’s the back story for characters and situations that we the viewers already know from the Original Trilogy. That fact alone drives the interest factor way down. We already know that 10-year old Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) will become Darth Vader, sorry if that spoils the surprise for you. We already know the fate of Obi-Wan Kenobi,(Ewan McGregor) Yoda (Frank Oz), and Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), as well as what will become of R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) and C-3P0 (Anthony Daniels). So there isn’t a lot of suspense about these characters. The characters which are new to the Star Wars Galaxy, Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), Darth Maul (Ray Park), Queen Amidala/Padme’ (Natalie Portman), Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) and Shmi Skywalker (Pernilla August) are just not very interesting. They do just enough to keep us watching, but not enough to make us care about them.

Secondly, there are too many special effects in TPM, way too many, an odd complaint for a sci-fi movie. But in TPM, there are hundreds of thousand of computer generated effects per second. So many effects in fact, that they actually distract the viewer who is constantly trying to assimilate the massive amounts of CGI going on in front of them. This fact was driven home to me during one particularly forgettable moment near the film’s end as thousands of battle-droids spring to life in one of the film’s most computer generated sequences. I recall drifting off from the action on the screen to stare up at the darkened theater ceiling and wondering how many tiles were up there and whether the management had been able to stop all the leaks that made those water marks...oh yeah, look, an effect...oooh, is that gum on my shoe?

But thirdly, and most importantly, the one thing that absolutely ruined TPM and confirmed George Lucas as insane and possibly evil, is the combination of a bad character and CGI. You know what I’m leading up to...JAR-JAR BINKS! Yes, Jar-Jar Binks, the computer-generated Gungan voiced by poor Ahmed Best, who probably thought Lucas was doing him a favor by giving him this part. Jar-Jar Binks, the most hideous computer creation since Spam.

Why is Jar-Jar hated? Mainly because he’s an annoying cross between an overgrown frog and Daffy Duck, without the quiet dignity of either. He’s also in every scene, from the moment he’s introduced up until the credits roll, he’s in every frikkin’ scene! He doesn’t do anything important mind you, doesn’t add one thing to the picture with his scenery-chewing presence. Yet every word that comes from his mouth is an insult to the audience’s collective intellect, and his every move is a knife in the back of every fan. So what exactly is Jar-Jar doing while everyone else is going about the business of saving the galaxy? Why Jar-Jar is running around stealing food, sticking out his tongue, stepping in piles of excrement, getting farted on, getting knocked down, tripping over furniture, getting electrocuted, shrieking, hollering and generally being an all around nuisance! Why? Because Lucas thought his film needed some comedy relief, from all of the intense drama no doubt.

George Lucas, in his madness, probably believed that children would love his CGI-clown, Jar-Jar. That they would flock to the stores demanding that their parents buy them Jar-Jar dolls, Jar-Jar books, Jar-Jar underoos and Jar-Jar crazy-straws, but he was wrong. To this day, more children have been injured by firecrackers while trying to blow up Jar-Jar Binks, than with any other action figure. Star Wars loyalists have written fan-fiction of Jar-Jar’s gruesome and extremely painful death, still others have done re-edits of TPM, which cut out nearly all of Jar-Jar’s scenes and dialogue.

The same mental illness that created Ewoks, festered for 16 years, to bring us Jar-Jar Binks and a 10-year old Darth Vader shouting "Yippee"! STAR WARS - Episode One - The Phantom Menace, is the weakest and least rewatchable of the series. A movie which almost makes THE STARS WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL look slightly less putrid, and makes the viewer long for Bea Arthur’s bar room sing-a-long.