Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
Directed by George Lucas
Anakin Skywalker, a young slave strong with the Force, is discovered on Tatooine. Meanwhile, the evil Sith have returned, enacting their plot for revenge against the Jedi.
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What critics say influenced Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
Director
George Lucas
Critics compare Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace to 3 of Lucas’s own films.
It has been 22 years since George Lucas directed his last film, “Star Wars,” the groundbreaking powerhouse that launched the series and became the second most successful film of all time (eclipsed only by “Titanic”).
The adrenalized pod race recalls Lucas’ ‘American Graffiti” in outer space; an underwater sequence highlighted by the line ‘there’s always a bigger fish” wonderfully weds live action and computer artistry.
But in terms of visual sophistication, already discernible in 1973's American Graffiti, Lucas ranks with the masters.
He’d previously made only small, personal films (THX 1138 and American Graffiti) and was allied with Francis Coppola, who seemed at the time to be a rebel shaking the film industry from within.
The movie's highlight, a rip-roaring "pod race," works because Lucas the American Graffiti gearhead knows his car culture: The recreation of track details, from pit crew to announcers, is affectionate and funny.
He’d previously made only small, personal films (THX 1138 and American Graffiti) and was allied with Francis Coppola, who seemed at the time to be a rebel shaking the film industry from within.
The difference is that THX 1138, Lucas' 1971 debut, was meant as a warning call, a vision of the world we could expect if we allowed hardware to govern the heart.
The galactic capital planet-city Coruscant, a classic fantasy cityscape vision recalling every sci-fi skyline from the silent classic Metropolis to Blade Runner to The Fifth Element, yet somehow for the first time delivering something that was only promised in those earlier films.
When I made my mom take me to see Blade Runner in 1982 because the guy who played Han Solo and Indiana Jones was in it, I learned that movies could also be dark, ambiguous things.
One has to reach all the way back to Gone With the Wind to remember a movie that was so fervently portrayed as a National Event in the months leading up to its release—and even at that, of course, today's media outstrips in size, variety, and omnipresence the newspapers and newsreels that tracked Scarlett & Co. through their own months of filming.
With ripping action, oddball aliens and three times the digital effects of any previous movie, The Phantom Menace generally lives up to the most eager anticipation of any movie since Gone With the Wind .
It's hard to forget the summer of 1999, when the film entered theaters on the heels of quite probably the most hype that any movie had enjoyed since Gone with the Wind 60 years earlier, and having the profoundly deflating experience of that opening title crawl: "Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic.
The Saragossa Manuscript, directed by Wojciech Has from Jan Potocki's episodic early-19th-century novel, is part Alice in Wonderland, part Arabian Nights.
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When Qui-Jon and Obi-Wan visit Anakin's mother, learn about the remarkable circumstances surrounding the boy's birth, and ask her permission to take her son from slavery on Tatooine to a life as an apprentice Jedi knight, the moment seems to echo, intentionally or not, "Citizen Kane."
As Roger Ebert said in his review of the original "Star Wars," the film was a technical watershed like "Birth of a Nation" and "Citizen Kane" that influenced many movies that came thereafter.
THINK OF IT THE SAME WAY AS YOU THOUGHT OF THE ORIGINAL STAR WARS, OR EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, OR RETURN OF THE JEDI; SURE THE ALIENS LOOKED LIKED MUPPETS, BUT YOU NEVER SAW MUPPETS THAT LOOKED THAT COOL BEFORE!
But perhaps even more importantly, Star Wars, and then The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, with their epic stories of heroes fighting the good fight, started me on my way to becoming an idealist, a romantic.
But what truly sets "Empire" apart from more recent genre plods like "The Mummy" and "The Phantom Menace" is the sheer strength of the relationships between the characters.
Its title, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, led to a reassessment as to what the original three films should be called.
The only way I can wrap my head around why the diabolical Trade Organization sounds like stereotypical Chinese gangsters or why the Gungans sound like blackface actors from the early 20th century or why Watto the slave-owning mechanic was imported straight out of a Lawrence of Arabia Middle East, is that Lucas wanted to differentiate his alien creatures with voices that were recognizable, but removed from modern society.
Natalie Portman, who was amazing in "The Professional" (1994) and did a star turn last year on Broadway in "The Diary of Anne Frank," is almost intriguing here as Queen Amidala of the planet Naboo, with her white-and-red pancake makeup and enormous royal beehive 'do.
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The ’70s sci-fi adventure was a boy’s fantasy movie junkyard, with spare parts rifled from ‘Flash Gordon,” WWII aerial combat footage and ‘Triumph of the Will.”
The galactic capital planet-city Coruscant, a classic fantasy cityscape vision recalling every sci-fi skyline from the silent classic Metropolis to Blade Runner to The Fifth Element, yet somehow for the first time delivering something that was only promised in those earlier films.
Jar Jar is an unwelcome meld of the dredloc'd Weequay that guard Jabba's skiffs in Jedi; of Ruby Rhod, the frenetic, jive-talkin' headache inducer played by Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element ; and the improbably futzy assassin "embodied" by Jamie Lee Curtis in James Cameron's True Lies.
Many of the techniques seen here were first put to stunning use in Luc Besson's The Fifth Element , which offered up similar vistas of sky-scraping, traffic-clogged metropolises and used the same strategy to animate the features on its rubber-masked aliens.
More than half the speaking roles go to a Lewis Carroll/Jim Henson menagerie of gimmicky, computer-generated creatures -- the most annoying of which is a Gungan named Jar Jar Binks, a plush toy-conscious, CGI sidekick who is almost as grating as Chris Tucker's extra-femme DJ in "The Fifth Element."
The film is mostly a chase and mostly comic, whose visual beauty and spectacle almost overshadow the film´s characters in the manner of "The Phantom Menace."