October 21, 2001.

"Greed can be a very powerful ally."

Starring Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd, Ian McDiarmid, Pernilla August, Oliver Ford Davies, Hugh Quarshie, Ahmed Best, Anthony Daniels, Ray Park, Kenny Baker, Frank Oz,  Terence Stamp and Brian Blessed.  Executive producer, George Lucas.  Music by John Williams.  Produced by Rick McCallum.  Written and directed by George Lucas.  Released by Fox in 1999.

After years of waiting, "Star Wars I - The Phantom Menace" has finally been released on DVD.  And it's about bloody time!  Then again, we were all waiting for the DVD release of a movie that turned out to be much less than what we expected.

The Trade Federation has blockaded the planet Naboo and is demanding a new trade treaty.  A Republican delegation composed of Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn and his apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi have been sent to resolve the issue.  There's more to the blockade than is originally suspected when the Trade Federation's viceroy orders his droids to eliminate the Jedi knights.  The two Jedi manage to elude their aggressors and escape to the surface of the planet Naboo on board one of the ships of the Trade Federation's android invasion fleet.

With the help of a Gungan exile named Jar Jar Binks, the trio embark on getting Queen Amidala off the planet Naboo and travel to the Republican capital planet of Coruscant on the Queen's ship so she can plead for assistance.  Trouble ensues when on their way off the planet, they are attacked by the Trade Federation blockade orbiting Naboo.  With the hyperdrive damaged in battle, and power levels dropping very fast, the queen's ship is forced to land on the planet Tatooing to proceed with necessary repairs.

Unfortunately, Republican credits are useless on that planet and the Jedi knights must find other ways to acquire the necessary replacement parts.  It's on this planet that they encounter the young slave Anakin Skywalker who is already an accomplished race pod pilot, a highly unstable skimming vehicle that only humans with a "Jedi" trait can safely pilot without crashing into an obstacle.  This is where the scheme of participating in the race is hatched with the intention of obtaining the necessary parts along with the boy who Qui-Gon Jinn suspects could become a futur Jedi knight.  If Jinn can get Skywalker to the Jedi Council, they could better evaluate the capabilities of this young lad.

However, a Dark Force master who is behind the treachery at the planet Naboo, sends out his sith Darth Maul on a mission to get the queen back to the planet and sign a new treaty while eliminating anyone who gets in his way.  The Trade Federation is in fact being led by a powerful and sinister individual who intends to acquire much more than just the planet Naboo.  Based on the other movies in the series, this individual wants to become the ruler of a new empire which will maintain control over the various species through fear, pain and suffering.

*** START OF SPOILER ALERT ***

At this point on, I will be revealing certain elements of the movie that you may not want to know until after you've seen the movie.  Please click here to skip over this section.

Where should I start?  I know!  Let's start with what's good.  That should be quick!

First, the music score.  George Lucas went with the logical choice: John Williams.  After all, he was the composer of the original Star Wars score, and his talent has steadily improved ever since.  A key musical sequence is associated with each episode in the series, and this movie is no exception.  As a switch, the music representing Darth Maul includes a highly effective chorus which adds a nice "Holier Than Thou" flavour to the evil character.  All in all, this is another successful music selection from one of the best movie composers in the business.

Second, the sets and the special effects.  Note however that this excludes the CGI aliens.  Effects such as the ones used in the pod race, the planet Coruscant and the final space battle, the environment are very well rendered.  The sets themselves are vast and highly detailed although I wonder if it's really all that practical to live in a palace with such high ceilings.  Then again, much of that palace exists in real life and is located in Italy.

Now let's start listing the bad stuff.  I hope you're patient, this is a bit long.

First, the CGI characters.  It's one thing to render a machine.  It's a totally different story when rendering an alien and blending that character in the rest of the movie.  Even with this low resolution transfer, the Gungan look as fake as can be.  In all honesty, the characters created for the Star Trek franchise had more realism than the characters in this one Star Wars movie.  Then again, the Star Trek creative team had more practice in creating imaginary characters, and on a shoestring budget to boot, limiting their use of CGI rendered characters only to the aliens that just couldn't be created any other way.  But in this movie, the only realistic alien in the entire bunch is Yoda, a puppet created by Muppet co-founder Frank Oz.  There were many other CGI rendered aliens that could have looked better if they were created more as real-life characters instead of highly imaginative computer generated ones.  But instead, we are left with what could best be described as a highly twisted version of "Mary Poppins".

