Thus far I have never done any movie reviews on this site. It's not a sacred rule, but it's one I've stuck to so far because I feel I'm better qualified to judge printed materials than audiovisual materials. When you consider that my definition of cinematography is "a big fancy word that starts with a C and has something to do film making," you may begin to realize why I take that attitude.

However, that's not to say that I would refuse to stoop to an underhanded method of reviewing the general plot and details of characterization of a popular movie if I could find a way to frame it as a review of printed material. Accordingly, ever since I first came to Epinions, I've been running searches in the database at regular intervals to see if my copy of this illustrated screenplay had made it to the database as a product ready for review. Some weeks ago I happened to run that search again and discovered it was finally listed.

It's always been an article of faith with me that if you're going to review a book, you should assume that the typical reader of the review has not read the book and knows very little about it and does not need to examine other materials (such as renting out a videotape of a movie based on the book from a store) in order to fully appreciate the impact of the book. With that in mind, I feel I have no business reviewing this book from the perspective of a person who has already seen the movie (even though I did). Instead, I'm going to approach it cold, as if this book was my first exposure to the screenplay for a proposed Star Wars movie, a prequel to the previous ones. The bulk of this review will be in the form of a letter I would have sent to George Lucas had he been wise enough to submit this to me for an opinion before he went into production. He would have greatly benefitted from doing that, but it obviously did not occur to him at the time, nor has he found it necessary to submit a rough draft of the next episode to me for advance proofreading either. A pity.

I should warn you, however, that I am assuming you are familiar with the original trilogy (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, the Return of the Jedi) or else you're making a terrible mistake in trying to get any enjoyment out of this screenplay or even my review of it. For instance, if you don't already know who Obi-Wan Kenobi is then you'll wonder why he's in this movie at all when all he ever does until the final battle is constantly doubt the wisdom of his master, the great Qui-Gon.

LETTER BEGINS

Dear George:

I've been looking over this very unpolished rough draft which word has it you are thinking of turning into the long-awaited Episode 1 of your Star Wars cycle. I must warn you not to rush into anything. As a rough draft, it has real potential. But if you went into production tomorrow morning using this as the shooting script, the results would fall hideously short of meeting the expectations of your adoring public.

The visuals are probably going to be great. The storyboards reprinted at the back for certain action sequences are quite promising. And there's a lovely color photo on the front cover showing what I gather is Darth Maul, looking something like a Kabuki dancer. (I think. Japanese Kabuki dancers are not an area of expertise for me. At any rate, the facepaint - if that's not supposed to be his natural facial appearance - is very striking.) And I see he'll be involved in a couple of lightsaber duels, a short inconclusive one and a much longer and bloodier one at the climax of the movie. That's great! I can easily throttle my longstanding suspicion that a lightsaber is ONLY a sensible weapon for a Jedi Knight to carry into battle IF he knows for a fact that his enemy will be using the same thing, as opposed to a machine gun fired from fifty yards away. After all, the lightsaber battles of the original trilogy were probably my favorite parts when I was just a young whippersnapper! Whether or not they made any sense at all, they certainly were visually appealing! (Note: For some reason, the stage directions in this screenplay keep referring to the preferred weapons of the Jedi as "laser swords." Is there any reason for this? Doesn't everybody involved in the project already know exactly what a lightsaber is and what it's supposed to look like? Why change the name?)

The basic plot is sound enough. Evil Trade Federation launching a blatantly illegal attack on the innocent little planet of Naboo . . . our Jedi heroes must escort Queen Amidala and friends back to Coruscant (capital planet of the Republic) to seek justice before it's too late . . . eventually they go back to Naboo and, against overwhelming odds (naturally!), manage to foil the evil designs of the Trade Federation, mainly because of the brilliant flying of cute little Anakin Skywalker, whom we all know will grow up to be Darth Vader someday. Meanwhile, Senator Palpatine (the future evil Emperor who will be Anakin's master as the Dark Lord of the Sith who recruits him to the evil side of the Force) is cleverly using the political ruckus (which he secretly triggered himself) to win an election and become the new Grand Chancellor of the Republic. All this is halfway reasonable and establishes a foundation for Episodes 2 and 3 to reveal how the respectable Republic of Episode 1 will gradually be transformed into the evil Empire of Episode 4.

