THE PHANTOM MENACE (60)

Directed by: George Lucas

Starring: Liam Nesson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd

The Pitch: In the course of protecting Queen Amidala from the nefarious Trade Federation, a Jedi Knight and his apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi, come across a young boy named Anakin Skywalker, in whom the Force is obviously very strong.

Theo Sez: Turns out I'm probably the ideal audience for this amiable, inessential fairytale - which I guess can only be a mark of its failure, given my STAR WARS credentials (saw the first one when I was a kid, thoroughly enjoyed it, had forgotten all about it three days later ; had similar experiences with EMPIRE and (less so) JEDI, and now with this fourth / first instalment). Still very solid and exceptionally gorgeous, albeit in a way that has more to do with computers' capacity for data storage than any visual imagination - the images thrive on scale and size, from entire cities spread out before us to a massive debating-hall with individual podia as far as the eye can see, and there's gigantism in the climax too, going MASK OF ZORRO one better by having three separate battles going on at the same time (I still say all the cross-cutting undermines rather than enhances the excitement). Yet there's something about it, something one hesitates to call innocence (under the circumstances) but which is certainly an absence of irony : it provides kiddie pleasures - a pod-race like an elaborate PlayStation game, or a vaguely Power Rangers moment as everyone abseils up a tower in their multi-coloured costumes - without winking at the rest of us, and takes a child's- building-blocks delight in mapping out its world (here's the underwater country, over here's the desert, there's the domed, Oriental-looking city) ; its lack of sophistication is disarming, leaving critics with little to say, which might explain the absurd ruckus over "racial slurs" (villains and comic relief have always talked in funny accents : is the procession of Hollywood villains who sound like BBC announcers a slur on the English?). Comparisons with Tolkien are well-founded, though another undertone is less commonly noted - the analogy with America itself, a huge melting-pot of different cultures and races living together in precarious harmony. Maybe that explains why Europe remains (relatively) immune to this baffling phenomenon.