‘The Phantom Menace’ and Multi-Protagonist Story Arcs

It’s been 25 years since George Lucas released Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace in theaters, adding the first new chapter to the Star Wars saga in 16 years. Lucas was the first to admit that he was a much better visual storyteller than a screenwriter, but he is so well-versed in the craft of storytelling and cinema history that it’s impossible for him to miss the target completely. 

For some, The Phantom Menace is a curiosity. George Lucas has long maintained that the Star Wars movies were designed for kids and none more so than The Phantom Menace, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have things to teach storytellers. No one is able to craft sequences that could very easily be read as nonsense with the clarity and economy of George Lucas. 

As one example, remember the moment in the podrace where young Anakin Skywalker’s pod—a massive jet engine strapped to a cockpit—catches fire? Young Anakin (Jake Lloyd) is able to manipulate his controls into putting out the fire. We have no frame of reference for how any of that technology works, but the visual storytelling is strong enough that it makes perfect sense. 

Lucas is also able to use visuals—since film is primarily a visual medium—to distill everything we need to know about the characters in any given conflict into a series of silent images that tell the story. For instance, the moments during the climactic lightsaber duel where the red energy shields separate Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), Darth Maul (Ray Park), and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor). Darth Maul’s body language, pacing back and forth like a caged jungle cat, exudes the rage of the character. Qui-Gon Jinn drops to a sitting position, closes his eyes, and meditates, showing us how much of a Jedi master he is. Obi-Wan Kenobi bounces ready, like a racehorse at the starting gate, showing us just how much Qui-Gon’s apprentice has to learn.

There is so much good filmmaking in The Phantom Menace, it’s worth studying on that level alone, but there is even more to learn as well.

One of the complaints leveled against the too-often maligned Episode I is the idea that there’s no single main protagonist. I was always curious why this argument about the movie was taken as given and somehow understood to be a negative. Multi-protagonist arcs that share a common (or generally adjacent) super-goal is something that’s been common across the history of cinema. Going back as far as Gunga Din in 1939 and probably even further, the function of a protagonist can be split into different aspects and characters to add up to one, cohesive whole in a film. At its most basic, this is how Star Trek functions: Kirk, Spock, and McCoy function almost like a single character, separating the gut feelings, logic, and emotion out of a single complex person and dramatizes it accordingly as they work toward the same goal.

The Phantom Menace splits these functions across Qui-Gon Jinn, Anakin Skywalker, and Queen Amidala. Although their goals aren’t exactly the same, their individual goals aim the plot in the same direction, and their choices and actions all affect it equally. Lucas pulled a lot of the structure of how to do this from Akira Kurosawa’s film The Hidden Fortress, which uses a multi-protagonist structure as well. In that film, you have the two peasants, General Makabe, and the Princess as your main POV characters. Each have their own reasons to make it through the territory and there are twists and turns involving body doubles and enemy forces, but the points of view in the narrative are split distinctly between those characters. Each minor protagonist has their own motivations and secrets from the others.

This structure was mirrored in A New Hope, as well. Lucas talked often about how The Hidden Fortress gave him the idea to utilize Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio this way. “I greatly admired Kurosawa, especially the film Hidden Fortress, which told a story from the point of view of two serfs, two […]peasants who tag along with this famous general and a princess– y'know, royalty. And the whole story is told from their point of view. And I like that idea. I like the idea of telling a story from the lowest person’s point of view, uh, in the food chain, and that’s how the story got to be told by Artoo and Threepio.”

But Princess Leia shared the POV with the droids, as did Luke Skywalker.

Many war films share this kind of structure. It could be argued that Gregory Peck’s Keith Mallory is the main protagonist in The Guns of Navarone, but there are too many decisions and story turns that lean on David Niven’s Corporal Miller and Anthony Quinn’s Stavros’s decisions, actions, and POVs. They are distinctly different and have different internal motivations even though they all share the same super goal. In The Guns of Navarone, each of the characters is put together on a team in order to destroy the titular cannons before a certain time in order to prevent more loss of allied life. But on a personal level, each of them has their own reasons that drive their decisions, including revenge against each other and putting those old animosities aside, no matter how temporary.

