Tag: Pernilla August

Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Bergman’s gorgeous final film, a sublime family saga, that leaves you thinking for days

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Bertil Guve (Alexander Ekdahl), Pernilla Allwin (Fanny Ekdahl), Ewa Fröling (Emilie Ekdahl), Jan Malmsjö (Bishop Edvard Vergérus), Gunn Wållgren (Helena Ekdahl), Erland Josephson (Isak Jacobi), Jarl Kulle (Gustav Adolf Ekdahl), Allan Edwall (Oscar Ekdahl), Pernilla August (Maj), Mona Malm (Alma Ekdahl), Börje Ahlstedt (Carl Ekdahl), Christina Schollin (Lydia Ekdahl), Harriet Andersson (Justina), Stina Ekblad (Ismael Retzinsky), Mats Bergman (Aron Retzinsky), Gunnar Björnstrand (Filip Landahl)

After many years (and masterpieces) Bergman wanted to move on from film: but before he went, there was time for one more magnum opus, a sprawling family saga that would throw a host of his interests (death, family, sexual openness, God, theatre, infidelity, the unknowable) onto one grand, sprawling canvas. Fanny and Alexander would be a truly personal film, featuring a young protagonist with more than a passing resemblance to Bergman himself. Despite this it’s an irony Bergman might like that the finest version of this film we have is actually a five-hour recut for television (the limits of run-time from distributors being one of many things Bergman was tired of). That version is a beautiful, life-affirming, gorgeous piece of film-making, an extraordinarily humane story tinged with the supernatural told on a luscious, Visconti-like scale. It’s a fitting sign-off from a master.

In 1907, the wealthy Ekdahl family live in a luxurious apartment block, their rooms filled with the rich detail of their love of art and culture. Ten-year-old Alexander’s (Bertil Guve) father Oscar (Allan Edwall) and mother Emilie (Ewa Fröling) run the Ekhdal theatre, where his wealthy grandmother Helena (Gunn Wållgren) once performed. After a fabulous Christmas celebration, Oscar dies after a stroke while rehearsing the role of the Ghost in Hamlet. After a period of mourning, Emilie remarries to the older Bishop Edvard Vergérus (Jan Malmsjö), who turns out to be a domestic tyrant, obsessed with the letter of religious and family law. Will Alexander, his younger sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) and their mother escape from Vergérus’ controlling clutches?

What really strikes you first and foremost about Fanny and Alexander is its gorgeous warmth – hardly the first quality you traditionally associate with Bergman. It opens with a prolonged (over an hour) Christmas celebration, with the family and their servants eating, laughing, telling stories and dancing through their gorgeously furnished apartment. It should feel indulgent (and I suppose it is), but this warm reconstruction of an at-times-flawed, but fundamentally loving and vibrant family is actually deeply moving and heart-warming.

The Ekdahls have a bohemian freedom, with their love of theatre and art (only Uncle Carl, a manic depressive businessman, feels slightly out-of-place and even he takes the children to one-side during the festivities to entertain them by blowing out candles with his farts). Their house is charmingly egalitarian, with the servants treated as part of the family, loyalty they return. The theatre troupe (led by Bergman regular Gunnar Björnstrand in his final, small, role) – are equally part of this extended family, the theatre a second magical home where the children take small roles in various productions and delight in the stagecraft and costumes behind-the-scenes.

Fitting a Bergman family (and the Ekdahl’s share some elements with parts of Bergman’s family) they are extremely forward-looking in their morality. Uncle Gustav Adolf (played with bombastic, gentle charm by Jarl Kulle) is a notorious ladies man, but goes about it with such innocence and near-childish openness his patient wife Alma (Mona Malm) indulges him because in all other respects he’s a loving husband and father, and his overall fidelity to her is never in doubt. Alma restricts herself to a single slap of his new lover, maid Maj, but otherwise treats her like a sister. Pernilla August is hugely endearing as this caring young woman, swiftly absorbed into the wider Ekdahl family who value her care for others. The Ekdahl’s have no time for conventional morality, led from the front by matriarch Helena (Gunn Wållgren is fantastic as this wordly-wise, ideal grandmother figure) who has lived a life of sexual openness with her husband and values people not societal conventions.

