Visit and join our new Facebook page! |
Look, everybody knows everything about Star Wars: Episode 1- The Phantom Menace, so what could I possibly say that you haven't already heard over and over again? Well it was 1999, and thanks entirely to the trailers for this movie the world’s supply of nerds were increasingly suffering from some sort of collective movie blue-ball. It'd been over fifteen years since Princess Leia chose to start shagging Indiana Jones instead of her own brother,
and so excitement for this prequel trilogy was higher than Keith
Richards in a rocket full of crack. Then the film was released, people
were able to see it and millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror
as it became increasingly more apparent that what they were watching was
a total piece of shit. Like Dr Manhattan's giant squid monster, The Phantom Menace brought humanity together to fight one collective enemy with society’s battle cry being, “George Lucas raped my childhood”. Although if modern revelations are to be believed,
it seems that most media personalities that rose to fame during the
1970's have quite literally raped somebodies childhood, so perhaps this was a little extreme. Nor in my own case was it true. I was ten years old in 1999 and I loved The Phantom Menace more genuinely than I loved my own soon-to-be-dead grandfather.
As
I'm sure you all fondly remember, this new entry into the saga begins
with the traditional yellow text setting up an exciting new beginning to
one of the most beloved franchises of all time. God knows what the hell
it's talking about though as its indecipherable waffle about trade
federations and galactic embargoes is like trying to read a tax return
from the fucking zodiac killer. From there we see a couple of Jedi
knights bumble their way from one culturally insensitive alien
stereotype to another, as though this kids-film
is from the damaged fever dream of a dying racist. First they run away
from the weird Japanese creatures, then they bump into the Jamaican
cliché, before having to buy a slave off what I'm sure Mel Gibson would refer to as, “a flying Jew”. Whilst doing this the two Jedi are also having to protect a young Queen from a devil looking Sith Lord, who is not only the coolest thing in the movie but who also has less screen-time than Ewan McGregor's anal pubes did in Trainspotting. Where
once we had a smuggler hooking up with a sassy princess, we now have
Natalie Portman flirting with a boy so inappropriately young for her
that had she been slightly older then she'd have been rightly forced to
sign the sex offenders register and banned from living near a primary school.
The biggest problem with The Phantom Menace is in director George Lucas' intended target audience. Rather than honouring his hard-core legion of fans with a film they'd actually enjoy,
he decided to ignore them in favour of a weaker minded group of
younglings that were more likely to buy his merchandise. I'd had my mind
blown by Star Wars in 1997 during the twentieth anniversary re-release,
and so two years later I was not only as excited to see this film as
everybody else but was actually lucky enough to be the age it was aimed
at. As a result, I loved the bullshit that I could see onscreen and like
the gonk in The Manchurian Candidate I couldn't wait for the brainwashing to end so that I could buy every bit of crap that Lucas had to offer. Since then however,
I have done what humans traditionally do and grown both older and more
cynical. I spent more time hearing about how turd this film was and
suddenly I'd gone from watching The Phantom Menace every weekend, to having not seen it in years. I might now be in my twenties but I was curious as to whether I'd still like this movie despite its crappy reputation. I'd always enjoyed it in the past and so maybe I'd be influenced by the kind of nostalgia that lets people remember the Ewoks with such hypocritical leniency.
The
results of this curiosity are I'm sure obvious at this point due to
quite how many times I've already used the word, “shit” and perhaps even
the phrase, “anal pubes”. I watched The Phantom Menace the
other night and its awfulness became painfully obvious from the
previously mentioned opening text and subsequent racism. Not only that, but for the most part the acting is fucking diabolical. Now I know Liam Neeson
has forgotten that he's an actor and spent the last few years trying to
cram in as many action films as he can before his hips cave in, but this was before all that. This was back when he was known almost exclusively for his dramatic work and Oscar nominations, and even then he delivers his lines like a deaf man that's been kicked in the throat. Of course though, this is mostly due to the writing of The Phantom Menace featuring some of the worst dialogue this side of a Tommy Wiseau film. In regards to Lucas'
writing ability, Harrison Ford famously told him that, “You can type
this shit but you sure can't say it”, based on this film though I'm not
even sure he can type it. It's more like somebody has accidentally
smacked the keyboard with various parts of their body during a
particularly violent wank and autocorrect has gone mental in trying to interpret it.
