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Return to The Phantom Menace
Last year I was surprised yet pleased to be offered one more chance to see Return of the Jedi at the movies for its fortieth anniversary. Closing out my post about that, though, I mentioned having “ambiguous thoughts” about just what future anniversaries of different Star Wars movies seemed more likely to be marked in the same way, given four of them paired up when counting anniversaries divisible by five. There was one more movie I didn’t mention at all.
It was therefore a bigger surprise this year to see news of a twenty-fifth anniversary theatrical re-release of The Phantom Menace, upending my lazy and perhaps self-satisfied suppositions. Certain awarenesses of references in certain of the streaming shows I don’t watch aside, things did appear to have come that much further since the twentieth anniversary of the movie, when the “Disney Space Movies” remained focused on one last fling at their new era. At the same time, I suppose I was thinking even further back to the “3D re-release” early in 2012. I’m afraid the gloomy suspicion any proof one way or another would be entangled with general putdowns keeps me from confirming old, vague impressions of comments about that re-release not doing well at the box office. It’s a little too easy to then imagine George Lucas realising the smirkingly dismissive were at that point controlling the narrative, that he’d become a liability, and that he’d have to either wind down his over-extended company as he’d had to do once before in the mid-1980s or sell it a bigger company. Whether the re-release was in fact proof he’d been thinking ahead to turning ideas popping into his head while collaborating on the Clone Wars computer-animated series into further movies unconstrained by a timeline rather than just “coming up with an outline as an unnecessary deal-sweetener” (something proposed by those intent on insisting the “Disney Space Movies” just need re-evaluation too and those intent on insisting the Expanded Universe remains the true and appropriate continuation of the story alike), we do know what happened.
For all that I was conscious of a “thanks, but this won’t get me checking out third-party material either” feeling, I was therefore intent on seeing the re-release. Heading back to the multiplex I kept going to last year, I was directed to a smaller theatre than Return of the Jedi had screened in (although, when leaving, I did realise more than one screen was being used for the movie this year). The audience looked to be ample enough right around me, and a mixture of families and “fans” (although nobody was in costume, unlike a few people, young and older, I’d noticed walking into the comics shop closest to me for “Free Comic Book Day” earlier that day...)
Not that long before heading for the theatre I’d noticed comments about a preview of one of the latest streaming shows, which is making efforts to invoke “the Jedi era,” being included with the re-release. That preview didn’t show up at my theatre, although I did notice a commercial for a special fortieth anniversary screening of the first episodes of the original Transformers cartoon with a “table read” featuring surviving voice actors. For the movie itself, anyway, I am rather comfortable about it now even if I can keep imagining some of the people most likely to see these comments being jolted away from “polite, careful silence.” Sometimes I wonder about being “stuck in 1999” myself. My recollections from back then amount to seeing “everyone” else be hit with instant, visceral revulsion towards “lame” comedy relief, such that I braced myself on opening night against some unimaginable crassness only to wind up as the credits rolled thinking “you know... I really liked it!” When “everyone” else just stayed fixated on how much the comedy relief had injured them, and newspaper columns started proclaiming it and all the other peculiar aliens in fact embodied offensive stereotypes of humans, things started getting uncomfortable again for me, although I did manage to see the movie a second time late that summer (on a Sunday morning of a weekend I’d returned to my university’s city for an anime club show there) and thought that maybe I was still all right with it. Over the years, as the negativity encompassed still more of the movie, I’ll admit to temptations of imagining “the indignation spread because it was, in fact, silly to be so worked up over one thing...” At the same time, I suppose I dodged the question of “that’s not actually funny, is it?” by making efforts to imagine Jar Jar as horribly aware awful things keep happening to him yet unable to do anything about it, at least until I began noticing “visual quotes” connecting him to certain silent film comedy stunts.
I might also be forever tempted to try and work out in my head ways the schemes of Darth Sidious might have had to have been trimmed and redirected over the course of the movie itself. It’s easy enough to suppose he possesses a diabolical foresight of everything, and yet that can also seem “a fallback for those whose indignation has spread to encompass the good guys, if in a less acidic concentration than some.” At a certain point that “diabolical foresight” might as well continue to the moment where Luke Skywalker refuses to kill his father, which might make it all the more significant yet still raises an uncertain question of “why does it break down then?”
I had contemplated going on from this movie to watching five discs of my Blu-Ray set earlier this year for once, but at a certain point I got to wondering about the image filling the screen from top to bottom. My impression has long been of the Star Wars movies being “wider than ‘widescreen’”; if the aspect ration was wrong, I suppose the temptation became to watch the Blu-Ray set in that affected order where “the Republic trilogy” becomes an extended flashback between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The sound, anyway, had a bit more impact than my TV speakers, and there was some applause from the crowd at the end (and I wasn’t one of the first to clap). After sticking around for all of the credits, though, I did happen to overhear one of the “fans” already mentioned rolling out the usual complaints about the dialogue. I did my best to suppose “his loss.”