Oscar, their father (wonderfully played by Allan Edwall as a bashfully mediocre actor and a quietly shy but warm man) takes his role as the leader of this company very seriously, but with a light touch (modestly bemoaning his lack of statue compared to his father). Bergman uses a myriad of small moments to make this father an ideal parent, not least a late-night fantastical story he improvises for the children, spun around their nursery room chair, one of the most tender moments of parent-child bonding in the movies. (This despite hints that Oscar, who has allowed the younger, more sensual Emilie to conduct her own affairs, might not be their true father).

The stunning production and costume design (which won Oscars for Anna Asp and Marik Vos-Lundh) are essential for creating this immersive, rich and vibrant life: one which will be exploded in Dickensian tragedy by the death of Oscar and the arrival of the Murdstone-like Edvard Vergérus (played with chilling, smug hypocrisy by Jan Malmsjö under a fake smile) who is everything the Ekdahls are not. Where they are warm and egalitarian, he is cool and elitist, he is a prude with no regard for art and his home is in bleached-out puritan stone, devoid of personal touches – it literally looks like a different world to that we’ve spent the first few hours in, full of untrustworthy people (like Vergérus’ maid played by a wonderfully two-faced Harriet Andersson).

Vergérus is all about control, something we suspect from the start with his aggressively tender manhandling of Alexander, his hand slamming into the back of his neck. He worms his way into the affections of Emilie – a woman who, with her earth-shattering wails over the body of Oscar, is clearly vulnerable in her raw grief (Ewa Fröling is extraordinary as this gentle figure, prone to appalling judgement and unexpected strength of character) – and then sets out their marriage terms with controlling agendas, not least that in arriving in his house, she and her children must shed every inch of their previous life, from personal connections to the knick-knacks they have grown to love. He’s a poor advert for a God Alexander is already cursing for taking his father (his attic, filled with crumbling religious symbols, feels of a part of Bergman’s world where God is at best a passive observer, at worst a near malicious presence).

Bergman makes clear Vergérus is a man who genuinely believes he is doing the best for his family and that the moral lessons he hands out, at the end of a cane, to Alexander are essential. A weak man who mistakes bullying for strength. In many ways the fact he is not vindictive just weak and convinced of his own moral certainty (re-enforced by his fawning family, who treat him like a sort of prophet). Sure, he’s capable of anger, anti-Semitic slurs and little acts of cruelty, but Malmsjö shows him as a man who is trying, in his own wrong-headed way, to win the love of his adopted wife and children and can’t understand why he is not met with gratitude and love.

Perhaps it’s this sudden dropping into a cold world (one not dissimilar from Bergman’s own troubled relationship with his priest father – in fact you leave Fanny and Alexander wondering if Bergman hated his own father as much as Alexander who literally prays for his death) that so sparks Alexander’s own links to a mystic world around him. There is a rich vein of something other throughout Fanny and Alexander, from the statues Alexander watches move in the opening sequence (not to mention the haunting spectre of Death he witnesses in the same moment), to Oscar constantly appearing to Alexander like Hamlet’s Ghost. Is this haunting Alexander’s guilt at this failure to face his dying father on his deathbed, or a link to a world beyond our understanding?

After all Oscar’s Ghost greets Helena at one point, the two entering into a loving conversation. And he’s not the only supernatural touch around Fanny and Alexander. Family friend (and Helena’s lover) the Jew Isak (a rich performance by Bergman regular Erland Josephson) lives in a house full of mystic puppets that might be able to breath and walk. Isak perhaps uses magic to help smuggle the children out of Vergérus’ house (making them appear in two places at once), while his androgenous son Ismael (played by a woman, Stina Ekbad) is implied to having the spiritual power to channel Alexander’s hatred of Vergérus into actual supernatural revenge in the real world (another classic literary touch, that plays on spirituality and the Mad Woman in the Attic in Jane Eyre).

Fanny and Alexander is an extraordinary film, I feel I have only begun to scratch its surface here. It’s both a Dickensian family fable and a semi-benevolent Ghost story. It’s a family saga and a careful look at a particular time and place. It’s funny and moving. It really feels like one final mighty effort from a master.