But the devil is in the details. A lot of little things need to be changed so the viewer's brain doesn't loudly rebel against the most implausible and inconsistent aspects of the story. Most of them can be addressed by altering a few lines of dialogue here and there, without needing to scrap your storyboards and completely redo the basic concepts for all those flashy action scenes you're planning.

As one example, let us take this point about the midi-chlorians in the human bloodstream (and presumably the bloodsteams of other sentient species). It is heavily implied that the prevalence of midi-chlorians in the blood is the determining factor in a being's ability to become a powerful user of the Force. In examining the readout for Anakin Skywalker's blood sample, Obi-Wan says "Even Master Yoda doesn't have a midi-chlorian count that high!"

At another point, Qui-Gon finally explains the significance of that to Anakin himself. "Midi-chlorians are a microscopic lifeform that resides within all living cells and communicates with the force. [snipped] We are symbionts with the midi-chlorians. [snipped] Without the midi-chlorians, life could not exist, and we would have no knowledge of the Force."

There's more, but those seem to be the key concepts. Together with that comment of young Obi-Wan Kenobi's which strongly suggested that Master Yoda had held the record for living Jedi with the highest concentration until Anakin appeared on the scene, we gather that only a few people have a sufficient concentration of the pesky m-c's to have any hope of becoming Jedi, and that the higher the concentration, the stronger you may become with proper training.

The major problem is that if this is how it works, why doesn't everyone get themselves a booster shot of m-c's at regular intervals so they can develop and maintain the force-using abilities of a Jedi Knight? That problem quickly occurred to me on the first pass, because it's not the first time I've encountered exactly this flaw in the internal logic of the plot for an audiovisual presentation set in a "space opera" universe. Possibly you will recall the Classic STar Trek episode titled "Plato's Stepchildren"? Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Uhura found themselves at the mercy of a civilization where one's status was a function of the strength of one's telekinetic power relative to the other people around you. Since Kirk and Co. had no telekinesis at all, they ended up as slaves at the bottom of the heap, alongside the jester, a short little guy we all felt sorry for. Dr. McCoy, attacking the problem scientifically with 23rd Century medical equipment, was able to determine that the varying degrees of telekinetic power found in this culture were not a genetic mutation, nor some supernatural Act of God bestowing different levels of ability to each person according to their mental and moral perfection (which seemed to be the theory the natives were working on, near as I can recall), but were the direct result of a strange chemical found in the metabolism of each inhabitant of this planet. Knowing that, McCoy was quickly able to inject himself and his buddies with hefty doses of this superchemical, with the result that at the climax of the show they demonstrated they were stronger than anyone else on the planet and won their freedom.

The only problem was that after this episode concluded, McCoy and the rest of the Enterprise crew promptly forgot the entire thing, never to refer to this "telekinesis-by-injection" method again, even when facing other foes who had telekinetic abilities. Providing a "rational" and easily analyzed and mass-produced basis for personal strength in manipulating the force, you have opened the door wide open to invite such nasty questions as Gene Roddenberry firmly failed to address.

There was never any suggestion in the original trilogy that microscopic symbionts were the key to becoming a Jedi. If that were the case, we would have expected Obi-Wan and/or Yoda to exhort Luke to run such tests on every other member of the Rebel Alliance in order to find out if there was anyone else who would also profit by being run through Jedi Boot Camp on Dagobah, as Luke did. Most of us ("us" being the adoring fans of the original trilogy) tended to assume that the key factor was something genetic, and that Yoda and Obi-Wan knew perfectly well that the Emperor and his servant Darth Vader (Anakin Skywalker as a grown man) had darn near exterminated all of the old, well-established Jedi bloodlines at the time they were taking over the old Republic, only missing a few stragglers such as Obi-Wan, Yoda, and twin children whom Anakin never knew he had until the time of the movies.

