Star wars episode i the phantom menace natalie portman
- #Star wars episode i the phantom menace natalie portman movie#
- #Star wars episode i the phantom menace natalie portman series#
The course sends racers hurtling through a video-game Monument Valley. Anakin's chief rival has flesh dreadlocks and a wicked grin. The stadium is huge and filled with excitable creatures. The showpiece pod-racing sequence on Tatooine (''Ben-Hur'' with jet engines) is a model of the film's cheerful ingenuity. The rogues' gallery on Tatooine is also new and improved, led by the blue, winged Watto, the alien most skilled at upstaging the film's humans. Unlike much of what is seen in ''The Phantom Menace,'' Tatooine is familiar from the first films, but it has been brightened to suit the new film's visual brio. In a notable change of pace, the earnest Swedish actress Pernilla August (''The Best Intentions'') goes from playing Ingmar Bergman's mother to Darth's, as a ''Star Wars'' madonna nobly raising her boy on the desert planet Tatooine. The big battles are crisply staged and sadism-free.
#Star wars episode i the phantom menace natalie portman movie#
What matters is that the series' sense of good and evil is still quaintly naive, just as its notion of heroism remains rooted in movie traditions much less nihilistic than today's. Lucas's screenplay carries far more baggage in the form of interplanetary turf wars and highly ceremonial political wrangling, the basics will suffice. In the beginning, according to ''The Phantom Menace,'' there were noble Jedi (''the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy'') and a whole lot of trouble-shooting to be done. Lucas's imaginings to life here really believe this epic fable and think you should, too. Or that the hundreds of design and computer-graphics artists who have brought Mr. It's not hard to believe that the story of ''The Phantom Menace,'' a genesis for the trio of films we already know, was always on a back burner somewhere. Lucas's boyish belief in the sci-fi universe he has created, then it hasn't dimmed.
#Star wars episode i the phantom menace natalie portman series#
There are film series that grow palpably desperate for inspiration as they age, but ''Star Wars'' isn't one of them. The ''Star Wars'' franchise was funnier and scrappier when it was new. It sustains the gee-whiz spirit of the series and offers a swashbuckling extragalactic getaway, creating illusions that are even more plausible than the kitchen-raiding raptors of ''Jurassic Park.'' While the human stars here are reduced to playing action figures, they are upstaged by amazing backdrops and hordes of crazily lifelike space beings as the Lewis Carroll in Mr. Lucas's first installment offers a happy surprise: it's up to snuff. And the reception of ''The Phantom Menace'' has not been helped by spoilsport tie-ins that make it (according to an item in The Hollywood Reporter) ''the first film that will make money even if nobody buys a ticket to see it.'' Nobody, not even camp followers ready to turn this souped-up ''Star Wars'' into the second coming of the Grateful Dead, wants to be sick and tired of a film before it hits the screen.īut stripped of hype and breathless expectations, Mr. This revelation has touched off shock waves in a cultural climate (much stranger than Naboo's) where anything short of the biggest, splashiest and most moneymaking qualifies as a galling flop. That description also sums up the earthly atmosphere into which George Lucas's pathologically anticipated ''Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace'' arrives today. ''There's always a bigger fish,'' observes the Jedi sage Qui-Gon Jinn, speaking for more than marine life on the planet Naboo, where the sequence takes place. But then an even mightier beast appears, and it swallows up the first. Things look dicey for the new ''Star Wars'' crew when their undersea craft is threatened by a large aquatic critter.