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)

He hates sand you know. Anakin puts the moves on Padmé in Attack of the Clones

Director: George Lucas

Cast: Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker), Natalie Portman (Senator Padmé Amidala), Ian McDiarmid (Chancellor Palpatine), Christopher Lee (Count Dooku), Samuel L. Jackson (Mace Windu), Temuera Morrison (Jango Fett), Frank Oz (Yoda), Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), Kenny Baker (R2 D2), Jimmy Smits (Bail Organa), Ahmed Best (Jar Jar Binks), Pernilla August (Shmi Skywalker), Joel Edgerton (Owen Lars), Silas Carson (Nute Gunray/Ki-Adi-Mundi)

Nothing could be as bad as The Phantom Menace. Surely? Well, umm, Attack of the Clones is pretty bad, but it’s not quite as stodgy and racist as the first one. It really isn’t. But don’t get me wrong, it’s still tone death, poorly written, crappily directed, poorly assembled, textbook bad film-making disguised under a lot of money.

Anyway, ten years have crawled by since Phantom Menace. Padmé (Natalie Portman) is now a senator campaigning against a revolutionary Separatist movement in the Republic, led by mysterious former Jedi Count Dooku (Christopher Lee). After a failed assassination attempt, Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and his Padewan pupil Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christiansen) are assigned to protect her. After another assassination attempt throws up a strange link to a mysterious planet of industrial cloners, Obi-Wan investigates leaving Padmé in Anakin’s care: but the two of them are falling in love, strictly against the rules of the Jedi order.

Sigh. Attack of the Clones is once again a mess, overly computer engineered, badly directed by a director with no knack for visual storytelling other than throwing special effects at the screen. It has a densely disinteresting plot about shady dealings around a mysterious Clone army that eventually the film doesn’t bother to resolve. Lucas shoots the entire film in a shiny, sterile, entirely computer generated environment that looks worse and worse the older the film gets. It builds towards a series of clashes at the end that have impressive spectacle on first viewing, but are hugely empty viewing experiences the more you come back to them. But all this isn’t even the film’s main problem.

First and foremost, the most egregious problem with this film is the romance at its heart. This romance, whose impact is meant to be felt through every film is to come, is as clumsy and unconvincing as anything you are likely to see. Not for one second are you convinced that this couple could ever actually be a thing. For starters Anakin is a whiny, preening, chippy rather dull man who over the course of the film murders a village full of people. Hardly the sort of character to make women swoon. On top of this, his romantic banter and tendency of staring blankly and possessively at Padmé has all the charm of a would-be stalker, mentally planning out the dimensions of the basement he’ll imprison his love in.

Padmé is hardly much more engaging. Her way of handling this love-struck young man, who she claims she doesn’t want to encourage? To flirt with him in a series of increasingly revealing costumes, while constantly telling him “no we can’t do anything” – for unspecified reasons. But then as she says “you’ll always be that 12 year old boy to me” (Oh yuck George!). Portman looks she can barely raise any interest in holding Anakin’s hand, let alone conceiving future generations of Skywalkers. The desperate attempt to create a sense of “love across the divide” falls flat, flat, flat with all the sweep of a Casualty romance of the week. Put it frankly, we are never ever given any reason at all for us to think that they have any reason to be in love.

Despite all this the film desperately tries to throw them together into a series of clichéd romantic encounters, from candle-lit meals to gondola cruises around the lakes of Naboo. Jesus the film even throws in a flirtatious picnic (in which, true to form, Anakin espouses the benefits of totalitarianism, hardly the sort of thing to get a young girl’s heart fluttering!) followed by a roll around in the long grass after a bit of horseplay. To be honest it’s sickening and all the fancy dressing in the world never disguises the utter lack of chemistry between either characters or actors. And you’ll suffer with the actors who are trawling through the appalling “romantic” dialogue. The infamous “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth” sums it up – especially as Anakin ends it with stroking Amidala’s exposed shoulder possessively. Late in the film Padmé says “I’ve been dying inside since you came back into my life” – I know how she fuckin’ feels.

But then to be honest nothing really works in this simply terrible film. Of course a lot of the blame rests with Lucas whose overwhelming ineptitude as a writer and director is exposed in scene after scene. Most of the dialogue lacks any wit or lightness at all, constantly straining for a grandeur it can’t deliver and reads like George simply knocked out the first draft and left it at that. As for his directing: the camera positioning lacks any imagination what-so-ever. Most scenes that don’t have lightsabers feature characters sitting talking at each other to fill in plot details (I’m not joking here, there are so many different designs of chairs in this film it’s like strolling around IKEA). Sometimes George spices it up by having characters work slowly and aimlessly from A to B telling each other the plot (I’m failing to resist saying this is a pretty decent metaphor from the film).

