Hate

I Hated Episode One

I'll admit it; I'm a cheap sci-fi cinema tart. A floozy who expects every bozo who puts down a few bucks to be Prince Charming, and then winds up groaning at my own naiveti in the middle of the night as I walk through the parking lot, away from some flea-bitten no-tell motel of a theater where some sweaty jerk of a producer has had his way with my wallet for a couple of hours. I guess I just assume that when someone has a gargantuan budget to spend on megastar casting, computer-animated effects and a media barrage that sends its competition scurrying into foxholes faster than Frenchies at Verdun, I expect them to have spent more than the price of a cheeseburger on a scriptwriter, and to have lined up an actual plot.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace started off with some modest promise. The opening scenes revolved around a good old-fashioned God-Bless-America tax revolt, in which a bunch of pissed-off Nabooians had decided not to shell out their hard-stolen moolah to a swollen intergalactic bureaucracy (the Trade Federation), and had been blockaded as a result. Then, unfortunately, I found out the tax-dodgers were actually spoiled aristocrats living in ostentatious architectural splendor, and the film went downhill from there.

Once the terminally overdressed Queen Amidala had been deservedly vanquished, and it looked like she was going to have to start buying her dresses off the rack, she retaliated, with the Jedi's help, by launching every hackneyed plot and marketing device in the Hollywood bag of tricks to re-establish their place at the cash-cow teat. Lucas began by introducing the cliched funny-man, Jar Jar Binks. A staple of poorly written sci-fi and action films, this role is usually filled by a clutzy, wise-talking black man (generally an actor such as Eddie Murphy, who somehow feels the cash offered by producers compensates for the degradation), who capers, stumbles, clowns, cowers and jive-talks his way through the film, inspiring violent urges in this particular audience member. In this case, our bumbler is a computer-generated Rastafarian Bugs Bunny, and from the moment he appeared, I began bargaining with God for his immediate and terrible death at the hands of whatever malevolent power the scriptwriter could provide. My prayers were to no avail, of course; I must not be in good standing with the Man Upstairs, because before I knew it, an entire race of amphibian Rasta rabbits came rising from the swamps with their bell-bottom pants and funkadelic strut intact, to do battle with the white-devil Babylonian robots of the Federation.

Later, of course, our heroes further punished the audience by revisiting the worst plot element of the last two Star Wars films: Lucas's inexplicable need to have every character somehow related to Darth Vader. In this case, we are suddenly ashamed to discover that the 9-year-old soon-to-be Lord of the Dark Side is not only responsible for siring Luke and Leia (a relationship that causes attraction in the first film to inspire queasiness,) but now has also cobbled C-3PO together out of some old transistor radios and tinfoil Swanson's TV dinner packages. Does this mean that the annoying droid gets to claim some kinship with the Skywalker twins as well?

Well, I for one have had enough. As the underdeveloped Darth Maul plunged his lightsaber through Jedi Qui-Gon Jinn's heart, I began to feel a distinct envy of Qui-Gon's quick and painless end. He alone no longer has to bear witness to the continual degradation of the archetypal first Star Wars film that inspired me as a child. He was finished off before he had to discover that he too is a child of Darth Vader, or had to wear a gold bikini, or had to dance with singing midgets in teddy-bear suits. The rest of us, well, we have to live with the continual mangling and the marketing that was spawned from that first box-office tidal wave twenty years ago, and entertain all its malformed children.

Kerry Delf, a senior majoring in Film Criticism, is an Associate Editor for the Oregon Commentator