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1. #Star wars episode i the phantom menace stream online movie#
2. #Star wars episode i the phantom menace stream online full#

Indeed, the film’s extended sojourn on Tatooine mostly serves to set up Anakin’s pod race, which may thrill younger viewers who haven’t grown tired of Lucas’s careening point-of-view shots, but doesn’t really advance the story. We’re told she and Anakin are passionately attached (and it’s hinted that his love for his mother will be his downfall), but their scenes together are bland and generic and she surrenders him to Qui-Gon without a murmur. Another is Pernilla August as Anakin’s mother. As Obi-Wan Ewan McGregor is one of several outstanding actors given virtually nothing to do. But we learn nothing about his life, and his relationship with Obi-Wan adds up to little more than a lot of graceful tandem swordplay. Qui-Gon Jinn is arguably the central character, with Liam Neeson supplying the requisite combination of Zen gnosticism and kung-fu athleticism. Logically, this wants to be the story of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s early relationship with Anakin Skywalker (soon to become Darth Vader), but the two scarcely exchange a word until the movie’s final scenes.

#Star wars episode i the phantom menace stream online movie#

Lucas’s intrusive use of diagonal and horizontal optical wipes only reinforces the sense that this movie is all stitches and no fabric. You have to wonder whether he has spent so long in an alternative universe – both the one inside his own head and the one in Marin County – that he can’t tell the difference between a sensitive depiction of cultural difference and offensive stereotypes.īut the biggest problem with The Phantom Menace is it that lacks narrative coherence.

Of course I don’t believe Lucas has any consciously racist agenda what’s involved here are multiple failures of common sense, good taste and imagination. When you consider that the Trade Federation leaders speak in hackneyed Fu Manchu accents and the elephant-insect character who owns the slave Anakin Skywalker resembles a traditional caricature of the hook-nosed Jewish trader, the whole picture becomes much more disturbing. The Gunga character Jar Jar Binks, with his rubbery platypus face, joke-Caribbean accent and jive walk right out of a 70s blaxploitation movie (with bell-bottom trousers to match) may amuse small children, but many adults will find The Phantom Menace’s quasi-racial typing patronising at best. In a laboured quest to recapture some of the first trilogy’s (sorry, the second trilogy’s) humour, Lucas and his enormous team of collaborators have created many cartoonish new species. Compared with the visual wit and imagination of such 1990s science-fiction epics as The Matrix and Starship Troopers, The Phantom Menace’s aesthetic seems leaden and outdated. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) just because it can, not because it should. Naboo’s capital looks like the Babylon of D. The vast, ovoid interior of the Galactic Senate, with its regimented rows of desks curving away into infinity, is a splendid visual joke about the inefficacy of politics on a grand scale.īut Lucas’s imagery often seems rooted in nothing particular. The great battle between the benevolent, amphibious Gunga and the Federation’s droids, lightly echoing the Agincourt scene from Olivier’s Henry V (1944), is marvellous to behold in a Jurassic Park way. Lucas has never been much of a visual stylist (at least, not since the days of THX 1138, 1970), but the characteristic cleanliness and contrast of his compositions – the brilliant, antiseptic white of the storm troopers’ uniforms, the lustrous blue-black of Darth Vader’s helmet – have been abandoned here in favour of meaningless clutter.Ĭertainly some of this film’s grand set pieces are impressive. Even if this is deliberate, it doesn’t work – the excessively electric-blue skies and green fields of the planet Naboo may be meant to remind us that we are not on earth, but what they really make us aware of is that what we’re seeing isn’t real.

#Star wars episode i the phantom menace stream online full#

Every shot is such a complex technical achievement, so full of droids, aliens, spacecraft or gargantuan structures, that the movie itself takes on the hazy, ugly look of software. The Phantom Menace doesn’t have that problem precisely, but almost nothing in it is based on photographing actual human beings in their environments. It’s now possible for films to spend vast sums on effects and still look laughably cheap (see, for instance, The Mummy). In the last year or two, filmmakers have finally reached the point of diminishing returns with computer-generated effects. films/star-wars-episode-i-the-phantom-menace Distributor Twentieth Century Fox (now Disney)