The film shakes this up with a few action sequences which either tediously ape things we’ve seen before, but not-as-good (a chase through an asteroid field smacks of Empire Strikes Back) or having a computer game realism to them that never involves you. A prolonged sequence in a battle droid factory literally looks like a computer game from its hideously shiny lack of realism, to its logic, to the way George shoots it with the conveyor belt moving relentlessly forward visually like a dated platform game.

In fact computer game is a pretty good way of thinking about this film. When making this film, Lucas was convinced this would be the start of a new age: that only dull, traditional directors would be building sets and that all the cool kids would make everything in computers. Watching this film today in hi-def blu-ray does it no favours. Lucas’ computer generated sets (in most shots everything except the actors and their costumes are not real) look ridiculously shiny and unrealistic. There is no weight and reality to anything. Instead it all looks like some sort of bizarre, wonky computer visuals. How can you invest in anything in this film when even the goddamn sofa they are sitting on is a visual effect? How can anything have any weight or meaning? Compared to the lived in appearance of the Millennium Falcon, nothing looks realistic or carries any weight at all.

George Lucas isn’t really a director of action either. It’s hard not to compare the epic battles here with the style and substance of the (equally effects filled world) of Lord of the Rings being released at the same time. There, the battle scenes not only carry real emotional weight and peril but also have at least some sense of tactics and story-telling. This is just a collection of special effects being thrown at each other, like an exploding fart in a special effects lab. This makes for events that look impressive when you first see them, but carry no lasting impact: when you revisit the film, nothing feels important or dangerous or coherent – instead it’s just a lot of stuff happening, loudly.

This goes for the famous Yoda-Dooku light saber duel. Sure when I first saw this, seeing a computer generated muppet take on a stunt double with an octogenarian’s face super-imposed on his felt really exciting. But again, on repeated viewings, it’s just a load of wham and bang that kind of leaves you cold (not least because the fight is a showy bore-draw). It’s as ridiculously over-made and over stuffed as half a dozen other fights in the film. It’s almost representative of how crude these prequels are: a character always defined by his intellect and patience in Yoda reduced to a bouncy special effect for a moment of cheap “wow” for the fans. I’ll also throw in the lousy fan service of turning Boba Fett (a character who has a fascination for a lot of fans for no real reason) into an integral part of the Star Wars backstory – as if George intended this character at any point to be so popular, until he released the merchandising opportunities…

Lucas’ direction fails time and time and time again. Even small scenes fall with a splat or feature moments that get the wrong type of chuckles. The moment where Anakin embraces his dying mother? Forever ruined by the snigger worthy collapse of Pernilla August’s Shmi in his arms, looking like a primary school child miming playing dead (tongue out and all) in a school play. Obi-Wan and Anakin’s chase through the skies of Coruscant packed with “jokey” attempted buddy cop lines that never ring true. The film has even more skin crawlingly embarrassing scenes than Phantom Menace, from a sickeningly cutesy room of “younglings” learning Jedi skills to Obi-Wan’s bizarre encounter with a greasy alien in some sort of American diner. There is precisely one moment of wit in the film (Obi-Wan using the force to tell a drug dealer to “You want to go home and rethink your life”). Other than that – nope, it’s poorly made, poorly written, poorly assembled rubbish.

None of the actors emerge with credit. Pity poor old Hayden Christiansen, left to his own devices by Lucas’s inept, direction free, direction. But he is absolutely, drop-down, unreedemably awful in this film. In fact Anakin, far from being a jumping off point, was the death-knell of his career. Was there really no other young actor with charisma who could have stepped in to take this role instead? Portman fairs a tiny bit better, while at least McGregor, Jackson and Lee have enough experience to take care of themselves. But there is no sense of relationship between any of these characters. The two most important relationships Anakin has in the film contain no chemistry: he and Padme and he and Obi-Wan (neither of whom seem to particularly like each other).