Next, the acting.  What happened here?  I've never seen such a bad selection of actors in all my life!  There's almost no chemistry between the people, acting parts were mismatched and some actors had no business being on the set.  Let's analyze a few of these characters one at a time.

• Young Anakin Skywalker played by Jake Lloyd.  His performance was very dry and void of any true emotion which was made even worse by the horrendous and juvenile dialog.  The test shots in the special features indicate he could have done a decent job in the movie, but whatever guidance he received has been a total disaster.  So my previous belief that he wasn't a real actor was basically an unfounded one.  But what a cruel trick to play on a kid for crying out loud!  Giving him such lousy dialog and guidance!

• Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor as the two Jedi knights.  They behave like strangers that have recently met, not like master and apprentice that have been together for years.  Their performances are so restricted and dry that a couple of monks on a vow of silence might be able to deliver better emotional expressions.

• Samuel Jackson as the Jedi council member.  He just didn't fit in the part, a situation which is the total opposite of what he normally encounters in his other performances such as in the movies "Pulp Fiction", "Die Hard 3" and just recently "Unbreakable" where his performance gave the characters he played total credibility.  In this movie, he resembles the "Token Negro" hired to accommodate either some kind of Affirmative Action policy, or a desire by George Lucas to avoid the flack he received for not hiring any visible minorities in his original Star Wars movies.  This is one movie Sam Jackson should have avoided.

• Nathalie Portman as Queen Amidala.  Now her performance could have been improved in two ways.  First, surround her with a better supporting cast.  Second, get rid of that annoying "Holier-Than-Thou" attitude and bring back a bit of the "Gung-Ho" attitude present in Princess Leia!  Now that was royalty with attitude!  In this movie, Portman's personification of a queen was played way too stiff.  It's as if she needed a laxative.

• Jar Jar Binks as Jar Jar Binks.  I can understand why Lucas wanted to add a comical element in the picture, but did he have to add so much?  That's what hurt the character more than anything else.  If he was just a bit less clumsy and more devoted to the task at hand, the creature would have gained a reasonable amount of respect and could still get away with the occasional clumsiness.

• As for the remaining characters, Anakin's mother was fine, the captain of the queen's ship was also acceptable except for the oversized hat that made him look like a refugee of the Seventies, Sebulba was a bit of a race car stereotype, the junkyard dealer was a bit annoying always hovering all over the place...

What's next?  How about the story?  Or if you prefer, "How to copy sequences from other movies and claim them as your own"?  Here are a few examples.

• The fish chase sequence down the core of Naboo looks like the giant squid battle from Disney's "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea".  Why this scene was added at all is beyond me.  It almost stops the movie.

• The pod race scene resembles a repackaged version of "Ben Hur's" chariot race, down to the final lap sequence where the two race leaders get their vehicles hooked together.  At least it makes a terrific demo scene for your home theater system.

• The final battle sequence between the Gungan and the droid army was taken from the final battle scene in the Roman epic "Spartacus".  Just look at the alignment of the troops on both sides.  The good guys are totally undisciplined while the enemy droids are perfectly lined up.

• The final space battle.  Hasn't this already been done in the previous Star Wars movies?  Same idea, the small ship flies into the big ship and activates a chain reaction.  After a while the sequence becomes redundant and you're left wanting something new and different.

• The light sabre battle sequence also resembles the final battle sequence in "Return of the Jedi" where the evil one falls down a deep shaft.  Lucas is copying from his own movies not once, but twice!

• One half-resemblance to a previous Star Wars movie is going to the planet Tatooine to pick up some local yokel.

Here are some more odds and ends that annoyed me.

• The dialog as a whole is poorly rendered and incredibly cliché.  Just the dialog delivered by both Jar Jar Binks and Anakin Skywalker is enough to ruin the entire movie.  The rest of the dialog as a whole is not all that different from the dialog created in Episodes 4, 5 and 6.  Even Alec Guinness complained that he hated the part of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original movies mainly because of the unrealistic and incomprehensible dialog.  However, contrary to this movie, the original Star Wars episodes were at least blessed with an excellent cast that made the movies work.  I would prefer if George Lucas starts delegating the task of scriptwriting to a professional script writer.  It may be time for a new perspective on the series.  Right now he's just insulting the intelligence of his fans.

• What's the point with the setting for the light sabre battle sequence?  There's no explanation on why there's all these unsafe catwalks all over the place.  Even worse, why is there a hallway of force beams that turn on and off at regular intervals?  As a security measure, it's full of holes.  As a movie vehicle, it has no real reason to exist because there's no clear explanation on why these beams exist in the first place.  We can't associate them with anything tangible.

