168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starﷺ Wars: Episode 1𝓰 - The Phantom Menace podraced its way into theaters 25 years ago this month, ending the series' 16-year drought after Return of the Jedi. That dry spell was so lengthy you would think Skywalker Ranch lay directly beneath the twin suns of Tatooine, so it’s understandable that when The Phantom Menace finally came out, it carried the weight of Death Star-sized expectations.
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To put it mildly, it didn't fulfill them. Though Phantom Menace still made out like a bantha with over a billion dollars (in 1999 money), it's never been especially beloved by fans — especially the fans who were old enough to have expectations going in.
I'm not one of those older fans. I was five when the movie came out, and it was the first Star Wars movie I remember seeing. I had a skateboard with art of young Anakin Skywalker in his pod racing helmet printed on the deck. Though the art faded with the sun, I rode it down my parents’ long driveway for a decade, until it eventually snapped in half.
As the prequel trilogy progressed, I acquired tons of action figures, with Mace Windu and Obi-Wan Kenobi being key members of my collection. In high school, my friend group all carried lightsabers in our cars and we would fight in the parking lot after basketball practice. We even caught the 3D screenings of Phantom Menace when it ♒came back to theaters in 2012. I always knew the film had a bad reputation, but I didn’t actually dislike it. It was too foundational an introduction to the kind of science fiction and fantasy stories I would go on to find,♔ in greater forms, in the work of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson.
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It's a strange movie full of strange decisions. Though I love some good politicking in my movies, half of the audience that made the movie a gigantic hit were children. George Lucas' focus on trade routes and taxation flew way over those kids’ heads. Jar Jar Binks was for the kids, but he was far too obnoxious and cartoonish to click with the adult fans who comprised the other half of the movie’s audience. Many of its aliens are racist caricatures. The central child performance doesn't work. And it plants the seeds for a romance between a nine-year-old kid and 18-year-old Natalie Portman. It's the singular work of one man who clearly needed another writer or director to effectively bring that vision to the screen.
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25 years later, I've reconsidered The Phantom Menace (and the prequel trilogy as a whole) multiple times. My first reconsideration kicked off in high school, while watching that 3D rerelease. My friends and I had been so Star Wars-pilled — quoting the movies to each other constantly, fixating on the tiny details, doing impressions of the background characters you only notice if you've seen the movie a dozen times — that it was a bit of a shock to be confronted by the movie on the big screen and find that it didn't really play. I had built up the 3D in my head, expecting it to transform the experience, and it turned out to be barely noticeable. I remember the Droideka's guns poking out of the screen a bit in the opening sequence, but that was the extent of it.
As disappointed as I felt, I doubled down on the prequels being "good, actually" in the following years. I had to give a PowerPoint presentation in my Intro to Speech class freshman year of college and opted to voice this opinion (and troll the class) by arguing that the prequels were, in fact, actually better than the original movies. I barely believed this at the time and I certainly don't believe it now, but it was fun to watch most of the class bite their tongues and roll their eyes.
A New Disappointment
Like many people, the sequel trilogy recontextualized my feelings about prequels. By the time The Force Awakens hit theaters in 2015, I had stopped buying into the idea that the preque𓄧ls were better than the originals, having rewatched the original trilogy in preparation for the new film. The Force Awakens ended up being my favorite Star Wars movie, combining the vibe of the original movies with the faster pace we expect from newer blockbusters. I loved the movie, and (controversially) enjoyed The Last Jedi, too. During this time, I came to see the prequels in the way dismissive adults had talked about them as I was growing up. They were a mess, and the newer, better-realized sequels brought that home.
Though the prequels were dismissed at the time of their release, they've become a cornerstone of modern Star Wars since through The Clone Wars series and Dave Filoni's live-action Disney+ shows.
But The Rise of Skywalker made me appreciate The Phantom Menace again. That's largely because — 20 years after Phantom — it gave me a chance to be the adult completely disappointed by a Star Wars movie. And though I hated TROS, it helped me appreciate the prequels more. Phantom Menace wasn't a great movie, but it was the product of Lucas' creativity. No one else could have made it. It has highs — Duel of the Fates, the podrace — and it has lows — the virgin birth — but good or bad, it feels like a movie made by one strange dude with a lot of ideas clattering around in his head like chance cubes.
It feels like none of the decisions in Rise of Skywalker were made by a single person. Every choice feels like it was made by a committee, then reversed when focus testing results came in, then reversed again. It remains the worst movie I've ever seen. Yes, worse than Phantom, worse than Attack of the Clones, and worse than Revenge of the Sith. It's a hollow movie, driven by the pursuit of nostalgia-driven profit, not by any artistic vision. The Phantom Menace may be bad, but its weird choices give you things to chew on, to debate, to yell about. I've been thinking about it for 25 years. I can't imagine Rise of Skywalker will inspire the same.
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