I have seen Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace several times in the past month.
I’ve listened to Griffin & David’s phantom podcast, I’ve watched the RedLetterMedia Mr. Plinkett reviews, I’ve listened to the Chapo commentary track. I’ve heard every criticism of the film said in many different ways by many different people, and I still can’t stop watching Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace.
I recently watched a staged live reading of the script with esteemed actors such as Tony Hale and Haley Joel Osment (highly recommend this one btw)
Surely by now I should be tired of everything to do with Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, but no. Every time I watch the film I’m every bit in awe as I was when I watched it in theaters at the age of 6.
Every choice confounds me, every scene surprises me anew with its sheer ineptitude, every frame oozes incompetence. I should know the film by heart, but I never have any idea what’s coming next, it’s as if my memory is erased every time a new terrible scene begins.
As a species we have just barely begun to scratch the surface of what’s wrong with this movie. I don’t think we will ever come close to fully unpacking what George Lucas has done here.
Please, Lord forgive me for what I’m about to do, which is press “play” on Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. This is the last time, I promise. I just need to get this out of my system and then I’ll be done forever. I can stop anytime…
oh god, oh fuck I’ve had the film playing on a loop for the past 48 hours. I can’t tear my eyes away, I haven’t eaten or slept, all I can do is watch Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, wallowing in my own filth until I inevitably die of exhaustion like in Infinite Jest. These are the last words I will ever hear:
Mesa caused mabbe one, two-y lettle bitty axadentes, huh? Yud-say boom da gassar, den crashin der boss’s heyblibber, den banished
— Jar Jar Binks
wait no, I’ve seen the light, I know how to break free, how to escape this endless nightmare. I’m going to watch Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones
Auteur theory, but it’s all the people around the auteur reigning in the extraordinarily stupid ideas (Marcia Lucas in this case) that make the great media.
It was much the same with Star Trek. When Gene Roddenberry stayed in his producer lane in TOS and don’t have the personal fame and influence that came later, he was able to gather an amazing group of people to make some great high-concept sci-fi. There’s a reason that the venn diagram of “worst TOS episodes” and “Gene Roddenberry decided to try writing” is almost a circle.
But his personal fame grew, he had less and less people around him to rein in his worst ideas, and the result was TNG seasons 1 and 2. It wasn’t until he was too ill to micromanage that TNG found its feet instead of being TOS with find-and-replace’d names in the scripts.