Yes, I am aware of that 70-minute video review of The Phantom Menace that’s currently making the rounds of the InterWebs. (io9 has helpfully aggregated the various YouTube chapters into a single, convenient location, if you didn’t know.)
No, I don’t have much to say about it.
The truth is — and I hope I don’t sound like too much of a dick here, because I know you guys are just trying to do me a friendly favor, and I really do appreciate the thought — I’m not interested in yet another snarky takedown of the Star Wars prequels, especially one that requires over an hour of my busy life to watch. Honestly, it’s been ten years since The Phantom Menace came out, and five years since I realized I was tired of talking about the prequels. I simply can’t imagine there’s anything left to be said about them in general, or The Phantom Menace in particular.
Look, I get it; the movie failed on any number of levels and that made a lot of people feel foolish for getting so excited about it in the first place. And a not-inconsiderable subset of fanboys have allowed their frustrated expectations to fester into white-hot anger and a deep conviction that George Lucas is and always was a no-talent hack who somehow hypnotized us all into loving his creations for decades and buying all the tie-in products we could get our hands on, but now the scales have fallen from some people’s eyes and they want their childhoods — not to mention all the money they’ve spent on collectibles — back. Fine. Whatever you say. Bored now.
Personally, I’m far more offended by Lucas’ stubborn disdain for the original trilogy than anything he did in the prequels. Or in Indy IV, for that matter. (I’m equally sick of hearing about CG monkeys and how Shia LaBeouf isn’t manly enough to satisfy the fanboys.) I guess I just have better things to bitch about these days…
I, too, have refused to watch it, kinda-sorta on the same grounds as you, even though my positive position on the Prequels (and TPM in particular) is long established. From what I’ve read by people fawning over this video, he doesn’t really say anything new about the movie at all or lodge any kind of new criticism; he just does it on YouTube. Interestingly he includes some footage from the first screening of the very first cut of the movie at Lucasfilm, and everyone is reacting as though this is revelatory; that footage has been on the TPM DVD features for years for anyone to see.
I can get people not liking TPM, although I disagree with most of their critiques. What I’ve never understood is the anger or resentment or just the way Lucas is the constant poster-boy for anything they don’t like in contemporary SF filmmaking. (See John Scalzi, for instance, who is apparently completely incapable of praising any SF film without dragging in Lucas’s name to bash at the same time.) Lord knows TPM ain’t perfect — I admit that all over the place in my “Fixing the Prequels” series — but jeez louise, it ain’t “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes”, either.
I did watch about ninety seconds of the video, to be honest, just to get a feel for it. The guy either has a very odd speaking voice or he takes on a very strange affectation that sounds like he’s pronouncing it “The Phrantom Menace”. I just couldn’t take the video seriously on those grounds alone.
Jaq, we’ve had this discussion before, of course — I’m not quite as positive on the prequels as you are, but I like them well enough for what they are. Really, though, that’s irrelevant to this video thing and my reason for not wanting to watch it. The bottom line is that I’m simply tired of people bitching about these three movies as if no other films in the entire history of cinema have failed to live up to expectations. Good god, do we still hear people whining about The Godfather III? That movie was a very similar situation — a return to a cinematic universe that was first created some 20 years earlier, and a big disappointment for a lot of people. (I myself didn’t think it was all that bad.) But the world has moved on and you don’t hear folks still griping about it years later.
Like you, I’m also tired of all the vicious attitude directed toward Lucas personally. (I agree that Scalzi, in particular, has gotten very tiresome with the L-bashing.) I have my issues with him — as I’ve mentioned, I want the pre-1997 versions of the original trilogy back, and I don’t believe him when he says they no longer exist — but I recognize that he’s a flawed human being who isn’t the same man or artist he used to be. Or who I personally thought he was. But whatever kind of man he may be, and whatever the quality of his current output, does not invalidate his earlier achievements.
