All right, the yobs are gonne love this, but I've finally figured out what's wrong with The Phantom Menace. It's somewhat of a philosophical inversion of the basic thesis that lead me to write this thing last year. When I wrote that, I thought that (one of the) the problems with Eps. 1 and 2 was that they didn't have a single narrative thrust, à la "blow up the Death Star," pulling them forward. Now I see that in Phantom's case this was kind of right, but from the wrong direction. The problem with The Phantom Menace is that it isn't about Qui-Gon Jinn.
The Phantom Menace should be about Qui-Gon Jinn. He's the main character. He's the featured actor on the film's poster. Liam Neeson gets top billing in the end credits. And on top of all that, there's the increasingly-popular realization that Qui-Gon is far and away the single most interesting character that Lucas created for the prequel trilogy. The Phantom Menace should be Qui-Gon's story. He dies at the end of the film, and not unlike some of the things Matthew was talking about on Mamo this week, the neatest trick they could have pulled with Qui-Gon would be to have the entire film essentially set up that death: have it be a course of adventures so grand and meaningful to this one man's waning life that by the end of it, the only logical next step is for him to sacrifice himself (for Anakin, for Obi-Wan, for the Republic, whatever). And when I realized this, I finally noticed what was fundamentally wrong with the flick. It's basic character 101: Qui-Gon is the main character of the film, yet he doesn't have an arc. He is in (nearly) every scene, yet he undergoes no change at all from his first scene to his last. He has impact on not just every character in the film, but by extension, every character in the prequel trilogy, and yet the film he top-lines isn't his story. And it really, really should be.
Qui-Gon's story is fundamental to the saga as a whole: the story of the last true Jedi. We should watch this man caper around the galaxy with his entourage (his apprentice, his ward, his bumbling sidekick Jar Jar) and by so doing, learn something about what it was like to be a Jedi Knight back when the Jedi really were the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy. Instead, TPM is schizophrenically sectioned in fours: it's made up of (largely separate) storylines for Anakin, Obi-Wan, the Queen, and Jar Jar, all of which Qui-Gon merely observes/enforces, but has little meaningful interaction with. Invert the structure, have the other storylines be little branches of the main Qui-Gon vein, et voila: filmo no sucko.
My fondness for Qui-Gon, and Liam Neeson's performance in general, has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years. I guess I'm finally getting a handle on why. There's a brilliant missed opportunity there, and I'm drawn to those like a moth to a flame (ahem, Alien 3), though there's always the omnipresent danger of this slipping over into meaningless fanboy grousing about things that aren't my business or within my power to change. I really am grateful for what I have, and I really do like the prequels. I just feel like I could have liked them "a bit more."
Sideshow Qui-Gon goes on sale today at 1:00.
