The Real Reason The Phantom Menace Sucked: It Was Too Indie

Posted on Wednesday, December 23, 2009

In my recent post on ’70s movies you need to see I was pretty harsh on George Lucas.

Not that he doesn’t deserve it, mind you. But it seems worth noting, given that a couple days after I posted that the Internet was graced with a positively epic 70-minute video deconstruction of all the ways in which Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace sucked.

You really should watch the whole thing — it’s hilarious, and manages to teach you a bunch of things about what makes good movies good to boot — but I’ll embed the first portion here so you can get a taste of it:

Like I said, watch the whole thing.

The final part of the video review goes beyond the specific details of what sucked about the film and offers some theories as to the process that could lead Lucas to think those details were good ideas. In doing this, it tiptoes up to an important point that’s relevant to anyone who works in a creative field, but never quite makes the point directly, so allow me to do it for them:

The reason why The Phantom Menace sucked was that it was too indie.

You heard me. The Phantom Menace was too indie.

Calling a movie that cost more than $100 million to make (including $20 million for advertising) “indie” may seem ridiculous. But it isn’t really. Indie isn’t about how much you spend, it’s about how much freedom you have in how you spend it.

For most filmmakers, that freedom is limited. The money, after all, isn’t theirs. It’s coming from a studio or a production company or a deep-pocketed backer, all of whom are seeking a return on their investment. Their money comes with conditions; it has strings attached. Additionally, they have to work with collaborators — actors and writers and technicians — all of whom are creative people in their own right, with their own opinions about what shape the movie should take, and most of whom have their own masters to serve.

In making Episode I, on the other hand, George Lucas had unlimited creative freedom. He was financing the picture himself, out of the vast fortune he had made selling Burger King cups with pictures of Ewoks on them. He was his own director, his own screenwriter. He did his own casting. He had his own special-effects house. And on and on.

The Phantom Menace was as indie as you can get.

And yet it sucked.

Why?

The answer points to one of the many, many ways in which hipsters are wrong about everything. If the Hipster Ethos can be said to have a core set of beliefs, one of them surely must be that Indie is Good and Corporate is Bad. Indie is punk kids cutting CDs in their mom’s basement, Corporate is suits and lawyers and focus groups. Indie is art, Corporate is product.

And maybe that’s even true. But there is a little-discussed dark side of the Indie Dream: total creative freedom sounds great, and it usually feels great, but it’s far less reliable in consistently turning out a great final product.

Why? Because sharing creative control means exposing your idea to minds other than your own — minds that may not share your biases and blind spots. Minds that may see weaknesses in your work that you would have otherwise missed.

Certainly there have been plenty of occasions in creative businesses where shortsighted bean counters snatched something beautiful from the hands of an artist, only to ruin it. Just think back to Orson Welles and The Magnificent Ambersons, whose true ending is lost to us forever because dimwitted test audiences and risk-averse studio execs didn’t “get it.”

It’s stories like Welles’ that have every director, every pop star, every game designer, on constant guard and dreaming of a day when they can afford to shut such interference out for good. But when that dream came true for George Lucas, it harmed his art more than it helped.

Lucas had achieved the Indie Dream. But that meant there was nobody around him to tell him that aliens that talked like Amos ‘n Andy might not be a good idea; nobody to tell him that the plot of his movie made no sense; nobody to tell him that Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman and Liam Neeson were capable of turning in far, far better performances than the wooden ones they were bringing to the set each day.

Or maybe there were such people around; who knows. But the point is, even if there were, Lucas didn’t have to listen to them. They all worked for him. The only voice he had to listen to was his own. And his own voice wasn’t telling him what he needed to hear.

You don’t need to be working at the scale Lucas was to experience this. Anyone who’s ever watched a collection of student films or listened the CD their cousin’s band cut has almost certainly seen some that ended up the same way: an audience wondering what the heck the artist was thinking, and an artist wondering why nobody gets his or her Grand Vision. But when you turn a student film into an exercise in tunnel vision, you usually only embarrass yourself in front of a few people. When you work at the scale Lucas was, you create a kind of grand monument to folly.

But, you ask, if an artist feels that their work embodies their vision, how can it be judged a failure, even if nobody else understands it? The short answer is that art is a form of communication, and a communication that only the sender can decipher is a meaningless one.

People don’t have to “understand” art on a purely intellectual level; art that moves them emotionally, or even subconsciously, is still provoking a reaction. But art that provokes no reaction, other than confusion? That just leaves the audience standing there scratching their heads?

It’s like the old riddle about a tree falling in a forest: if a piece of art fails to provoke a reaction in anyone who looks at it, is the world any richer than it would have been if that art had never been made at all?

This is why “indie” is a double-edged sword. It takes a keen mind to take over complete creative control of a project, any project, and yet still be open enough to external feedback — not to mention willing to even seek such feedback out! — to change course when a course change is required; to recognize when something that speaks to them speaks to nobody else.

To get, in other words, outside their own head.

With the original Star Wars, Lucas took audiences to the farthest edge of the galaxy. But twenty years later, even exploring the world beyond his own ego proved to be a journey too far.