First of all, let me make two things crystal clear: I consider myself fairly critic-proof, and I enjoy the Star Wars movies, having two different versions of the trilogy on video. So I went into The Phantom Menace expecting a good time, and thinking that the critics who had given the film mediocre reviews probably had had their knives out for Lucas. Wrong. If anything, the critics were too kind. The Phantom Menace is moviemaking at its worst and most arrogant, in which the filmmaker expects literally tens of millions of dollars worth of special effects to take the place of intelligent dialogue, well directed acting, and a strong and involving plot.

The warning signs come early. As you'll recall, the previous films begin with a text crawl. As you may not recall, the serial chapters upon which the Star Wars saga is modeled also began with text, except for the first episode: in that episode we would meet the characters, the dramatic situations would be set up, and away we'd go. Lucas's text crawl for his first episode is lengthy and complex, leading viewers to look questioningly at one another over their popcorn as if to say, Did we come in late?

I can't tell you all that much about the first hour of the film, since I dozed off during much of it, except to say that it involved a Byzantine mishmash of interstellar trade, politics and intrigue that would have been better left to a role-playing game. All the characters speak in fluent cliché, and as a result there is no one with whom to empathize. The good guys are all too good, the bad guys too bad, and there's no one in between, like Han Solo, by far the most interesting character in the first trilogy, because you were never quite sure what he was going to do next. Even with Darth Vader, symbol of the Dark Side, we sensed the possibility of something more complex than pure evil.

But in this black-and-white space opera, our sole Darth is Darth Maul, who speaks exactly one line of dialogue, and whose destiny seems shaped solely by the genetic misfortune to look like a tattooed version of Satan. We know nothing about him, so it's an effort to even hate him the way we should. We know nothing about anyone. The mythic elements are still there (the segment with Anakin and his widowed mother being visited by the two Jedi knights reminds one of Amahl & the Night Visitors as well as the Arthurian saga), but the humanity is not. Lucas directs his actors like a general moving troops, and it's a case of acting pearls before directorial swine. Liam Neeson and Ewan MacGregor seem thoroughly lost (though MacGregor does a nice Alec Guinness voice).

As a result, the much heralded action sequences fall flat. The mid-point pod race is like watching someone play a video game (I swear, my eyes closed several times in boredom during it). Nearly as dull is the last battle, which is intercut with the efforts of the Jedi to ... um ... do something that seemed important, and of the little boy to essentially "destroy the Death Star" again. This kiddy-dogfight sequence is only slightly more interesting than watching a toddler ride a coin-op airplane outside of K-Mart. So let's hope that someone else directs the next film, that Lucas gets a real scriptwriter to tell his story, and that word-of-mouth puts a quick end to Phantom-Menacemania. If Hell really has a multiplex, this puppy's showing on three screens.

[ by Chet Williamson ]