The Phantom Menace was maligned in its time, and it goes disparaged in posterity, if only because The Phantom Menace launched the long and infamous phase when Star Wars, a cherished saga, kinda sucked. The boy Jake Lloyd, who played Anakin Skywalker, would become a pariah. (The Japanese occupation of Manchuria ended with the U.S.’s nuking two cities and the Soviets’ routing the Kwantung Army.) The boy Anakin Skywalker would become Darth Vader. Naboo’s monarchy resolves the planet’s sovereignty crisis by dispatching a precocious 10-year-old boy to blow up the Trade Federation’s doughnut-shaped space station with his slick, silver gunship. George Lucas’s turning a 20th-century atrocity into a movie about intergalactic tariffs, but then turning the movie about intergalactic tariffs into a movie about underage romance, minstrel rabbits, and motorsports: It’s such a perfectly George Lucas thing to do. In The Phantom Menace, the Trade Federation misleads the Galactic Senate to obscure the Neimoidian invasion of Naboo. The mock-Japanese accents, as reprehensible as they are, get me thinking about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria: In September 1931, the Kwantung Army fabricated a Chinese nationalist attack on a Japanese railway in order to deceive the League of Nations about their subsequent invasion of the Chinese mainland.
The Galactic Senate dispatches the two Jedi to mediate the dispute between the Trade Federation and Naboo. The aliens-a Neimoidian consortium known as the Trade Federation-launch a blockade over Naboo, a wealthy planet that the Trade Federation plans to invade. It all begins-it really does begin-with Obi-Wan Kenobi (!) and Qui-Gon Jinn (?) sitting down for tea together as a craft-services droid tries to murder them. The Phantom Menace really does begin with a bug-eyed alien speaking, in a mock-Japanese accent, about a commercial trade dispute. Next up is Star Wars: Episode 1–The Phantom Menace, George Lucas’s much-maligned first prequel. Throughout the week, The Ringer will highlight some of the year’s best, most interesting films, and in this series, make the case for why a specific movie deserves to be called that year’s best. Welcome to 1999 Movies Week, a celebration of one of the best years in film history.
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