In NBC’s tremendous-if-uneven sitcom “Community,” there is an episode wherein a neurotic film student named Abed Nadir suffers a temporary psychotic break after he enrolls in a two-day community college course called “Nicolas Cage: good or bad?” and attempts to provide the definitive answer by watching all of the actor’s movies nonstop over the course of a weekend. Ultimately, Abed learns a simple lesson about art and life, about how most things can’t just be classified as one thing or another and how complexity can render competing assessments accurate, if not dispositive. “And that’s why critics can call [Cage] a genius or an idiot and be right no matter what,” Abed concludes.
I was reminded of this lesson, and Abed’s brief descent into madness, while revisiting “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,” which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. Much like Cage, “The Phantom Menace” represents something of an enigma. It’s the movie that introduced a new generation to “Star Wars” fandom or it’s the movie that ruined the childhood fandom of its first generation, depending on whom you ask. It grossed over $1 billion worldwide but holds a dismal 54% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 51% on Metacritic. Like the other prequels, “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith,” no one is supposed to admit publicly that they like “The Phantom Menace,” yet it nevertheless boasts a huge number of fans and defenders.
To be sure, the movie itself is all over the place. On the one hand, “The Phantom Menace” is a fun kid’s movie, featuring poop jokes, a 10-year-old hero saving the day, and a CGI alien rabbit who talks funny, okieday. On the other, it’s a strikingly prescient story about an intergalactic trade dispute presaging the fall of a republic, featuring shadowy, corrupting political figures, a sclerotic senate, and stirring denunciations of bureaucracy.
[Opinion: Yes, there are ‘Phantom Menace’ fans. It’s all about when you came of age]
The simplistic script and earnest-yet-unserious tone clash constantly with the convoluted farrago of a story. Important details or causal explanations are waved away with perfunctory or nonsensical conclusions, resulting in statements such as what might be my favorite line in all of cinema: “A communications disruption can mean only one thing: invasion.” Only George Lucas could make the most-awaited blockbuster of all time into a vehicle to sell kids’ toys that also happens to be a space opera critique of the United Nations.
Yet, for many reasons, it’s also a film that lives outside of its 136-minute runtime. Your opinion of “The Phantom Menace” and the prequels generally has a great deal to do with how old you were when you first saw them, for instance. Like many other children of the ’90s, I was obsessed with “Star Wars” thanks to “Phantom Menace.” That’s got to count for something.
At some point, of course, the prequels’ myriad problems became apparent: midi-chlorians (space Calvinism), “I don’t like sand” (who does, though?), Jar Jar Binks, that Anakin wouldn’t have turned to the Dark Side if the Jedi Council had simply granted him the rank of master, and so on. But even now, the fact that they are, technically speaking, bad movies doesn’t stir in me the antipathy it would if I’d first seen them at a later age or after falling in love with the original trilogy previously. Rewatching “The Phantom Menace” with amicable detachment allows you to enjoy the fun absurdity of the movie itself. Podracing can still be awesome, even if the reasons for going to Tatooine are murky at best and the reasons for relying on said race to move the plot forward completely unintelligible.
[Also read: What Trump’s enemies could learn from ‘Star Wars’]
Popular perception of the prequels has even begun to reflect these perplexing contradictions. In part, this is due to fan displeasure with Disney’s sequel movies, “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi.” But newfound appreciation for the much-maligned trilogy has come in greater measure thanks to a change in the meta-textual orientation among online fans.
RedLetterMedia’s viral, scathing, feature-length reviews typify popular attitude in the years after the prequel trilogy’s close: harsh, angry, unforgiving. Now, however, memes and in-jokes have displaced longform commentary, and ironic enjoyment rivals critical cynicism in the firmament. This mien — very millennial, very online — is best represented by the wildly popular subreddit forum r/PrequelMemes, which finds in the prequels’ foibles, campy dialogue, and incoherent logic something to be joked about but not upset over, lampooned but not cut down. These movies might be bad, it says, but they’re ours.
And for better or worse, we are still living in the world “The Phantom Menace” built. As Justin Charity wrote in March for the Ringer, “The Phantom Menace inaugurated peak fandom — a century so far defined by maximum serialization … George Lucas taught everyone else how to make movies, and how to watch movies, in the age of sprawling blockbuster fandom.” Far from destroying “Star Wars,” “The Phantom Menace” launched the property into the 21st century, providing a visual and technical spectacle, pairing slapstick with heady stakes, and drawing moviegoers — young and old, disgruntled and awed — back to the metroplex for more.
On May 19, 1999, “The Phantom Menace” opened to mixed reviews, delighted some fans and enraged others, and made a boatload of money. Twenty years on, not much has changed.
J. Grant Addison is deputy editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