In this story, however, you seem to be taking the position that genetic characteristics per se are not terribly important, unless the midi-chlorians like the individual. You even suggest the midi-chlorians caused the Immaculate Conception of Anakin Skywalker in his mommy's womb because they wanted him to "bring balance to the force." Whatever that means. And if we grant that the m-c's have a collective consciousness and long-range planning abilities, why couldn't they just select some Jedi who had been conceived in the normal fashion and was of high moral character and ability, and get busy being fruitful and multiplying in his body until he had the same high concentration that Anakin does? But I'll let that drop because (unlike most of the other problems I'm discussing in this letter) I figure you actually mean to address this perplexing subject in the next two episodes. I don't expect you to reveal all of your long-range plans to me, after all. Let's just take this one screenplay at a time!

Moving right along! We now have the question of why Anakin Skywalker, encountered at the age of nine (says the screenplay's first description of him) on the planet Tatooine, is already too old for the Jedi training regimen. (Gee, wasn't Luke about double his age when his training commenced? Two different old-timers of the Jedi organization, Yoda being one of them, both trained him without whining about his being too old to benefit properly from the experience.) Qui-Gon is considered to be a real radical for even venturing to suggest that the Council of Jedis should make an exception in this case. Begging the question of how the Jedi normally do their recruiting if their ideal candidate is a very young boy (are there any girl Jedi?) who lives at home with his parents until the Jedi stumble across him.

I never got the feeling that there are enough of them to hang around every maternity ward in the galaxy checking out newborns for strong raw potential in the Force. Granted, Qui-Gon's method of double-checking Anakin's potential after he had already sensed it via his own sensitivity to the Force was to take a blood sample and have a computer do a quick analysis for m-c concentration. If this test is really all that's required to identify potential Jedis, one would think that the Jedi Knights (a firm part of the power structure of the Republic as we see in this film, answering directly to the Grand Chancellor) would have been able to successfully lobby for a Republic-wide law requiring such testing be performed on all children at a very tender age. Possibly right there in the maternity ward! After all, a purely scientific test of a blood sample doesn't really require the presence of a Jedi Knight at all! Any trained technician could handle it!

In that fashion, they could identify all possible Jedis and offer a bounty to be handed over to his parents as compensation if they permitted him to enter Jedi training right away. That would probably pull in a fair number of recruits, although the success rate in this recruiting method would probably depend heavily upon the question of whether or not the kid would be permitted to continue living with the rest of his family while he was being trained over the next 15 or 20 years. For instance, if Standard Operating Procedure required that the kid be taken to Coruscant, headquarters of the Republic and home of the Jedi Council, would the Council subsidize the immigration of the kid's parents and siblings to a nice apartment on that planet, so the boy could have eat dinner with his family every night, and have a social life with other (non-Jedi-trainee) kids in his spare time, and have his mommy kiss him good night when he went to bed? Those were issues which I really expected to see addressed in or before the final scenes of the screenplay - but didn't.

This leads us to the next flaw in this rough draft. It is established to my satisfaction that young Anakin Skywalker and his mother, both living as slaves in the city of Mos Eisley, on the obscure planet of Tatooine, love one another dearly. That's heartwarming as far as it goes - but where exactly is it going? On the question of whether a Jedi apprentice's family is allowed to stay in contact with him, the answer initially appeared to be yes. Qui-Gon made the best effort possible under the circumstances to liberate both mother and child even though his professional interest was strictly in the child. Qui-Gon tried to get their owner to put both of them up as his side of a bet on the outcome of a pod race. He only managed to get the guy to put up Anakin, but the thought was there.

