Retrospective: Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (Patreon)

Between the final season of Andor, the re-release of Revenge of the Sith, and American democracy's polite submission to fascism, 2025 is the year of the Star Wars prequels.

George Lucas' vision of the transition from liberal democracy to fascism may be a creaky one — he doesn't quite nail the mechanics of it — but its cynicism is wonderful. The Trade Federation has congressional representation? The progenitor of fascism is an outwardly ordinary politician who "[has] the Senate bogged down in procedures?" A legislative body dismissing an orchestrated famine as slander? Douglas Adams could hardly do better (although he's just as likely to have come up with a Galactic senate constituting thousands of representatives, a hilariously doomed idea for a government).

The Phantom Menace invokes images of Caesar's Civil War and Weimar (note the Galactic Republic), but like its predecessors, it's basically a slideshow of moments — bits of aesthetics copped from Kurosawa, some headlines straight out of the Reagan era. There are big problems — we never actually see the mass suffering on Naboo that's constantly alluded to. Fascism being the pet project of a single man is a bit cartoony. And the racial stereotypes are reprehensible — Watto is just Fagin in space.

On the artistic side, we have Lucas' rather flat shot composition and his failure to grant characters much interiority (everything Anakin experiences on Coruscant should be traumatizing — a powerful order of adults render him a displaced person). At the same time, it's somehow easier to forgive these movies now that they've led to Andor. The idea of Vader beginning life as an enslaved child in a junkyard is, at least in theory, inspired. Qui-Gon's myopia, his excessive focus on the here-and-now, dooms him and everyone else. The podrace is wonderful, as is the lightsaber battle. And John Williams ends the movie with a parade whose music is just Palpatine's theme in a major key. Fascism gets a nice parade as it arrives. What could be more 2025 than that?