"This isn't so much a movie as a two-hour special-effects demonstration reel." - Kansas City Star "Even without aliens, though, the humanity in Phantom Menace would still be hard to find." -Newsday We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen. "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace seems designed more as a promotion for Lucasfilm's billion-dollar merchandising concerns than a meaningful chapter in the Star Wars canon." - Hollywood Reporter "Perhaps Lucas has become too lost in his mastery of computer-generated effects and digital sound to remember that creativity in the movies is not just a technical thing." - Denver Post "It is neither captivating nor transporting, for it lacks any emotional pull, as well as the sense of wonder and awe that marks the best works of sci-fi/fantasy." - Variety To call "The Force Awakens" a good junk movie is no insult: There is enough bad junk around. And surely we're getting over the snobbery of pretending that it is undemocratic to recognize any hierarchy of culture, as if both low and high can't be appreciated, often by the same people.īut when light entertainment is done well, someone is bound to make extravagant and unsupportable claims for its being great art. You will hear that this sequel to "Star Wars" is part of a vast new mythology, as if it were the Oresteia. Its originator, George Lucas, revealed over the years that the pictures are actually parts of a nine-part sage, as if audiences will some day receive the total the way devotees now go to Seattle for a week of immersion in Wagner's complete Ring Cycle. This is no monumental artistic work, but a science-fiction movie done more snappily than most, including its own predecessors. A chocolate bar is a marvelous sweet that does not need to pretend to be a chocolate soufflé musical comedies are wonderful entertainment without trying to compete with opera blue jeans are a perfect garment that shouldn't be compared with haute couture. There are times when you would much rather have a really good hot dog than any steak, but you can still recognize that one is junk food and the other isn't. "The Force Awakens" has no plot structure, no character studies let alone character development, no emotional or philosophical point to make.
It has no original vision of the future, which is depicted as a pastiche of other junk-culture formulae, such as the western, the costume epic and the World War II movie. Its specialty is "special effects" or visual tricks, some of which are playful, imaginative and impressive, but others of which have become space-movie clichés.īut the total effect is fast and attractive and occasionally amusing. Like a good hot dog, that's something of an achievement in a field where unpalatable junk is the rule. In this film, as in "Star Wars," a trio of nice, average-looking young people is pursued by a sinister figure in black mask and cloak. Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford as Han Solo and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia all return.
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