It was therefore a bigger surprise this year to see news of a twenty-fifth anniversary theatrical re-release of The Phantom Menace, upending my lazy and perhaps self-satisfied suppositions. Certain awarenesses of references in certain of the streaming shows I don’t watch aside, things did appear to have come that much further since the twentieth anniversary of the movie, when the “Disney Space Movies” remained focused on one last fling at their new era. At the same time, I suppose I was thinking even further back to the “3D re-release” early in 2012. I’m afraid the gloomy suspicion any proof one way or another would be entangled with general putdowns keeps me from confirming old, vague impressions of comments about that re-release not doing well at the box office. It’s a little too easy to then imagine George Lucas realising the smirkingly dismissive were at that point controlling the narrative, that he’d become a liability, and that he’d have to either wind down his over-extended company as he’d had to do once before in the mid-1980s or sell it a bigger company. Whether the re-release was in fact proof he’d been thinking ahead to turning ideas popping into his head while collaborating on the Clone Wars computer-animated series into further movies unconstrained by a timeline rather than just “coming up with an outline as an unnecessary deal-sweetener” (something proposed by those intent on insisting the “Disney Space Movies” just need re-evaluation too and those intent on insisting the Expanded Universe remains the true and appropriate continuation of the story alike), we do know what happened.
For all that I was conscious of a “thanks, but this won’t get me checking out third-party material either” feeling, I was therefore intent on seeing the re-release. Heading back to the multiplex I kept going to last year, I was directed to a smaller theatre than Return of the Jedi had screened in (although, when leaving, I did realise more than one screen was being used for the movie this year). The audience looked to be ample enough right around me, and a mixture of families and “fans” (although nobody was in costume, unlike a few people, young and older, I’d noticed walking into the comics shop closest to me for “Free Comic Book Day” earlier that day...)
Not that long before heading for the theatre I’d noticed comments about a preview of one of the latest streaming shows, which is making efforts to invoke “the Jedi era,” being included with the re-release. That preview didn’t show up at my theatre, although I did notice a commercial for a special fortieth anniversary screening of the first episodes of the original Transformers cartoon with a “table read” featuring surviving voice actors. For the movie itself, anyway, I am rather comfortable about it now even if I can keep imagining some of the people most likely to see these comments being jolted away from “polite, careful silence.” Sometimes I wonder about being “stuck in 1999” myself. My recollections from back then amount to seeing “everyone” else be hit with instant, visceral revulsion towards “lame” comedy relief, such that I braced myself on opening night against some unimaginable crassness only to wind up as the credits rolled thinking “you know... I really liked it!” When “everyone” else just stayed fixated on how much the comedy relief had injured them, and newspaper columns started proclaiming it and all the other peculiar aliens in fact embodied offensive stereotypes of humans, things started getting uncomfortable again for me, although I did manage to see the movie a second time late that summer (on a Sunday morning of a weekend I’d returned to my university’s city for an anime club show there) and thought that maybe I was still all right with it. Over the years, as the negativity encompassed still more of the movie, I’ll admit to temptations of imagining “the indignation spread because it was, in fact, silly to be so worked up over one thing...” At the same time, I suppose I dodged the question of “that’s not actually funny, is it?” by making efforts to imagine Jar Jar as horribly aware awful things keep happening to him yet unable to do anything about it, at least until I began noticing “visual quotes” connecting him to certain silent film comedy stunts.
I might also be forever tempted to try and work out in my head ways the schemes of Darth Sidious might have had to have been trimmed and redirected over the course of the movie itself. It’s easy enough to suppose he possesses a diabolical foresight of everything, and yet that can also seem “a fallback for those whose indignation has spread to encompass the good guys, if in a less acidic concentration than some.” At a certain point that “diabolical foresight” might as well continue to the moment where Luke Skywalker refuses to kill his father, which might make it all the more significant yet still raises an uncertain question of “why does it break down then?”
I had contemplated going on from this movie to watching five discs of my Blu-Ray set earlier this year for once, but at a certain point I got to wondering about the image filling the screen from top to bottom. My impression has long been of the Star Wars movies being “wider than ‘widescreen’”; if the aspect ration was wrong, I suppose the temptation became to watch the Blu-Ray set in that affected order where “the Republic trilogy” becomes an extended flashback between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The sound, anyway, had a bit more impact than my TV speakers, and there was some applause from the crowd at the end (and I wasn’t one of the first to clap). After sticking around for all of the credits, though, I did happen to overhear one of the “fans” already mentioned rolling out the usual complaints about the dialogue. I did my best to suppose “his loss.”