I had a 20+ year
love affair with Star Wars. It was very loving and stimulated my mind
and imagination to great heights. But like all love affairs, it ended
in betrayal, then hate, and then complete indifference.
Indifference,
not suffering. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Yoda!
Not
long after I graduated high school, I moved to a different city and
into a place in the middle of nowhere. I didn't know anybody, so I
found myself spending my nights alone. I was very poor thanks to a
crummy job, so I couldn't afford much in the way of entertainment
besides what few possessions I had rammed into my car when I moved. Most important of
these possessions was a small 13” TV, a VCR, and my VHS copies of
the original Star Wars trilogy that I had recorded off NBC in the
early 1990s. As a kid I loved Star Wars like most children of the era
and I always considered them the best movies ever growing up, but I
wasn't what you'd call a mega fan. But now as a lonely and
bored teenager with nothing better to do, I became one. I watched the
trilogy almost every single night, falling in love with the franchise
all over again and finding all new ways to appreciate it.
The months went on and I finally got a good job, made friends, and found a much better place in town. I didn't watch the movies much anymore because I finally had a life, but my Star Wars fandom was still growing due to the fact it was 1998 and the Prequels were nearly on the horizon. Never in my entire life have I been as captivated by any single piece of pop culture than I was Episode I. I scoured every fan website, every forum, every magazine, every toy, whatever I could find to discover the latest bit of information. Every day that we got closer to May 19, 1999 my excitement just kept rising.
By the time the
date FINALLY rolled out, I was rabid foaming at the mouth ready. My
friends and I stood in line for about 13 hours at the the theater, we
were pretty hardcore Star Wars nerds but even WE weren't insane
enough to stand in line for weeks. It was jolly good
fun, we met a lot of the like-minded people in line and had a blast,
so the time just flew by. Midnight finally rolled around, and when
the theater opened the doors for us we let out one of the loudest
cheers I've ever heard. We
took our seats, endured all the commercials and trailers that seemed
to last an eternity, and then the LucasFilm Ltd. logo popped up to an
even louder applause than when the doors were opened.
I honestly don't think anyone even read the infamous opening crawl with its taxation nonsense, because everyone in the theater was too giddy to notice any issues... at first. I'm not going to lie and say everyone turned on this movie, because there was certainly a lot of applause at the end but it was NOWHERE near as loud as when the movie began. The Tatooine section is where the film definitely started losing some people, including myself and my friends. You could hear groans and moans and scoffs the loudest during these scenes, personally this movie started losing me when Qui-Gon grabbed Jar Jar's tongue and totally lost me when Shmi revealed Anakin was Jesus.
I didn't even need
days of reflection for it to sink in, by the time they got to
Coruscant it'd already hit me: this movie was horrible. When Qui-Gon
explained midi-chlorians I really wanted to leave. It was like
watching your favourite painting getting pissed on by a drunk frat
boy. My friends and I sat out the rest of the movie in a
somewhat stunned silence, none of this seemed possible. I certainly
didn't want to believe it, over the course of the summer I'd see the
movie five more times to try to break my state of denial.
There was NO WAY a Star Wars movie could be bad, it had to be me. I saw it with different people, I saw it alone, I saw it sober, I saw it under the influence... one of these times this movie HAD to be good and I'd realize I was just missing the key component to made it so. The state of denial I was in was unbelievably epic. But that magic moment never happened, things never clicked into place for me and the movie remained terrible. And now that the cracks were in the foundation, I went back to the original trilogy. My NBC dubs had long since died so all I had was the Special Edition VHS Boxset they put out with all the additions that George Lucas thought would “improve” the movies.
With the exception of how gorgeous Cloud City looked with windows, they didn't improve the movies at all. Lucas had hurt three of the most classic movies of all time with pointless CGI add ons and bizarre slapstick comedy... just like most of Episode I. It was at this point I began realizing Lucas wasn't the greatest filmmaker of all time. Howard The Duck probably should have been my first clue.
While he
undeniably is a film genius, the original trilogy wasn't just all
him. It was a collective output of creative minds coming together, a
committee able to overrule bad ideas and streamline out questionable
ones. I've always liked this very telling quote from former LucasFilm
producer Rick McCallum, as it really gives the impression Lucas is
not down with this line of thinking:
"And one
of the great things about doing the Special Editions was we were able
to go back and do the original Star Wars: A New Hope exactly the way
George wanted it. The way he had written it. Whether people liked it,
it didn't matter, it was his movie and he couldn't make it when he
first made it because there were so many compromises he had to go
through.”
I didn't want to completely destroy all the happy memories I had of these movies that'd kept me so entertained at a time when I needed it the most, so I “retired” them so to speak. I was done with Star Wars, I'd just let it live on in my memories the way it should be. I've never seen the Phantom Menace since. I've seen all the parodies and the famous Red Letter Media review, but not the actual movie since 1999. I never bothered to see Attack of the Clones in theater, and couldn't even finish watching it when it hit DVD. I did see Revenge of the Sith in the theater but I'm pretty sure I slept through part of it. I don't think I've seen the original trilogy in almost a decade.
Enough with the backstory, let's celebrate the Fifteenth Anniversary of this movie with A Ghoul Versus Star Wars Episode I: A Phantom Menace. Has fifteen years softened my views on this film or will I hate it more? I don't know about you, but I'm actually pretty excited to find out! By the way, I'll be asking a metric ton of questions in this review, almost all of which I'm sure have been answered in the Expanded Universe. Despite being a way too obsessed Star Wars fan back in the day, I've never had anything to do with that realm: if Lucas didn't write it or it wasn't printed on the packaging for one of the toys, it never happened as far as I'm concerned.
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