Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace Review

Lucas came back to directing after twenty two years with total control and nobody left to tell him no, and the film shows it in both directions. The design work is superb: Naboo assembled from Italian palazzos and Asian temples, Coruscant stacked to the horizon, the royal cruiser polished to a chrome the original trilogy had deliberately dirtied.

David Tattersall shoots it on film with real depth, and the podrace still functions as pure kinetic cinema, cut for velocity and scored mostly by engine noise. Then there is everything else. The plot turns on a trade blockade and a procedural vote, which no amount of lightsaber work can make urgent, and the film explains the Force as a blood test.

Jake Lloyd is handed lines no child actor could survive, and Jar Jar Binks is a sustained failure of judgment that nobody on set was empowered to stop. Liam Neeson gives Qui-Gon a grounded weariness and Ian McDiarmid plays political rot with relish, but Natalie Portman is stranded behind ceremonial makeup and a voice she was told to use. The Duel of the Fates finale, Ray Park's choreography married to a full choir, is the one place where the ambition and the execution actually meet.