Okay.

I might as well get this over with, my belated reaction to Episode One, the Phantom Menace.

By now, the world at large must have processed this earth-flattening film event, and everybody will have reached their own conclusions.  But as somebody who remains deeply involved with story telling in a vein not entirely dissimilar to the one Lucas works in, I think I might be able to offer a few thoughts of interest. . .
 

First of all, I was dreading the opening of this film ever since the so-called 'special' editions came out a couple of years back.  (While many of the changes made vastly improved the three movies, several only served to confuse me since I found they dramatically detracted from the overall quality of the films. I much prefer the originals.)

I wasn't exactly sure what was going to appear on the screen with this new film; either Lucas would learn from all the negative reactions to the 'special' editions, and make sure the new movie was spotless, or it would simply be a poor film.  Even though I tried very hard not to hear anything prior to seeing the movie, I couldn't help but be affected by the debris of numerous, very negative feelings about Lucas' new project.  In fact, a few hours before the film, sensing that the floor of the universe had fallen away and there was no sense in blindly hoping for a great film, I basically gave up and called Carson to ask what the heck was going on.  (He'd seen it on opening day, while I was waiting for the weekend.)

He told me the film nearly made him physically ill.  He went into a few specifics, but generally advised me not to see it, saying, "Imagine your worst fears realized."

I said, "Yikes."

Surprisingly, though, I took the blow of learning Carson's reaction rather well.  (I confess, that while I loved the early films and that they did affect me deeply when I was young, I am unable to sit through endless viewings of them like many of the people I know are able.  I'm not the sort of person who reads books twice; even really good ones.  As a kid, I read the C.S. Lewis 'Narnia' series twice, knowing that many people visit their favorite story worlds more than once and love it each time, but I confess that I found the exercise rather flat.  To this day, I'd rather pick up a new book with new possibilities than return to an old one.  I figure there are more good books out there than I'll ever be able to find or read in a lifetime, so why spin my wheels?)  Naturally, I can respect how other people read books or watch favorite movies more than once, but for some reason, it just isn't the way my head works.  -And luckily, this prepared me well for the new Star Wars film.  Essentially, I didn't really care terribly when I learned that the new one wasn't so great.  My level of emotional investment in Star Wars has decreased a great deal in the last twenty years, so when the stock market crashed, so to speak, I wasn't left ruined.

But hearing Carson's comments and putting them together with all the other negative bits and pieces I'd heard did something else very interesting. . .  What happened was that I sat down to see the film expecting it to be MUCH worse than it actually turned out to be.  (When I envision my 'worst fears realized', I invariably come up with cinematic possibilities which really would have made me ill.)

The net result was that I found myself pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed Episode One.  I came out of the film feeling pretty darn good.  Tara was looking a little pale at my side, and Carson, who came all the way down just to view my reaction, (I typically get quite rabid when subjected to even partially flawed fare), stared at me in disbelief when I told him I'd enjoyed the film.

The next two hours were spent on street corners and in coffee shops discussing the film, (where both Tara and Carson continued to assure me that it did in fact suck poo and that Lucas' brain had indeed melted some years ago.)  I kept grinning.

Now this is not to say that I wasn't able to tick off each and every stupid mistake and missed opportunity which came up in the film as they happened across the screen.  (There must have been well over a hundred points I would have altered, removed or done entirely differently had I been in charge of things.  Points which certainly made Episode One the weakest of the four films.)  And while I admit that I did openly cringe several times during the movie, none of the mistakes I noted came anywhere even close to taking things to the levels of bad I'd been anticipating.  -Indeed, there were several points of direction and subtle observation which I found very clever and insightful; stuff difficult to describe quickly, but there nonetheless, -although I don't think anybody is looking to discuss those elements when the over-all movie was such a disappointment.

I did, however, enjoy myself.  I was relieved by three things. . .
 

1) The actors, despite some poor dialogue, stayed within the confines of their characters, taking themselves and the events happening to them seriously.

I saw a movie where the main character was sitting in his car while a large Doberman, who wanted to tear him up, was standing on the hood, slobbering and barking at him on the other side of the windshield.  The main character, after quickly rolling up the windows, said to the dog, "Hey, look!  Behind us!  It's Lassie!"  -The dog then made a Scooby Doo, "Rassie!?", and zoomed off to look for the famous female dog star.  The main character then turned to the camera and said, "They always fall for that trick!"

Sure, that makes you smile when it's in a text-only form, but on screen, jokes like this ALWAYS fail, and I don't understand why people don't see this and continue to put scenes like that into their movies.  Luckily for Episode One, there were only two partial instances of this sort of thing, and none of the characters were making clever one-liner remarks while dealing with perilous situations; situations which would have any normal person feeling far too threatened and adrenalized to be able to be anything but be honestly affected during.
 

2) The characters reacted correctly to the stimuli striking them.  (A subtle shading of the above rule.)

