In the first three Star Wars movies, the Jedi and Sith are dwindling embers. What was once a vast, entangled hierarchy of light and dark Force practitioners has shrunk to a handful of creaky and vindictive old men, fighting for control over a couple of angsty, unschooled kids. With 1999’s prequel Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace – set in the heyday of the Galactic Republic – Lucasfilm wanted to show these crusading space mystics in their prime. The film’s opening act is basically a 30-minute-long rockstar kneeslide. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn bust out of stage smoke and proceed to drop more bodies than you’ll see fall in the entirety of the original trilogy, batting away blaster bolts without looking and throwing the Force around like confetti.
The original Star Wars trilogy’s fights are closer to duels in older medieval romance flicks: you can more or less follow every blow. The Phantom Menace redefines the Jedi and Sith as crowd-pleasing stuntspeople and martial artists, their intricate choreography mixing Kendo with tennis and a few, universe-specific flourishes. Sometimes, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon wield their sabers like feather dusters, letting the heat of the blade do the job rather than exerting their muscles. The real heroes of these encounters are their opponents, however: spindly CGI battle droids who are designed to be even more expendable than Stormtroopers. They’re foes you can dismember by the hundreds without riling any age ratings boards, or risking a tabloid outcry.
The Phantom Menace is, of course, widely and correctly viewed as the worst Star Wars film ever made. It’s lore rather than plot-driven, packed with racist caricatures, and bizarrely muted in its delivery, with a roster of otherwise solid actors who seem to have been pumped full of sedatives before each scene. The lightsaber fights are often called its redeeming feature. Later on, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan have an epic three-way in the vaults of Naboo Royal Palace with Darth Maul, the soon-to-be Emperor’s apprentice and wielder of a (gasp!) double-ended lightsaber. But as frenetic and impressively staged as even these fateful skirmishes are, there’s something lacking here too: a sense of genuine dramatic stakes.