• There was some potential in the original storyline, but the final result may have been a bit too complicated to fully understand.  In fact, some elements require that you watch the original movies before watching this one otherwise you'd be left wondering what's going on.  Even then, I still encountered someone who still can't understand the order of the movies.  "This is Episode I?  What about the other three movies made years ago?  Where do they fit in?"

• Two items in the pod race scene are downright annoying.  First of all, we already have enough incompetent sports announcers on TV.  Do we really need to see them in a movie as well?  Second, what's with the excessive "poodoo" crap and fart jokes?  Is the toilet humour really necessary?

I might have missed a few items, but you now have an excellent idea on how I feel about this movie.

*** END OF SPOILER ALERT *** 

George Lucas made two major mistakes.  First, he believed he still had enough vision to create a brand new and exciting story for all to see; the final result is his movie is riddled with patchwork sequences borrowed from many other movies including his own, lacks the creativity that made the original series as exciting as it was, and infested this movie with inept and poorly chosen actors.  Second, under his own admission, he wanted to make a movie that even the kids would enjoy, thus increasing ticket sales.  This "demographic planning" is highly counterproductive to the creative process, and can transform a movie into nothing more than a major advertising vehicle to sell other products.  It's a phenomena that has already infected just about every other major motion picture studio in Hollywood, and has reached George Lucas himself.  And he most likely started this phenomena back in 1977 with the release of the first Star Wars movie.  Hollywood has been following the same type of demographic planning ever since.

Just by failing to concentrate on the storyline itself, George Lucas failed to deliver a quality product us consumers could have enjoyed.  That last sentence may sound like what a marketing department would say, but in reality it's the foundation for every great movie ever made.  Great movies were made primarily to entertain the public with their clever storyline, intelligent dialog and great acting.  Even when a movie is deliberately silly such as is the case with the movie "Airplane!", the silliness can still be cleverly assembled to make viewing such a movie highly entertaining and thoroughly enjoyable without necessarily aiming for a specific target audience.  Unfortunately, that's not the case with "The Phantom Menace".

Picture

2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen.  I've seen this transfer on a 65" Toshiba, on my notebook computer, and downconverted on my 20" JVC TV.  In all three cases, the image is rock solid and highly detailed.  Colour, detail and black levels are perfect across the board and perfectly appropriate for the material at hand.  And the space sequences reveal none of the bad mattes that were so evident in the original Star Wars movies.

The only glitch in the transfer is an MPEG artifact that manifests itself as a ghost along the top black bar of the widescreen image.  That's pretty much the only annoyance I could find.

October 24, 2001.  A correction is in order.  There's also some excessive vertical edge enhancement in some sequences.  I've seen this problem in the past on other 2.35:1 aspect ratio transfers ("Unbreakable" is a good example) and I've yet to determine the exact cause of this particular problem.  As a result of this overlooked information, the picture rating has been downgraded by half a point.

Sound/Subtitles

This is probably the best Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack ever created for a movie and DVD release.  Full range sound all around, thunderous music score, crystal clear vocals, and plenty of thunderous bass.  As expected, the pod race and light sabre battle are the best examples of how much the sound on this disc can literally surround you with dizzying yet properly exploited music and sound effects.  Definitely a five-star soundtrack.  And it ain't even DTS.

 WARNING!  The subwoofer track on this DVD release is extremely powerful, dropping all the way down to 10 Hz!  I've already read one private forum message where an owner's SVS 20-39CS subwoofer's main driver was driven to oblivion during the pod race scene.  If you feel your subwoofers are being overdriven, it may be a good idea to turn them down a bit before you end up with a fried sub and a big repair bill.  In my case, this meant activating the -10dB level attenuator.  This may seem like a lot, but it was necessary in order not to disturb the neighbours too much.

However, if your subwoofers are of military grade and your foundations can handle the sonic stress, well... CRANK IT UP!!!

Alternate tracks include 2 channel English and French surround soundtracks.  I'm surprised the French language track is only 2 channels.  There must have been a French 5.1 source somewhere, but for some reason Fox didn't use it.  Also included are English captions for the hearing impaired along with automatic English and French subtitles for the alien language segments.

Features

This is a very long list.

