Movie critics don't like the new Star Wars movie-Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace-or perhaps it's better to say that they were so sick of hearing about it, that they wished the picture ill from the moment it began. The film has dominated conversation for months. Editors and reporters have endlessly sought new angles on the phenomenon while labouring entirely in the dark about it. My own newspaper, the New York Post, began publishing a story a day on the film six weeks before its US premiere in mid-May (it comes to Britain in mid-July).
But hype is a dangerous business, particularly when it comes to movies no one has seen. Last year, entertainment journalists went nuts over Godzilla until two weeks before its release. The cognoscenti assumed that this post-Jurassic Park dinosaurfest would topple all box-office records and then discovered that it was a colossal misfire. Critics felt that they had all been had, and so they took it out on Godzilla with a gleeful vengeance.
But Star Wars isn't Godzilla. There has never, in the annals of entertainment, been a money-making machine with the staying power of this one, which began with the release of the original Star Wars in 1977 and was followed by The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and Return of the Jedi in 1983. By some reckonings, series creator George Lucas has made $2 billion, for himself, on the three movies, their video releases, and his assorted licensing deals. When the films were re-released in 1997 (with a few extra minutes of new footage) after being absent from theatres for 14 years, they made more than $400m worldwide. It was a commercial triumph that made it clear just how enduring the Star Wars myth was, and fuelled the enormous hype for The Phantom Menace two years later.
Nothing could have lived up to these expectations-and The Phantom Menace doesn't. But it is still a very good movie, lovely to look at, with an interesting and complicated story line. The film begins 40 years before the first Star Wars. A peaceful planet ruled by a teenage queen is under pointless and savage military assault by evil members of the Trade Federation. The Galactic Senate should be putting a stop to this war, but the Senate has become a do-nothing body full of endless and pointless debate. So the president of the Galactic Republic sends two emissaries to find out what's going on. These emissaries are Jedi knights, those mystical folks of "May the Force be with you" fame. One of them is the young Obi-Wan Kenobi (who, as a much older man played by Alec Guinness, trains Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars.)
The Jedi knights save the teenage queen and fly away. Forced to land on a desert planet, they encounter a nine-year-old slave boy named Anakin Skywalker. The Jedi knights realise the Force is with this kid like nobody's business, and they bring the boy away with them. But the head of the Jedi knights doesn't want anything to do with him. Anyone familiar with the plot of the first three Star Wars movies knows that Anakin is Luke Skywalker's father-and that sometime in the future he will be seduced by the Dark Side of the Force and become the evil Darth Vader, villain of the original trilogy.
The naysayers are right in part: the characters aren't that interesting; The Phantom Menace lacks the first movie's dazzling series of mini-climaxes. This may be because the first movie used special effects in a new way: moviegoers were seeing things in 1977 that they had never seen before. Two decades later, we are so used to those special effects that we take them for granted, even though The Phantom Menace has more of them and uses them more creatively than any movie before it.
But the film is more than just the sum of its special effects, and it will strike a chord with audiences for the same reason that its predecessors did: it is earnest, well-meaning, and delightfully free of irony. (Actually, only the first two movies really struck a chord; everyone I've ever met agrees that Return of the Jedi was a major stinker.) The jokes in The Phantom Menace are broad and childish in a way that may displease sophisticates, but they will be endearing to everyone else. The comic relief comes from a mush-mouthed alien named Jar Jar Binks who will drive movie critics insane, but will delight every ten-year-old in the world. And the cosmology is very simple. The Jedi knights are good. And an ever smiling politician is the incarnation of all evil.
What was so disarming about the original Star Wars was the absence of cynicism or camp. Coming out in 1977, after years of bitter American movies with unhappy endings in which the bad guys triumphed and the good guys slunk away in defeat, Star Wars sounded an uncharacteristic note of optimism and good cheer. It was a nice movie, and it made audiences feel so good that they kept going back to try to recapture the experience. A nation traumatised by Vietnam could celebrate as two American prototypes-the gee-whiz good guy Luke and the hard bitten romantic Han Solo-blew up the bad guys.
Star Wars was an unabashed tribute to 1930s science-fiction serials and flying-ace pictures like Only Angels Have Wings (1939). It didn't make fun of its antecedents, but borrowed their solemnity and their devil-may-care playfulness. "You can learn from cynicism, but you can't build on it," Lucas told the Los Angeles Times in 1973 about his other great film, American Graffiti, which also played affectionate tribute to an American ideal that had become distasteful to Hollywood.
American Graffiti, which cost $750,000 to make and has earned about $100m, remains (on a dollar for dollar basis) the single most successful movie ever made. Lucas came of age at a time when movie-makers thought they were supposed to use their ill-gotten gains to show Americans what a cesspool of corruption their nation really was. But his films changed the face of American movies by delivering to Hollywood a lesson as simple and seductive as "May the Force be with you": if you make a movie that pleases audiences-instead of trying to confront them with the horrors of their phony existence-the public will make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Post-Star Wars American cinema has been pretty dreadful. (Ironically, the years in which the America-is-a-cesspool philosophy dominated Hollywood were among the best in the history of movies.) But in The Phantom Menace, the only movie he has directed since Star Wars, Lucas shows that he still believes in good guys and bad guys, in right and wrong, in the Force and the Dark Side-and if that's even more unfashionable today than in 1977, so be it; it makes for a surprising and refreshing evening at the movies.
