The letdown was immediate and unmistakable.
In May of 1999, my friends and I had scored radio-station tickets to a preview screening of “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,” and the Force of anticipation was strong. The room was packed with costumed fans, who cheered for the Lucasfilm logo and that famous title card: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”
Cue the John Williams fanfare and the text crawl outlining the dramatic stakes: “Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.” Nervous chatter broke out: What’s all this about taxes? Give us space battles!
The grumbling boiled over into mutiny when Jar Jar Binks first appeared, and by the end, the floor was littered with discarded plastic light-sabers, a tidy metaphor for the crushed dreams of a generation that grew up loving George Lucas’ original trilogy.
But am I remembering this correctly? Or has the narrative about the “Phantom Menace” backlash eclipsed my recollection of what really happened, which is that a bunch of fans simply trudged out of the theater, silently disappointed?
Either way, it did not take long for a consensus to develop. “Episode I” — the first film in a prequel trilogy about the boy who became Darth Vader — was bad. “Episode II — Attack of the Clones,” while not burdened with similar expectations, was somehow worse. “Episode III — Revenge of the Sith,” as a bridge to the original trilogy, was marginally better but still not good.
The prequels, entirely written and directed by Lucas, were characterized by cringey dialogue, half-realized CGI and alien characters that felt like racist caricatures. The films’ many moments of unintentional hilarity have blessed the internet with plentiful memes. (“I don’t like sand…”, etc.)
But over the years, the backlash subsided to the point where the prequel trilogy is now oddly beloved. “Phantom Menace” is the most-watched “Star Wars” movie on Disney+, according to a recent Variety report.
The website Inverse earlier this month published an affectionate series of articles celebrating the legacy of the prequels, specifically “Phantom Menace,” which briefly returned to theaters in May to mark the 25th anniversary of its original release.
And fans who were either not alive when the prequels came out, or were too young to understand why they weren’t supposed to like the movies, generated enough enthusiasm to convince Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christiansen to reprise their roles as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker in the revival series “Obi-Wan.”
The movies’ rehabilitation says less about the actual art than the marketplace they helped create. Backlash or not, Lucas’ films were hits, and they ushered in an era of endless franchise reboots, generic blockbuster sequels, compulsory fantasy/comic retreads and stories that never end as long as there is money to be made.
Lucas in 2012 sold the “Star Wars” brand to Disney, which has saturated that marketplace with more than a dozen animated and live-action streaming series, a divisive sequel trilogy and a pair of standalone films with plenty more in development.
The quality has varied so widely that the prequels might no longer seem uniquely bad, even for older fans. By now, the loudest haters have experienced so many additional cycles of manufactured excitement and disappointment that it’s hard to get worked up about three goofy space-laser movies.
Part of me feels like saluting “Phantom Menace” purely for puncturing the collective illusion that fans were owed, in exchange for their fevered, toxic devotion, a movie that lived up to a list of expectations no single cultural product could ever hope to fulfill.
But seeming less bad in hindsight is not the same as being actually good. As I learned during a halfhearted rewatch, history has not made Jar Jar Binks less repulsive, or the green-screen acting any less wooden, or the romance between Anakin and Padme (Natalie Portman) any less painful to watch.
Lucas, whatever his shortcomings as a director and writer, pursued a singular vision with an auteurist mania that is hard not to admire. It’s just too bad about the movies themselves, which are still about as pleasant as unwanted sand: coarse and rough and irritating.