At the very least I suppose the effects were pretty cool for the time with almost everything having been done with CG. Although, you have to wonder if this was because Lucas wanted to impress us with his latest technology, or because throwing a script at some computer nerd and telling them to make it happen was easier than directing real actors. To be fair,
the effects haven't dated half as badly as you might imagine
considering even this film is now starting to knock on. It's just a
shame that we now live in more enlightened times where pixels are used to enhance a scene, rather than create it in its entirety. As a result of this everything lacks weight, believability, any sense of physicality, and therefore interest. It's also probably one of the other reasons why the cast struggle to spit out their shit lines, when all they have to aim for is a tennis ball on a stick and a room composed entirely of green walls. Actual humans aside, I suppose the use of this kind of technology is also to blame for the creation of Jar Jar Binks, who really is a single representation of everything that is wrong with The Phantom Menace. His sub-Chuckle Brothers slapstick shit is proof that the film is aimed at kids, and his Jamaican influence is so offensive that it kind of feels like the Star Wars equivalent of a minstrel act.
Despite all of this however, I can't bring myself to hate Jar Jar and I can't bring myself to hate this film. I can see everything that's crap about it and I can only imagine how much of a let-down it must have been after such a wait. Nor can I say that I particularly liked what I saw. It's rather that
watching this film simply reminded me of how excited I was by it as a
child. For better or worse this movie is a thread that leads right back
to a time when I was a happier, more optimistic person that was yet to
experience a raping from the miserable cock of life. As a child I was
incapable of seeing a bad performance and any of that bollocks involving
trade and tax was simply ignored by my mushy brain in favour of shiny lights and funny Gungans. Jar Jar
to me is like that weird kid in school that you used to be friends with
that ate worms and smelt of shit. My cynical self can now more
accurately judge him as worrying,
but I can't help but remember the fondness that I used to have for him.
Nor as a child was I frustrated by Lucas's incompetence as an editor,
which can be seen as he cuts between three battles in the third act
whilst oblivious to the fact that he's actually destroying the tension
of each one by doing so. As an adult this is not only painfully obvious
but I couldn't give a flying toss about any of them beyond the three way
lightsaber fight.
In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that as annoying as Jar Jar may be, the real problem in the film is that boring kid that they got to play a young Anakin. Obviously I don't blame him, as anybody who’s
read anything about his subsequent experience of life will probably see
that nobody can hate him more than he hates himself. Instead I blame
Lucas for hiring such a shit actor,
and directing such a shit performance from an obviously shit script
whilst simultaneously managing to shit all over the legacy of Darth
Vader. The pod-racing scene might be pretty cool,
but I shouldn't be left with the thought that it'd have been improved
if the young Vader had exploded into a fire ball that blasted his teeth
out through his arse. I might have found Jar Jar
funny as a child but even then I was more than aware that the young
Skywalker was about as annoying as one of those fish that swims up your
knob as you take a piss in a swamp.
None of this is to say, by the way, that beyond this issue of Anakin, I'm claiming that the film works as a decent kids-film and the only reason people hate it is because they weren't children at the time. Time Bandits is a kids-film that I didn't see until I was an adult, and I loved it regardless. What I'm saying is that The Phantom Menace is just an all-round
bad film that only kids will like because it's aimed at them and
they're all stupid. The fact that Lucas ignored his fans is simply the
reason that they now all hate him. Old people remember their childhood
fondly thanks exclusively to nostalgia and that was a time when Hitler
was killing all of their loved ones off with bullets, bombs and death
camps. However even with a drug as powerful as that nostalgia, the best I can say about The Phantom Menace is
that I can't admit to hating it as much as I can see that I clearly
should. I asked at the beginning what I could tell you about this movie
that you haven't already heard a million times, to which the answer is clearly nothing... Although, including now, I have used the phrase anal pubes three times throughout, so you know that's something to enjoy at least. Thanks for reading motherfuckers and see you next time.
You can visit the blog picture artist at _Moriendus_
No comments :
Post a Comment