I HATE movies where people don't react properly.  -I watched a David Lynch film called the 'Lost Highway', in which, time after time, the main character made no comment or gave even the slightest indicator that a devastating or supernatural event of the freakiest quality had just occurred.  When bizarre, terrifying stuff happens to me, I jump out of my skin.  To not do so is the same as not jumping back when a big bug falls out of your shoe; to not react and not automatically yelp, alerting all those around you to the surprise of a possible danger, flies in the face of millions of years of genetically in-ground programming.  I find seeing a lack of this behavior in a film maddening and even disturbing.  (As an aside, perhaps because 'disturbing qualities' are so highly praised in the works of Picasso and other artists like him, I see this lack of reaction by film characters most commonly in European films.)
 
 

3) The storyline in Episode One was linear and logical; there seemed to be no gaps in the story.

This one doesn't need explanation.
 
 

In my opinion, these are three of the most important rules which should be observed by any story.  The moment you break even one of them, the film becomes an utter waste.  Phantom Menace managed to avoid stepping on any of these mines, and that made all the lesser violations much more manageable.  I found it was a matter of choice as to whether or not I paid attention to the spectacle of other flaws.

A few examples of the lesser rules which were broken by Phantom Menace are. . .

a) Never make any direct references to the real world.>

Transfer interrupted!

The racial stereotypes we saw in the films had a similar effect.)

b) Never explain the science behind magic.  (They turned the Force into a scientific phenomenon better suited to the Star Trek universe.  Big mistake.)

c) Back story, back story, back story!  (The first three films were made rich by the fact that all the names and places and events of the movies were already fleshed out with full pedigrees and established relationship histories which could be referred and reacted to by the characters.  This new film had no such back story, and suffered immeasurably because of it).

d) If you are going to break laws of physics, do it only for specific reasons!  (Everybody knows that you cannot hear explosions in space.  The creators of the original films made a conscious decision to break that law.  -And it worked; partly because nobody has ever experienced first hand the realities of orbital vacuum; our senses are tuned to the physics of the earthbound world we live in each day.  By breaking the 'no sound' rule, our internal registers were not offended by the un-reality of sound in space, and in fact responded positively to it.  -Now, I realize that I tend to be more aware of how the world works on a physical level than many people, and this explains why I am much more easily offended by films which get stuff wrong, so perhaps the character of the hovering junk dealer was the sort of thing most people were not distracted by.  It drove me nuts, though!

Humming birds are small and light, and they have to beat their wings a zillion times per second and ingest a gallon or so of sugar fluids in the form of flower sap every day just to function.  I've observed humming birds first hand, so this is not an intellectual understanding for me; it's intuitive.  And unlike how objects behave in a vacuum, I intimately know how what normal birds look like when they fly; how they carve the air.  Like I said, I might be unusual in this regard, but the junk dealer looked so wrong to me that I can only liken my reaction to what people would have felt had there been visible strings holding up the ships during space scenes.  The only excuse for this was incompetence on the part of the creators, either through lack of understanding about how things work, or by thinking that breaking this physical law was somehow acceptable.  -And perhaps because I was the only one I know who really cared about this detail, breaking it was in fact alright.  Like I said, these are less crucial rules which got broken).

And there were many others. . .

(These rules, by the way, are my own.  I have come up with them over the years through observance and I use them as tools when I write.  Ironically enough, some of them were derived from watching and listening to Lucas.)

So all in all, what did I think?

Well, clearly this was a 'Good Parts' movie. (A film which needs to be watched, and even enjoyed for all the good parts even though it requires one to overlook the bad.) A 'Great' movie is one where all the parts are good.  Star
Wars should have been a Great movie. Sadly, it wasn't.

So I don't think that Star Wars, the Phantom Menace was a total loss.   It didn't, as I seriously feared it might, destroy the integrity of Star Wars as a whole, and I will certainly be watching closely when the next episodes are produced employing different writers and directors.
 

My main question, however, is this: What went wrong?

Clearly, Lucas fell into a hole he dug for himself.  He put himself at the top of an ivory tower and pushed away or ignored all of the creative people who have worked with him in the past.

Carson had this to say:  Madonna is not a very good singer.  Neither is she a great song writer, actor or dancer, nor is she even considered the most attractive woman in the world of entertainment.  However, she can do all of those things at least competently, and more importantly, she can bring those elements together like nobody else, and THAT takes talent. 

Lucas is not like this.  While Madonna can wear all hats with competence, Lucas works differently; he has two unquestioned skills; he has grand vision which can fire the imaginations of both audiences and the creative people who work with him, and he has the organizational and business savvy needed to put huge projects together.  Everything else he needs help with, and up until recently, he had it.  Dialogue and scripting and general editing for the Phantom Menace were tasks which should have been given to others with aptitudes in those areas.

And why didn't this happen?

Up until now, I have never wanted to meet Lucas because there was never anything I thought we would be able to talk about.  Now, although I suspect it would be an unpleasant conversation at best, I would be intrigued to know what was going on in the man's head.

And those are some of my thoughts on that subject.
 

As for I Box news. . .

Issue  #27 goes to press tomorrow, (May 27) which means you'll see it in two weeks.  I am not soliciting issue #29 until next month, and after which, with apartment moves and convention stuff and various other publishing delays like personal burn-out neatly dealt with, (Hooray!), it's back to a bi-monthly schedule!  --And, by the way, the next issue (#27) had all who read it telling me it was one of my best yet.  (But don't get your hopes up.  We've all seen what happens when projects get too much hype!)

That's it for now.
 

Take care all!

-Mark