Twisted Spinster

Well, actually, I just turned it off — the Spike channel was showing Star Wars: the Phantom Menace — aka “Episode I,” and I watched most of it until I got bored — the Big Boring Speech scenes between the Queen and the Senate is where I always zone out. I remember what happens more or less at the end anyway, and the movie isn’t so good that I feel like wading through the aforementioned BBS just to get to the ending scenes of the dispatch of various uninteresting characters. Alas Liam Neeson plays one of those, the dullest ninja-samurai ever filmed, or at least ever in any movie with a ninja-samurai character that I’ve seen. But much worse than his character — in fact, much worse, I have now decided, than the misbegotten “comic relief” CGI creation Jar Jar Binks — is the complete nonentity playing the young Anakin. Movie history is replete with talentless child actors, and Jake Lloyd is up there in the stratosphere of complete lack of charisma or acting ability.

I haven’t seen the other two “prequels” (since Spike is showing them this weekend I guess I’ll watch and remedy that lack, or maybe I’ll just clean that tile grout in the bathroom…) I don’t know if those movies contain the standard Sports Scene that this one has — the pod race. For some reason most children-aimed adventure films have scenes where the heroes have to engage in some sort of sports activity — for example, the quidditch games in the Harry Potter films. I mostly find these scenes boring, because I am, to put it mildly, not interesting in sports. However, they can be made to be part of the story, which for the most part the quidditch games are (there’s almost always some nefarious magical activity going on that will tie in later). Or they can just seem tacked on as if the script writers needed some way to get the plot moving and the characters out of their current environment so they came up with this scenario — the unlikely stranding of a queen of a space empire (well, a “republic,” as if something with a hereditary ruler can be called a “republic” — I guess it can in Hollywood!) on a remote planet, the even more unlikely circumstance of there being no way for this monarch to be able to persuade the locals to fix her ship, so that the space knights protecting her must resort to some weird local sports ritual to “raise money” to buy the necessary parts to repair her ship, etc. Anyway, the whole thing seems written as if whoever was in charge said “we need something to get the kids’ attention — all this politics stuff is boring! Got it — a car race! Write it in — give it some sort of reason and make it science-fictiony with aliens and things!”

Then there is the CGI. The movie was made — or released, I never remember what the date the TV Guide shows means — in 1999, which means the CGI or whatever they were calling it back then is nearly ten years old. My, what a difference time makes — the alien creatures and scenes all look so fake now. Well, Jar Jar always looked fake, but that was a flaw in the character’s conception.

One more thing: most of the characters are standard adventure drama clichéd nonentities, and the actors play their parts stiffly, as if they didn’t believe in their parts. Oddly enough the acting in the first three Star Wars movies (the so-called “sequels” that featured Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and the rest) was much more naturalistic and believable, so I blame it on a failure of direction.