FLUXEUROPA: PHANTOM MENACE

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STAR WARS: EPISODE I - THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999)

Directed by George Lucas

Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd I, Ian McDiarmid, Pernilla August, Oliver Ford Davies, Hugh Quarshie, Ahmed Best, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker I, Frank Oz, Terence Stamp, Brian Blessed, Andrew Secombe etc

Although essentially 1950s pulp SciFi of the Jack Williamson/E.E.'Doc' Smith genre, Star Wars is actually a rather good and exciting piece of cinema. The arcade game pop-up-n-shoot and space-battle scenes were competent as expected, but the special effects used to depict the aliens are a quantum leap ahead of the old 70s Star Wars trilogy. The aliens are no longer men in rubber suits, but computer images à la Jurassic Park. There are also interesting undertones such as the neo-Wagnerian background music whenever 'The Force' is invoked (which is very similar to the Nothung sword motif in the Ring), and the inherent elitism of the Jedi Knights.

The landscapes and cities are also really good. The Galactic capital planet, a planetary megalopolis, is obviously taken from Trantor in Asimov's Foundation trilogy, and looks like an idealised, extrapolated Manhattan on a giant scale. Most of the audience will spot this, but I wonder how many realised that the rather magnificent and architecturally impressive capital of the planet Naidoo is the result of the same hypertrophy applied to 6th Century Byzantine Constantinople, complete with a ginormous neo-Hagia Sophia which even has the blue roof domes characteristic of Greek churches to this day.

US SF film makers have usually resorted to one of a very few clichés in depicting future metropoli - either super-New York skylines with spires and monorails thrown in or Parthenon-clone pastiche pseudoclassicism. Creating a city which looks as if it really was created by a distinct culture, and one which actually appears rather splendid, is an unexpected cinematic achievement, even if, of course, they had to go to an actual historical culture/architecture for inspiration.

Unlike most SF films, the plot is no worse than many a 'classic' 1950s SF story. In fact in places it is in danger of becoming quite clever. There is at least one cunning Byzantine political plot and a fairly credible attempt at depicting a society in a world-historical 'Seldon Crisis', a combination of the plight of the late Roman Republic with ambitious magnates increasingly overriding the Senate, the ossified bureaucracy of the kind that afflicted China and Byzantium, and greedy capitalist combines (whose leaders look like something out of 15th Century Florence).

The heroine is effectively portrayed as an hereditary monarch while being described as "the elected Queen". This is a particularly feeble nod at Americanist ideology - even in America 14-year-old girls are not elected queen of anything more significant than a carnival procession.

The fact that this film is set 30 years before the 1977 Star Wars and must "join up" plotwise is used to dramatic effect rather well, with characters making decisions whose ultimate effect, not at all what they intended, SW aficionados in the audience will know as the characters don't.

BOB CARRICK - 9 November 1999