Attack of the Clones could never be as disappointing as Phantom Menace (what could?) but it’s far, far, far away from being a good film. It’s got a simply terrible script, is directed with a dull flatness that all the CGI flair and shouting can’t distract you from. There is nothing in there for you to invest emotionally in. It’s built around a relationship that quite frankly doesn’t work at all on any levels. It builds to a random ending that feels like George ran out of ideas rather than because it meets any thematic reason. How could it all have gone so wrong?

Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999)

Jedi vs Sith – where did it all go wrong in The Phantom Menace?

Director: George Lucas

Cast: Liam Neeson (Qui-Gon Jinn), Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Natalie Portman (Queen Padmé Amidala), Jake Lloyd (Anakin Skywalker), Ian McDiarmid (Senator Palpatine), Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), Kenny Baker (R2 D2), Pernilla August (Shmi Skywalker), Frank Oz (Yoda), Ahmed Best (Jar Jar Binks), Oliver Ford Davies (Sio Bibble), Hugh Quashie (Captain Panaka), Samuel L Jackson (Mace Windu), Ray Park (Darth Maul), Terence Stamp (Chancellor Valorum), Kiera Knightley (Sabé), Silas Carson (Nute Gunray/Ki-Adi-Mundi), Brian Blessed (Boss Nass), Ralph Brown (Ric Olié)

Has there ever been a more disappointing film than The Phantom Menace? I don’t think any film has ever opened to so much hype and fan expectation. The Second Coming could have trouble competing with the expectations piled onto this first Star Wars prequel. Everyone thought it would be the film of the year. Until they saw it. No one thought it would be the film of the year after that.

Of course you should have sensed a disturbance in the force the second you read the opening crawl. The first sentence “Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic” sounds promising right? Well let that expectation die as we hit the second sentence “The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute”. Not exactly a flight for the Empire with the Death Star plans is it? Perhaps only a multi-millionaire like George Lucas could have expected a storyline based around a tax dispute would get the pulses racing.

But then this is a jumping off point for a seriously shambolic film experience. Phantom Menace is a total mess, an incoherent, poorly scripted, farce of a film, a terrible stumble through a dashed off storyline that makes no sense. Anyway, Naboo is a planet under siege from the Trade Federation. Jedi knights Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) are sent to negotiate but things quickly turn to violence and they need to flee the planet with its 14 year old (?) elected (??) Queen (???) Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman). On the planet of Tatooine they encounter a 9 year old slave Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) with a natural instinct for the force. Qui-Gon wants to train him, while the Galactic Republic tries to resolve the siege of Naboo.

That’s sort of the story – but even writing it down seems episodic and vague. But then that’s everything in the film. Nothing is really clearly explained, and we are never properly introduced to who all the sides are in this film and what they might want. There is a complete lack of any real narrative sense at all. The antagonists and protagonists of the film are hard to define. In fact they are frequently a pile of two dimensional yawns. It’s pretty hard to care about any of them. I guess you feel a bond with Obi-Wan, but that’s based on old films – watch this and Obi-Wan is a do-nothing whiner.

But all the characters are infected by this. George Lucas is completely unable to bring any characterisations to these people, his lines constantly falling flatly or crappily to the ground, while the actors themselves struggle to find anything to engage it. Harrison Ford famously told Lucas on the first film that “you can type this shit but you can’t say it” – and that’s pretty much nailed on for this film. There is not one single vaguely memorable line in this film. Rather you are struck every second with feeble lines that sound like they might have had depth (“There’s always a bigger fish!”) but when analysed for a second make no sense whatsoever. It’s no wonder Neeson seriously considered quitting acting after this film.

Yes these two characters will get it on in the next film. Yuck.

There isn’t a single character in the film to really invest in. There is no equivalent to your Han Solo, the witty outsider to puncture some of the grandaeur. Instead every character is a flat, po-faced, non-personality who spend all their time in the film very seriously going about their business, never explaining anything. The Jedi are particularly affected by this, written as serious stick-in-the-muds constantly lecturing and ticking off other characters. Qui-Gon Jinn makes a tedious lead character, who constantly gets in the way of the relationship building we need to see between Obi-Wan and Anakin. Because we know where the film series is going, spending time on Qui-Gon feels like wasted time. The backstory is to see the relationship build between Obi-Wan and Anakin – instead they hardly speak in the film, and we instead spend ages on Qui-Gon. It’s poor story-telling and wastes a film showing us unimportant back story rather than spending time on the core stuff. It’s bad enough that we have to waste one third of the prequel series on Anakin Skywalker: The Wesley Crusher Years (seriously has anyone, even a child, ever loved a film where a brattish, super kid is the hero? You won’t be shouting Yiipppeeee…)

