Cinema: Ready, Set, Glow!

• Share

(2 of 6)

All right, any auteur can replay his greatest hits, exploiting even the youngest viewer's need for nostalgia. And, indeed, Episode 1 will display the old Lucas touches, many of them dating back not just to the trilogy of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but also to his first features, THX 1138 and American Graffiti. It has the gifted, driven misfit; the young woman above his station but not beyond his dreams; the mystic guide, the imposing villain, the comic sidekick. Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, the evil Emperor and Darth Vader are here--all of them 30 years younger, some barely recognizable. There are lots of battles and a cool drag race. It's a George Lucas movie.

Still, based on reading the script (hasn't everybody?) and seeing scraps of the film, we get intimations of something fresh, handsome, grand. Naboo's golden underwater city glows like an Art Nouveau chandelier, while the Jedi knights' home base, Coruscant, could come from a spiffier Blade Runner. The new sidekick, a computer-birthed frog boy named Jar Jar Binks, is a vexing, endearing mix of Kipling's Gunga Din and Tolkien's Gollum, and speaks in a pidgin English ("Yousa Jedi not all yousa cracked up to be!") that will be every kid's secret language this summer. Even on paper, the film's set pieces--a 10-min. Podrace and the climactic battle between the ragged forces of good and the minions of the dark side--have power and razzmatazz.

The human characters are briskly developed in the script. And the cast is certainly tony: Neeson; art-house sex pistol Ewan McGregor as young Obi-Wan; Ingmar Bergman favorite Pernilla August as Anakin's mother; Natalie Portman (Broadway's Anne Frank) as the young Queen; and, brooding on the Jedi Council, Samuel L. Jackson. The completed film will offer definitive evidence, but for now there is reason to give Episode 1 the subtitle of the original Star Wars movie: A New Hope.

The film is set in an age tipping from medieval to modern, from the doddering aristocracy of the Galactic Republic to the brutal opportunism of the Trade Federation, which has blocked all shipping routes to the planet Naboo. Qui-Gon and his Jedi apprentice Obi-Wan are dispatched to settle the dispute. Reaching Naboo, they are befriended--hounded, really--by Jar Jar, a disaster-prone outcast of the Gungan race. He leads them to Amidala the Naboo Queen, whom they intend to take to the Republic's assembly in Coruscant. Engine trouble forces them to detour to Tatooine, where Qui-Gon bargains for spare spacecraft parts with Watto, a potbellied, hummingbird-winged junkman. In Anakin, Watto's slave boy, Qui-Gon senses an unusual precocity, one might almost say a Force. Qui-Gon makes a bet with Watto. If Anakin miraculously wins the big Podrace against the swaggering champ Sebulba, the boy will be freed. Free to chase his destiny as a Jedi knight.

That's one way to start telling the story. Here is another: One day in November 1994, George Lucas dropped his three adopted kids off at school. He came home, climbed the stairs to his study, got a pad of yellow ruled paper and a box of Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils. And in the same binder in which he wrote the original Star Wars, he got to work on The Phantom Menace.