Everybody loved Lucas and the original trilogy right up until 1999, when he made the fatal mistake of not living up his own reputation. And for that, he’s now forever more a hack? And none of the SW films were ever that good to begin with? Sorry, but that’s revisionist bullshit.
And it’s also unfair. John Carpenter has disappointed me with me with every movie he’s made since 1987, and Escape from LA was downright execrable. But I still love Escape from New York.
Same with Coppola — his movies have been on a downward slope since Apocalypse Now, IMO. But I still respect the man and am always willing to give his latest work a try.
Speilberg seems to have lost something after finishing Schindler’s List, but people still generally like him.
So why doesn’t Lucas get the same kind of respect, for his past achievements — not to mention all he’s done for the industry behind the scenes — if nothing else? In the end, I think our (collectively speaking) disappointment and anger about the prequels and Indy IV somehow has to be as much about ourselves as it is about him…
And on the subject of Scalzi and his tiresome harping on something that doesn’t really deserve his ire, I’m getting really sick of his digs against the rock band Night Ranger. I like Night Ranger, and I’ll take them over any of those bloodless, plastic-sounding synth bands he seems to favor any frackin’ day of the week.
I did watch the review because I’m cranky and I had nothing else to do while uploading photos. I think the review makes two interesting points. First, it is very difficult to describe the characters in the TPM as characters. In one segment, the reviewer asks people to describe Han Solo, C-3PO, Queen Amidala, and QGJ (sorry, I can’t spell his name). There is much to say about the first two, very little to say about the last two. Second, the reviewer shares Jason’s dislike of the special editions of epidodes IV-VI. His point is that the extra eye-candy draws attention away from the story. I don’t agree with this point, but I do share Jason’s discomfort with the idea that Lucas has repudiated the original versions, even to the point of claiming that they no longer exist and can’t be released on DVD.
I agree with Jason that the faults of the prequels don’t invalidate the achievements of the original trilogy. But I do remember being terribly disappointed with Return of the Jedi when it came out. Lucas’s deficiencies as a storyteller were evident long before TPM. Add to this the fact that Lucas didn’t write The Empire Strikes Back (to my mind the best written of the entires series) and you start to wonder how A New Hope turned out so well.
But we have trodden this path many times, have we not Jason?
Indeed we have, Robert. 🙂
One minor point of correction: Lucas did write the story outlines for both Empire and Return of the Jedi, just not the finished screenplays, which were credited to Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan in the case of TESB and Kasdan alone for ROTJ. Never doubt that those stories unfolded exactly the way he wanted them to, even if someone else was polishing the finished products. (It was a similar situation for Raiders of the Lost Ark, incidentally: story by Lucas, screenplay by Kasdan. If only Kasdan had been willing to write the screenplays for the prequels, eh?)
I tend to think Lucas’ storytelling abilities are fine — or at least no worse than a lot of other filmmakers’ — when it comes to the broad strokes (or beats as they say in the trade). His weakness is dialog. But again, I don’t think it’s all that unusual in movies to have multiple screenwriters making up for each other’s deficiencies. If you start paying attention to writing credits, very few screenplays are entirely the work of one individual, and the SW movies, for better or worse, are far more one man’s vision than most.
The point about the characters in TPM is well-taken. They are not well-defined, in part (I think) because there are too many of them. One of the biggest flaws of the prequels, IMO, is that GL was just trying to cram too much into them. I get that he wanted to do something more complex than the simple cliffhanger serial-style stories of the original trilogy, but his ambitions got the better of him. The prequels tried to blend political intrigue, an unfolding conspiracy, a war with a far more complicated backstory than “rebels vs. tyrannical empire,” Jedi mysticism, a romance, some big action set-pieces, a big cast, and, not incidentally, a coming-of-age and fall-from-grace story. All within a framework that had to be recognizably part of the established Star Wars idiom. With all that on the agenda, something had to suffer, and the characters (not to mention clarity) were the unfortunate victims.
Damn, I thought I said I wasn’t going to talk about this? 🙂