Lucas isn’t a director of actors, he’d say the same. But he is supposed to be a master of visuals and special effects. This is a film where everything you could possibly imagine has been thrown at the screen. Each frame is full of complex business, every single section crammed with special effects. There is a lot going on visually all the time, but all of it comes across like an explosion in a colouring book. Unlike the effects of the original trilogy, nothing really feels real or carries any real weight. Instead you see every special effects shot in the film and see frames filled with clutter and shiny, computer generated weightless nonsense. Worst offender is the hideously overextended pod race sequence, like a particularly dull Formula One race, which carries no real stakes (as we all know the result) and, for all the high speed camera work and editing feels not one iota as thrilling as the speeder chase in Return of the Jedi.

On top of this, most of the interventions into the Star Wars backstory makes the original trilogy worse. This is the film that gave us midichlorians, some sort of magic alien thing that lives in blood and gives the Jedi the ability to use the force. The reaction to this midichlorian nonsense, undermining the mystique of the force into something that could measured like a top trump was so negative that it was mentioned at most once in the two sequels. Other areas got similarly scathed, not least turning Anakin Skywalker into the worst form of “gifted child”. I’m not even going to touch on the icky fore-knowledge we have about the fact that Anakin and Padme are going to get it on in the future, something that is hideous to think about.

The most hated character in film history?

Lucas also fudged the new stuff he introduced in the film. The worst element: of course it’s poor old Jar-Jar Binks. I genuinely feel sorry for Ahmed Best, an actor whose career never recovered, who is just doing here what he was told to do. But Binks is the most irritating character possibly ever conceived for a hit blockbuster. An idiotic, comic creation designed for the kids who falls over, trips up, says stupid things and steps in shit he does nothing useful for the whole course of the film and tries to entertain kids who were way more interested in Darth Maul. Binks is almost irredeemable, every sentence enough to send everyone’s teeth on edge.

Lucas trumpeted how much Binks was setting the trend of being the first major computer generated character. Lucas was incapable of guiding the actors to respond (or even look at) the correct spaces where Binks was standing. And Lucas was so pleased with it, he never stopped to think. Binks makes no sense. Like the rest of the Gungans he’s a joke. There is literally no reason at all for the Jedi to take him anywhere with them, particularly as he constantly gets in the way, causes trouble and offends people. Even in the “desperate” final battle, Binks prats about – compare him to the moments of tragedy and sacrifice given to the Ewoks in Jedi and you’ll see how bad this is.

**Yes Watto loves Money. What? What’s the problem?**

And of course he and the Gungans are shocking racist caricatures in their Jamaican accent. If you had any doubts that Lucas had no one saying no to him on anything, this film is stuffed with pretty shocking racist characters. Binks is terrible, but the villains of this place are the money obsessed Trade Federation, all with Japanese accents. On Tatooine, Anakin is kept by a greasy, fly ridden, money obsessed, big nosed, fly-covered alien Watto who looks, sounds and acts like a children’s version of The Eternal Jew. Did no one watching the film take a second and say “hang on this looks a bit dodgy…”

All of this nonsense finally comes together in a grand final battle which sums the whole film up, in a sequence where the tone shifts and changes all the time with no sense of a single person doing so intentionally. We have the Gungans comically fighting the droids in a series of awful little vignettes. We have the Queen chasing through the palace in a poorly explained subplot. We have a 9 year old child accidentally flying a ship into space and accidentally blowing up the baseship (Anakin saves the day without even realising it, the one thing that could make the child even more irritating than he already is). And we have the Jedi fighting Darth Maul in a battle that looks impressive at first but is in fact overly busy and overly choreographed.

The Phantom Menace has few reasons to like it at all. You get bored with the story. You don’t invest in the characters. You don’t engage with the events. You don’t feel your pulse racing. The plot drifts from planet to planet with very little logic at all. The dialogue is terrible. The story telling is abysmal. The direction is flat. The film throws in moments that crap over the original trilogy. Lucas made is wait for decades – but then seems to have produced a film that he didn’t really want to do. It’s a truly dire film.