Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace Directed by George Lucas Starring Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman Get your "Star Wars" fix at BARNES & NOBLE

Whatever the faults of the original trilogy, it's not hard to see why audiences responded to its combination of a big special-effects show with a simple Saturday-afternoon serial story of good vs. evil (except in "The Empire Strikes Back," directed by Irvin Kershner, which is the dark, gleaming jewel in the series). The movies provided audiences with the pleasures of a story familiar to them from westerns or swashbucklers while wowing them with the new movie technology on display. (And it's worth remembering just how amazing those special effects looked 22 years ago.)

In the press material for "The Phantom Menace," and in "Today" interviews that George Lucas did last week, the success of the trilogy is explained as a respite from modern cynicism and disillusionment. But in order to give audiences that sort of satisfaction, you need a simple, immediately engaging story line, and "The Phantom Menace" just doesn't have it. The plot has something to do with a trade embargo being waged against a small planet called Naboo, an embargo that turns out to be a disguise for a planned full-scale invasion. We're never told what this tiny planet could possibly be worth to the enormous Trade Federation (the way we understand, in the first "Star Wars," what the baddies stand to gain from the elimination of the rebel forces), so the story's basic conflict has no weight.

In the same fashion, we're not told how the Republic has become so weak as to allow the Federation to take over. We're supposed to be watching the back-story of the original "Star Wars" trilogy, but most of the reasons for what's taking place seem to have occurred in yet another back-story, one not sufficiently explained by the trademark monolithic crawl that starts the film. If "The Phantom Menace" really is the beginning of the story, why not just start with those familiar words, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ..."?

Except for the battle sequences, scenes rarely last longer than 15 or 20 seconds. Lucas zips from place to place, careless about giving us our bearings. There should be a special pleasure in watching the origins of characters who, whatever sins can be laid at George Lucas' door, have become mainstays of pop mythology. But action figures are given more dynamic presentation than Lucas has managed here. The young Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and the Jedi he is apprenticed to, Liam Neeson's Qui-Jon Jinn, are sent to negotiate a settlement between Naboo and the Federation, and they simply turn up, as if they were spear carriers. (I didn't even catch the name of Neeson's character until halfway through the movie -- though part of that may be because the audio has been geared more to the sounds of spaceships taking off than the sound of human speech.)

And the new characters barely register. We should feel torn watching the 9-year-old slave Anakin Skywalker (who will become the father of Luke and thus Darth Vader), as we're warming to the little boy and yet knowing what he will become. But Jake Lloyd has been directed to play the character as a scrappy little go-getter, a smudged-faced sprite. It makes no sense when Anakin is called before the Jedi council and Yoda speaks of the danger he senses in the child. Lloyd has the manufactured "spunk" of dozens of interchangeable child actors. And even if he were good, what could he do with a line like "Mom, you say the biggest problem in this universe is that nobody helps each other ..."?

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