Hence, after Anakin's smashing victory in the pod race, we have the sad scene where he and his mom are saying goodbye. My personal suspicion was that you had something up your sleeve to prevent Anakin and Mom from meeting each other again for years to come, if ever (given the bad way we all know Anakin is going to turn out, for one thing) - so this scene does indeed represent the beginning of a very long separation - BUT THEY SHOULDN'T KNOW THAT!

The only reason Qui-Gon couldn't both repair his ship and liberate Anakin and his mom out of pocket change was the financial difficulty that arose. He had a large sum on him in the standard currency called Republic Credits, but couldn't spend it or exchange it. This was the most ridiculous economic-themed plot twist I have ever seen in a science fiction movie or the screenplay for one. You would think that Republic Credits would be the functional equivalent of the American Dollar in today's global economy. It's long been proverbial (among U.S. citizens, at least) that the American dollar is good anywhere! The firm belief (probably resting on a pretty solid foundation although I'm no globetrotter myself) is that banks and other financial institutions worldwide are only too happy to get their hands on a wad of American dollars when a tourist from the USA steps off the airplane and wants to exchange the wad for local currency.

After all, the Republic involves I don't know how many thousands of planets and no one claims its galactic economy is actually crashing and burning. An advantage to this set up would seem to be that if one or two planets fall on real economic hard times, others would presumably pick up the slack, so that the total size of the Republic's tax base would remain pretty darn stable from one year to the next. Just as the USA has the largest economy in the world and Third World countries do not normally expect to hear that runaway inflation is causing its dollars to decrease in value at a terrifying rate. (Unlike what has been known to happen in some of those Third World countries regarding lack of popular faith in their own currency.)

If no one else on Tatooine wanted Republic Credits for some reason that is never explained to us in this rough draft, what about Jabba the Hutt? We know he's involved in interstellar smuggling activities which would presumably give him a vested interest in having a supply of Republic Credits available for buying merchandise on other planets in the Republic. Why wouldn't he run a currency exchange service at Mos Eisley on terms which permitted him to make a very high profit by charging exorbitant commissions? Jabba always struck me as a fellow who would never pass up any chance to make a tidy and dishonest profit at very little effort to himself. But let that slide.

So Qui-Gon takes Anakin under his wing and off they go, leaving mom behind (her name, let it be said and forgotten, is Shmi. So why do I keep referring to her as Anakin's mom? Because that's how the viewer would be forced to think of her if you filmed this screenplay as it now stands. I don't think her name is ever stated in a single line of dialogue in this rough draft. Only by actually reading the screenplay do I learn she even HAS a name other than Mom! You might want to do something about that in the final draft, George. Viewers like to know the names of the interesting people they're watching. Trust me on this one.)

It seemed clear to me that Qui-Gon wanted to keep the two of them together and it was only the sheer lunacy of the Tatooinean business community's attitude toward foreign currency that prevented him from doing so in the short run. But what about the long run? As I suggested above, one would think that the Jedi Knights have run into this sort of situation many times before and would have a system for dealing such difficulties all set up and running smoothly for the past thousand years and counting (or however long the Jedi have existed). A system that involved large sums of cash to grease the wheels. Granting that Qui-Gon and Queen Amidala were extremely busy worrying about the armed invasion of planet Naboo at the time, by the end of the movie that problem has evaporated - thanks in large part to the heroic efforts of Anakin Skywalker!