In The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon, Anakin, and Padmé all adopt the super goal (and central narrative question) of liberating Naboo. For Qui-Gon, it’s an assignment. For Anakin, it’s an overwhelming desire to help. For the Queen it’s an overriding sense of duty to free her people. But for all of them, the central narrative question about the freedom of Naboo becomes their shared goal, and however the story meanders, it’s all in aid of accomplishing that goal. So many war movies function this way. In The Dirty Dozen, a case could be made that Lee Marvin’s Major Reisman is the main protagonist, but an equal case could be made for John Cassavetes’ Victor Franko, or even Charles Bronson’s Wlaidslaw, or any of the titular dozen. They each have different motivations for completing the mission, but the mission is what dominates the film and the central narrative question becomes, “Will they complete the job at hand?”

As long as your characters can pay heed to their personal missions while focusing on the overarching narrative of the screenplay, you’re going to have a cohesive story. In The Phantom Menace, that narrative begins in the opening crawl text of the film. “The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute. Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade of deadly battleships, the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo.”

Regardless of who becomes our main protagonists, we know that the film won’t end until that particular question has been resolved. It works with all of the Star Wars movies, actually. When you look at the maneuverings of The Phantom Menace, every detour taken is still in service of answering that question. When the Jedi get involved in the conflict, the mysterious Sith lord Darth Sidious orders the Trade Federation to launch an all-out invasion of Naboo. They capture Queen Amidala who struggles to keep her planet free. The Jedi, led by Qui-Gon Jinn, rescue her and whisk her away to plead for help. In breaking the blockade, their ship is damaged and they are forced to make a landing on Tatooine where they meet the idealistic young Anakin Skywalker who comments that the biggest problem in the universe is that nobody helps each other. 

To combat this personally, he pledges to do what he can to help them get on their way and rescue Naboo. When Anakin wins the podrace, he wins his own freedom. Qui-Gon has gambled to free the young slave in addition to the parts they need to get to the capital of the Republic. There, they plead for help, and finding the gears of bureaucracy too slow to aid in their crisis, they travel back to Naboo on their own in hopes of repelling the invasion on their own. Because of the machinations of the Sith, the Jedi Council sends Qui-Gon to Naboo to protect the Queen and Anakin—who they have refused to let him train—at the same time. Together, all three fight a different front in the battle of Naboo—each obstacle themed and aligned with their personal motives—and repel the attack.

It’s quite an elegant story that mirrors the struggles of General Makabe and company in Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. With so much precedent in the history of filmmaking, I’ve always been baffled by accusations that it’s not well-written. It’s a whiz-bang ‘30s action serial with a classic adventure story structure and dialogue ripped straight out of that era of film—which makes sense, too. If A New Hope is the ‘70s in Star Wars and the acting and dialogue style is true to that period of filmmaking, and The Phantom Menace goes back even further, making the prequels pastiches of the filmmaking and acting techniques of the ‘30s and ‘40s, it fits on the timeline with Star Wars perfectly. That’s why the sequel trilogy does the same thing with even more modern flourishes in the future of A New Hope.

Movies like The Phantom Menace or The Guns of Navarone follow very specific characters through the whole of the narrative, but there are other screenplays that just as elegantly shift the cast constantly through the narrative, but never losing the urgency of the main narrative question. 

Take A Bridge Too Far, for example, adapted by William Goldman. There are characters that exist for a single scene or three through the narrative, but by seeing all of their varied points of view, the audience is able to add up the stakes for the entirety of the mission being portrayed. A Bridge Too Far dramatizes the real-life World War II mission Operation: Market Garden. As it’s presented in the narrative, this is a desperate bid to end the war early by achieving key objectives behind enemy lines, making the narrative question clear: do they end the war early or not? It almost doesn’t matter how many characters Goldman chewed through to answer the question as long as each of them was compelling and unique enough to stand on their own in the interests of answering that question.

As you’re crafting your own story that involves a group of protagonists sharing a goal, keep these lessons from The Phantom Menace (and others!) in mind. And when someone points to a movie like this and says, “But who is the protagonist?” as though they know what they’re talking about, you can point them to all of the protagonists and explain the arch-plot governing the actions of everyone. It’s how these sorts of stories work.

And with Phantom Menace having its silver anniversary, there’s never a wrong time to revisit its galaxy far, far away. It’s aged much better than most movies from the late ‘90s, and remains timeless in the world of Star Wars.