STAR WARS AND ITS CRITICS

The film has dominated conversation for months before its release, despite the fact that nobody knew much about it. (You might say The Phantom Menace is the George W. Bush of motion pictures.) Editors and reporters have endlessly sought new angles on the phenomenon while laboring entirely in the dark about it. My own newspaper, the New York Post, began publishing a story a day on the movie six weeks before its premiere, as did USA Today. You can’t count the number of magazines that have put the movie on their covers. We all assumed that readers just can’t get enough of the subject.

But hype is a dangerous business, particularly when it comes to movies nobody has seen. Last year, entertainment journalists went nuts over Godzilla until two weeks before its release. The cognoscenti assumed that this post-Furassic Park dinosaurfest would topple all box-office records — until somebody finally saw the thing about ten days before its release and discovered that it was a colossal misfire. Critics and their bosses felt they had all been had, and so they took out after Godzilla with a gleeful vengeance. By the time the first weekend was over, journalists had made sure that residents of the United States would stay away from Godzilla in droves.

But Star Wars isn’t Godzilla. There has never, in the annals of entertainment, been a money-making machine with the staying power of this one, which began with the release of the original Star Wars in 1977 and was followed by The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and Return of the Fedi in 1983. By some reckonings, series creator George Lucas has made $ 2 billion — for himself, alone — on the three movies, their video release, and his assorted licensing deals. When the films were released in 1997 (with a few extra minutes of new footage) after being absent from theaters for fourteen years, they made more than $ 400 million at the box-office worldwide. It was a commercial triumph that made it clear just how enduring the Star Wars myth was and fueled the enormous hype for The Phantom Menace two years later.

Nothing could have lived up to these expectations, and The Phantom Menace doesn’t. But it’s still a very good movie, lovely to look at, with an interesting and complicated story line. The film begins forty years before the first Star Wars. A peaceful planet ruled by a teenage queen is under pointless and savage military assault by evil members of the Trade Federation. (Yes, it appears George Lucas is a NAFTA supporter.) The Galactic Senate should be putting a stop to this war, but the Senate has become a do-nothing body full of endless and pointless debate. (Yes, it appears George Lucas supports term limits.)

So the president of the Galactic Republic sends two emissaries to find out what’s going on. These emissaries are Jedi knights, those mystical and powerful folks who know everything about the Force (of “May the Force be with you” fame). One of them is the young Obi-Wan Kenobi (who, as a much older man played by Alec Guinness, trains Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars).

The Jedi knights save the teenage queen and fly away. Forced to land on a desert planet, they encounter a nine-year-old slave boy named Anakin Skywalker. The Jedi knights realize the Force is with this kid like nobody’s business, and they bring the boy away with them. But the head Jedi knights don’t want anything to do with him. Anyone familiar with the plot of the first three Star Wars movies knows that Anakin is Luke Skywalker’s father — and that sometime in the future he will be seduced by the Dark Side of the Force and become the evil Darth Vader, villain of the original trilogy.

There’s a whole other plot in the film as well, about a very suspicious senator named Palpatine and a bad guy name Darth Maul who are trying to destroy the Galactic Republic from within, and a bunch of lizard people with Jamaican accents who live in an underwater city, and . . .

The naysayers are right in part: The characters aren’t all that interesting, and The Phantom Menace lacks the first movie’s dazzling series of mini-climaxes — in part because the first movie used special effects in a new way: Moviegoers were seeing things in 1977 that they’d never seen before. Two decades later, we’re so used to being dazzled by those special effects, we take them for granted, even though The Phantom Menace has more of them and uses them more creatively than any movie before it.

But the film is more than just the sum of its special effects, and I think it will strike a real chord with audiences for the same reason that its predecessors did: It is earnest, well-meaning, and delightfully free of irony. (Actually, only the first two movies really struck a chord; everyone I’ve ever met agrees that Return of the Fedi was a major stinker.) The jokes in Phantom Menace are broad and childish in a way that may displease sophisticates but will be endearing to everyone else. The comic relief comes from a mush-mouthed alien named Jar Jar Binks who will drive movie critics insane but will delight every ten-year-old in the world. And the cosmology is very simple. The Jedi knights are good. Guys with horns on their heads are bad. And an eversmiling politician is the incarnation of all evil.

What was so disarming about the original Star Wars was the absence of cynicism or camp. Coming out in 1977, after years of bitter American movies with unhappy endings in which the bad guys triumphed and the good guys slunk away in defeat, Star Wars sounded an entirely uncharacteristic note of optimism and good cheer. It was a remarkably nice movie, and it made audiences feel so good that they returned over and over again just to try to recapture the experience. A nation traumatized by the loss in Vietnam could celebrate as two American proto types — the gee-whiz good guy Luke and the hard-bitten romantic Han Solo — blew up the bad guys.

Star Wars was an unabashed tribute to 1930s science-fiction serials and flying-ace pictures like 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings. It didn’t make fun of its antecedents, but borrowed their solemnity and their devil-may-care playfulness. “You can learn from cynicism, but you can’t build on it,” Lucas told the Los Angeles Times in 1973 about his other triumphant film, American Graffiti, which also paid affectionate tribute to an American ideal that had become distasteful to the other young turks of Young Hollywood.

American Graffiti, which cost $ 750,000 to make and has earned about $ 100 million, remains (on a dollar-for-dollar basis) the single most successful movie ever made. Lucas came of age at a time when moviemakers thought they were supposed to use their ill-gotten capitalist gains to show Americans what a cesspool of corruption their nation really was.

But his films changed the face of American movies by delivering to Hollywood a lesson as simple and seductive as “May the Force be with you”: If you make a movie that pleases audiences — instead of trying to confront them with the horrors of their capitalist, bourgeois, phony existence — the public will make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

Post-Star Wars American cinema has been pretty dreadful. The truth is that the years in which the America-is-acesspool philosophy dominated Hollywood were among the best in the history of movies. But Lucas can’t be held responsible for the way Hollywood made cynical use of his own defiant unwillingness to surrender to cynicism.

In The Phantom Menace, the only movie he’s actually directed since Star Wars (two hacks made the other two films in the series), Lucas shows he still believes in good guys and bad guys, in right and wrong, in the Force and the Dark Side — and if that’s even more unfashionable today than in 1977, so be it; it still makes for a surprising and refreshing evening at the movies.

A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz is the editorial-page editor of the New York Post.