Even the new Grand Chancellor meets him at the end of the movie. Of course, we have the advantage of knowing that Grand Chancellor Palpatine is not just an ambitious politician but is secretly a Jedi Knight of the Sith who has given himself to the Dark Side of the Force. (Possibly you are a tad too subtle on this point - I'm not sure everyone who watches this movie will automatically remember that Palpatine was the Emperor's name in the previous films, and therefore that Darth Maul's hooded boss, Darth Sidious, is actually Palpatine.) Granting that Palpatine wants to seduce Anakin into being his faithful follower in evil pursuits, one excellent way to inspire gratitude and trust in the young whippersnapper would be to arrange to restore his mother to his side. If it later developed that mom's tender loving care was keeping Anakin from developing along the "properly" cold-blooded lines Palpatine envisioned, he could always arrange for the lady to be assassinated by someone in a way that left no accusing fingers pointed at the Grand Chancellor. You would think that the shrewd politician who eventually turned the Republic into his personal Empire would be bright enough to see these possibilities. Even if he didn't, you would think that the honest Jedi Knights, who are (I hope) probably more in touch with the more tender emotions, such as great affection for one's mother, would think of it.

As it now stands, I can foresee a situation in Episode 3 where Anakin enters the meetingplace of the Jedi Council and starts slicing its members in half with his lightsaber, and one of them (perhaps the character meant to be played by Samuel L. Jackson) gasps out, "Why are you doing this after all we did for you?" and Darth Vader snarls, "After you did WHAT for me? Leaving my mother to rot in slavery instead of lifting a finger to bail her out? You elitist pig!" Or words to that effect. I think it would be a particularly strong scene if he snarled that at a dark-skinned character such as Jackson's, what with African-Americans have their own reasons to be extremely sensitive to the issue of slavery.

However, if that IS what you are setting up, having Anakin go evil in Episode 3 after receiving the terrible news that his mother just died in slavery back on Tatooine, it requires that everyone be absolutely brain dead in this movie when Anakin becomes the great hero. Are they going to pin a medal on his chest? Or are they going to do something practical to make him happy and demonstrate their presumably boundless gratitude?

Obi-Wan and Palpatine have some slight excuse in the short run. They never met his mother and (as of the closing scene of the movie) may not realize she exists, although I imagine they'll find out soon enough - at which time it ought to occur to them to do something about her plight on Tatooine. Qui-Gon met her but Qui-Gon is dead. But what about the Queen? She knows Anakin's mother and she knows Anakin, yet if she intended to use her power and money as ruler of a planet to bail the lady out and restore her to the side of her son, I think you would have mentioned it to us before the screenplay says we fade out to the End Titles. (I kept expecting you to!) It seems like the least she could do for the bright young lad who saved her planet so she could continue ruling it in her loveably naive way.

Which raises another point. I'll finally drop the issue of Anakin's mom and move on to the next one. No age is provided for the Queen in this script, but I get the impression (aided by some of the sketches representing her appearances in various scenes) that she's quite young. Let's say 18-22 years old as a ballpark figure? At the beginning of the screenplay I wondered vaguely why a planet that was supposedly a staunch member of the "Republic" had a "Queen" as its Chief Executive. She didn't seem to be a mere figurehead as the British monarch is these days, but rather a real policymaker. Younger (I think) than I would like to see in the top political leader of an entire planet, but if she had inherited the job (as kings and queens normally do) then I could understand how she had ended up in the hot seat at such a tender age.

Well, my concern about the coexistence of "Queen" and "member of the Republic" was addressed - more or less - in that big scene in the Galactic Senate where Senator Palpatine of Naboo is presenting his chief of state to the chamber so she can speak. Palpatine introduces her as "the recently elected ruler of the Naboo." At least two problems here, one minor, one major. The minor one: If her post is elective, why confuse the issue by calling her a Queen? The major one: Is such a young lady really the best her planet's human population could do when it was time to find a qualified candidate for Chief Executive of the entire world? Why not elect someone who's already demonstrated his talent for administrative work by serving as Mayor of a large city, Governor of a province, et cetera? If the young Queen has any past experience in running an organization of any size at all, prior to her recent election to the very top, then you do an excellent job of keeping it a deep dark secret from us. What exactly persuaded zillions of people to cast their ballots for her? Was the election fixed? Does she come from a rich family that can bribe the people who count the votes?

