As a the holy trinity of the original Star Wars trilogy. They both had to introduce new characters and worlds, and begin a three-part story that would make up an important part of the Skywalker bloodline’s storied history. So, without further ado, here are 5 Things The Phantom Menace Did Better Than The Force Awakens (And 5 The Force Awakens Did Better).
The Phantom Menace: Introducing new characters alongside familiar characters
In The Phantom Menace, we see a non-exiled Yoda leading the Jedi Council with Mace Windu. We see a young Obi-Wan Kenobi getting trained by the wise Master Qui-Gon Jinn. We see Anakin Skywalker as a doe-eyed kid described as “the Chosen One.” George Lucas deftly interwove his new characters with the familiar characters. The Force Awakens, however, thanks to Disney’s overreliance on the audience’s nostalgia, underdeveloped the new characters in the first act and then sidelined them throughout the rest of the movie in favor of catching up with the original trilogy’s lead characters and winking at the audience.
The Force Awakens: Dialogue
It’s no secret that George Lucas isn’t the best writer of dialogue. Lines such as “I don’t like sand,” and “Are you an angel?” fall flat on their face. But the combination of brainpower that went into crafting the script for The Force Awakens — with J.J. Abrams dipping into his “mystery box,” Michael Arndt bringing Oscar-winning pathos, and Star Wars veteran Lawrence Kasdan shaping it into the saga’s immutable style — came up with some brilliant dialogue. The exchanges between odd-couple pairings like Rey and BB-8, or Finn and Poe, or Kylo Ren and General Hux, maintain Star Wars’ distinctive corniness, but the phrasing doesn’t grate on the ears.
The Phantom Menace: A threatening villain
Darth Maul only appeared as a villain in The Phantom Menace. He wasn’t being primed for a multi-movie arc. He was just a pawn in Palpatine’s larger game. But he still managed to make more of an impression than Kylo Ren in Disney’s sequel trilogy. Maul was a genuinely terrifying presence, like Darth Vader was in the original trilogy.
Kylo Ren, on the other hand, is just a bratty kid. He has never felt like a real threat, he has never successfully scared the audience, and his repeated failures give fans little fear that he’ll succeed in dominating the galaxy.
The Force Awakens: Mixing practical effects with CGI
When George Lucas made The Phantom Menace — and the whole prequel trilogy, as a matter of fact — CGI effects were in their infancy. Lucas had to pioneer a bunch of technologies and software through his companies just to produce the effects he needed for the films. This meant that he focused a lot more heavily on CGI than practical effects. All of the effects in the original trilogy had been done practically. With CGI technology at its peak when J.J. Abrams and co. made The Force Awakens, they were able to determine the perfect balance between CGI effects and practical effects.
The Phantom Menace: Bold creative decisions
George Lucas went to painstaking lengths to make The Phantom Menace stand out from the original trilogy. He designed a more technologically advanced society, because unlike the original trilogy, the prequels were set during a time of widespread peace. He pioneered CGI software to depict Battle Droids as the new faceless villains as opposed to the Stormtroopers. And he gave us brand-new worlds, like the monarchy Naboo and the city-planet Coruscant. The Force Awakens was less bold, rehashing the Rebels-versus-Empire conflict from the original trilogy, and updating the Stormtroopers’ armor instead of replacing them, and giving us yet another desert planet.
The Force Awakens: Putting politics in the background
12-year-olds and 40-year-olds who are 12 at heart alike don’t go to Star Wars movies to watch political debates between aliens representing different institutions. It’s boring. There have always been political undertones in Star Wars — the battle between the Rebels and the Empire was conceived as a thinly veiled allegory for the then-ongoing Vietnam War — but in the prequel trilogy, it’s very on the nose. We spend entirely too much time in Galactic Senate hearings, listening to politicians argue about interstellar trade. The Force Awakens put the politics in the background in favor of spectacle and character moments. (Actually, the politics of The Force Awakens are unclear — the First Order’s ideologies are never outlined — but the point is, who cares?)
The Phantom Menace: Thematic substance
Although it’s yet another “chosen one” story — the most overused plot device in science fiction and fantasy — The Phantom Menace has a lot of strong themes, including fear and loyalty. The Force Awakens doesn’t have much in the way of thematic substance. Every creative decision was made based on the aesthetic of the Star Wars universe and the stock characters that we’re used to. It can be read as a metatext about the power of nostalgia, but since it made over $2 billion at the box office, it’s more likely that it was simply a non-metatext about a corporation milking its newly acquired cash cow.
The Force Awakens: Comic relief
Humor has always been a big part of Star Wars. But while some of the jokes land (“Laugh it up, fuzzball!”), a lot of the others end up making the audience cringe (“The negotiations were short!”). The jokes that land have generally come from the dryly hilarious Carrie Fisher’s on-set contributions to the scripts. The ones that don’t usually come from the pen of George Lucas.
The comic relief in The Force Awakens worked out really well. BB-8 never failed to bring the house down with an exasperated beep or a slapstick-y flourish, while likable actors like Oscar Isaac and Daisy Ridley nailed the comedic lines.
The Phantom Menace: No rehashed plots
Okay, The Phantom Menace does end with Anakin reluctantly taking a spacecraft out to the bad guys’ intergalactic outpost and blowing it up. But the overall plot of The Phantom Menace is an original space opera. The Force Awakens copied the Rebels, the Empire, the masked villain, the planet-exploding space station, and the basic story structure of A New Hope. The Phantom Menace introduced us to new worlds, new characters, and new story possibilities. It set up the tragic rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker, establishing the prequel trilogy as a type of story that we’d never seen in the Star Wars saga before.
The Force Awakens: Focused direction
George Lucas is an incredible filmmaker. He singlehandedly changed the way that Hollywood movies were made and pioneered a bunch of post-production techniques that have now become the norm. But in of his actual filmmaking, he has a tendency to lose focus. The perspectives of the characters get mixed up and there are long, drawn-out sequences that don’t take the plot anywhere. J.J. Abrams might not be the greatest storyteller in the world (unless that story was already told in 1977), but he does have a strong command of the technical aspects of filmmaking. Abrams brought brilliantly focused direction to The Force Awakens.