• Commentary track including George Lucas and part of the production team

• Three animated DVD menu designs chosen at random

• Deleted scenes with commentary

• "The Beginning" hour long documentary

• Multi-angle storyboard-to-animatic-to-film segments

• Five featurettes on different aspects of the production

• Complete Web documentary series

• John Williams music video

• Production photos with captions

• Theatrical posters and print campaign

• Teasers, trailers and TV spots

• "Star Wars: Starfighter" game making-of featurette

• DVD-ROM Weblinks

And to be honest, I haven't had the time to go through every one of them.  But what I have seen shows just how complete this DVD edition really is.  The best segment I've seen up to now has to be the anamorphic widescreen documentary "In The Beginning" which contains an excellent behind-the-scenes look of the production at the studios, in Italy and in Tunisia where Lucas encountered a disaster I believed he already encountered previously during the production of "Return Of The Jedi": rain!

George Lucas' introduction to the deleted scenes treated the DVD audience as if they've never seen a DVD in their lives.  What was the reason to point out the benefits of DVD technology in his introduction?  If we've gone this far on the disc, we already know what the DVD technology can do!  Some of us can even teach Lucas a thing or two about special features.  The next time he produces a DVD, he should just get on with the reasons behind the deleted scenes and skip the monologue.  Most other directors have already understood this a long time ago.

Multi-angle features are a much maligned element of the DVD technology which sounded like a good idea at the time, but seem to have fallen flat over the years.  In this case, the animatic sequences offer you an angle the combines the images of the three other angles.  So if you don't like switching from one angle to another, you don't have to.  But if you like to jump from one angle to another like a ping pong ball, it's also readily available.  Basically, the best of both worlds.

Many of the other special features are the kind we're used to seeing in many other DVD releases, and are just as much appreciated in this release.  The print campaign, theatrical trailers and TV spots are always a favourite even if they are technically advertising.  It's always a lot of fun seeing what went through the mind of the marketing department when they created the advertising campaign.  Sometimes they give out too much information, sometimes they give you just enough to pique your interest.  When "The Phantom Menace" trailer was released in theaters, people were paying good money just to see the trailer!  They didn't care about the movie that was playing!  Now that's a successful advertising campaign!

The special features get five stars not only on the sheer amount of material made available on this DVD, but also on the level of quality of many of the individual features.  I'm not done watching them all and I already enjoy them very much.  Despite the substandard storyline, I can still appreciate the work involved in assembling the rest of the movie.

Final verdict

I'm always annoyed when I see a movie filled with plenty of potential and creative special effects be systematically ruined by inept storytelling and bad acting.  Unfortunately, this seems to be a popular trend among science-fiction movies these days where the special effects take the place of good storytelling.  This movie is simply another example of this phenomena, and it's an approach that is simply not defendable.

Other science-fiction movies have managed to avoid this trap.  For example, the movie "Total Recall" has gained much respectability over the years because the story was well assembled and the dialog cleverly delivered by competent actors.  And all this despite Arnold's heavily accentuated delivery.  The movie itself clearly wasn't a thinking person's movie, but it was -- and still is -- an excellent and highly entertaining popcorn movie.  So why did "The Phantom Menace" turn out the way it did?

"The Phantom Menace" has turned out to be a dangerous thorn in George Lucas' career.  His failure to deliver a decent storyline and excellent cast performance has possibly jeopardized the potential success of the rest of the Star Wars franchise.  It will be interesting to see if the phenomenal theater line-ups that formed during Episode I's original theatrical release will materialized one more time before Episode II's released.  It wouldn't surprise me if George Lucas has lost many of his hard-core fans in recent years.

In one sentence, the movie sucked but the special features attempt to make up for this blunder.  At the very least, what we have here is an excellent DVD demo disc.

Picture		Video	2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen
Sound		Audio	ENGLISH: Dolby Digital 5.1 EX ENGLISH: Dolby Digital 2.0 (surround) FRENCH: Dolby Digital 2.0 (surround)
Story		Subtitles	English (captions)
Features		Features	Commentary track including George Lucas and part of the production team Three animated DVD menu designs chosen at random Deleted scenes with commentary "The Beginning" hour long documentary Multi-angle storyboard-to-animatic-to-film segments Five featurettes on different aspects of the production Complete Web documentary series John Williams music video Production photos with captions Theatrical posters and print campaign Teasers, trailers and TV spots "Star Wars: Starfighter" game making-of featurette DVD-ROM Weblinks
Value		Final word	All that money spent on the special effects, yet the storyline and acting were severely neglected.  It's a real shame.