If you want a suggestion, you could establish at the start that Naboo normally has an elected Prime Minister who handles the day-to-day administrative work, with the Queen usually being a figurehead as in the British system. However, you could also declare that when the Prime Minister dies in mid-term, the monarch temporarily inherits the responsibilities of Chief Executive until such time as a new global election can be held and a new PM selected. Then you just find a way to kill the old PM in the first five minutes of the Trade Federation's sneak attack and the young and unqualified Queen Amidala is suddenly left in charge by default when she never expected to be - with no chance of another election until after the military invasion has been beaten off and things go back to normal. It would only require you rewrite a few lines of dialogue here and there. It could even stir up a little sympathy in the audience for her!

Of course, what passes for "back to normal" on Naboo seems to include speciesist prejucide against the Gungans, who were probably the original native residents of Naboo before human colonists came along and claimed all the best real estate for themselves. I'll bet they never offered to pay for the land they took, either. Which leads us to the question of Jar Jar Binks. Why does he exist? Even without the heavily accented dialogue, he'd be an idiot. With the accented dialogue, it only gets worse. I suppose you think he's good for comic relief, but his accent is so thick that you're going to have people wondering if incomprehensible dialogue is supposed to be funny, especially since they won't have the option of staring for several seconds at each line printed on a page until they figure out how he is butchering the English language in each instance. You might even be accused of creating him as a racist parody of some ethnic group or other right here on Planet Earth. (I'm not sure which group, because I don't know what sort of accent in real life would most closely resemble Jar Jar's as it is written in the screenplay.)

But I'm probably wasting my time telling you this, George. I'm sure you have far too much class to fall into such obvious traps by letting Jar Jar make it into the final draft as he now stands! Why, at one point he's busily losing a battle against an army of killer robots until Anakin saves the day by taking out the huge mothership and all lesser military fightercraft/soldiers/whatever suddenly cease to be a real problem. Didn't I see that clever ending in Independence Day, which probably stole it from The Last Starfighter, which probably stole it from your own The Return of the Jedi, which definitely stole it from your own Star Wars, which probably stole it from I-don't-know-what? My point is that Jar Jar accomplishes absolutely nothing in this scene. He and his Gungans are starting to get ground up as cannon fodder creating a distraction for Queen Amidala's raid in the capital, and then they get miraculously saved by outside forces. Big deal. Was he supposed to impress me with his courage as he fought a losing battle? He's too dumb to realize he and his fellow Gungans are cannon fodder without a prayer of winning the battle on their own merits?

I admit the leaders of the Trade Federation were equally dumb. Dumb enough to not realize how useless an army that only functions when it's in constant radio contact with the mothership really is! What a stupid way to program your army of loyal killer robots! Maybe they would have been better off just drafting a million farmboys of their own species, issuing blasters to them, and running them through boot camp to create an army whose soldiers would have a wee bit of initiative if they lost contact with Headquarters in the middle of a battle? Might prove to be more cost-effective in the long run than producing all those robots. But I admit an army of killer robots could make some great visuals, and we all know how important the visuals are. Remember what I said earlier about lightsaber duels being beautiful even when nonsensical?

But as I started to say, I'm sure you intend to do a major rewrite to make Jar Jar just a wee bit more intelligent and effective instead of being an embarrassingly useless detail in the story. Cleaning up his accent would help too. Concentrate on having him say funny things comprehensibly instead of things that are supposed to be funny because of how hard they are to comprehend.

Anyway, that'll do for now. A quick rewrite and things will really fall into place.

Sincerely,
Lorendiac

P.S. Having Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Jar Jar make an underwater voyage is great, but what on earth is all this nonsense about taking their submarine vehicle right through the "planet's core"? Are you aware that the core of a habitable Earth-like planet is not a water-filled cavern with big fish swimming around in it? Junk that dialogue and have them talk about the need for "hugging the ocean floor until we reach the city in order to avoid surveillance cameras in orbit" and you've got it made.

Recommended: Yes