25 years later, we're still arguing about Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
If there’s anything agreeable about the most polarizing blockbuster in modern movie history, it’s that nobody is ever going to agree on it.
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace turns 25 this month, having lived many lives through the pop culture discourse machine to where it’s immortal in its polarization. It’s been a quarter century since the podraces, Jar Jar Binks, the “Duel of the Fates,” the midi-chlorians and the birth of an unmatched phenomenon that we will never see again at the movies.
As much as the Avengers movies and the recent Star Wars films took a vise-grip on audiences, nothing ever arrived in theaters with the sheer blunt force of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. The 16-yearlong anticipation for movie fans to find out why exactly Darth Vader found himself breathing through a mask and atop the Galactic Empire came with such generational force that people actually went to the movies to see the debut of the teaser trailer and got up and left before the actual film they paid to see started.
In an age where movie studios drop teaser trailers out of nowhere that wind up being dissected by the internet within seconds, the tantalizing tease of the literal return of Star Wars could only be watched at your local multiplex.
Of course, the second the John Williams fanfare blared through the THX speakers and people saw exactly what series mastermind George Lucas had in store, it sent a permanent fissure through pop culture that still sends minor shockwaves through people’s lunchtime conversations and Twitter back-and-forths. All these years later, the film remains wildly divisive. Either you love it, you loathe it or you fast-forward through the Trade Federation negotiations and the Jar Jar Binks-as-Buster Keaton slapstick routines to get to the podracing and the lightsaber battles.
If you loved it, you either bought into the radical departure from the original trilogy and ate up the high-society melodrama and the old Hollywood tonal mash-up of Cecil B. DeMille, William Wyler, Akira Kurosawa and Ray Harryhausen, or you were probably about seven or eight, clutching your Pizza Hut tie-in toy and absolutely in awe that this is what Star Wars looked like during the pinnacle of your childhood.
If you hated it, you either felt Lucas was well out of his range to so aggressively mount such a stodgy spectacle built on the back of thick discussions of galactic taxes, democratic failures and erosions of bureaucratic safeguards to protect from tyranny. You hated the pandering to younger audiences, you felt the dialogue was rancid, you abhorred the mysticism being translated into trackable science and the visions from your childhood of what Star Wars might look like one day got “Yippee’d” to smithereens by clumsy Gungans and Eopie farts.
The Star Wars prequels that followed, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, curried roughly the same levels of reactions, varying to the stilted romance of Anakin and Padmé in Episode II to the unreal depths of darkness from Order 66 during Episode III. Trying to find common ground on these films has proven fruitless over the years.
For better or for worse, the prequels were not your daddy’s Star Wars, and the generational clash between “This ruined my childhood!” and “This IS my childhood!” continues to rage on with every Dave Filoni animated series about the Clone Wars to every YouTube film scholar breaking down the mechanics of why this decision works and why this one doesn’t.
Twenty-five years later, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace remains a cultural lightning rod for debate and still brings people into the movie theaters to see it. After being re-released by Lucasfilm for its 25th anniversary, the film came in second at the domestic box office on the first weekend of what’s considered to be the summer months at the movies.
That proves decidedly that, even after sparking the most belabored debate in movie history, Episode I is never going to go away. It’s still one of the most important blockbusters we’ve ever gotten, responsible for so much of what we have now in Star Wars and in general media.
How has it aged? While some of it is a little silly and some of it is a little dry, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace remains thrilling and passionate, the singular vision of a filmmaker who wanted to give audiences something new and expand what these movies could be to a new generation.
It’s impeccably made and outrageously creative, still rousing a sense of awe and excitement once the podracers hit the gas and Williams’ goosebump-inducing “Duel of the Fates” hits the second Darth Maul makes his final entrance behind the palace doors on Naboo. The film is breathtaking and intensely personal in a way so many modern blockbusters are not. Maybe that’s why it plays even better than it did when it was released in May 1999.
However, that’s not exactly gospel among the millions of people who have seen the movie countless times, some of them cursing the ground it walks on and others annually firing it up for their birthdays. We’re never going to agree on this movie, but how fascinating that it remains ever-present in our culture all these years later. The Force is strong with this one, even if you disagree.