Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace

The Phantom Menace occupies a peculiar position in the woke canon: a 1999 film made before contemporary progressive sensibilities had coalesced, yet one that contains elements which would later become flashpoints for cultural debate. The film presents itself as a grand space opera unconcerned with the identity politics of the modern age, which is to say it is largely unconcerned with such matters altogether. What progressive elements exist are incidental rather than ideological. Natalie Portman's Queen Amidala commands armies and makes political decisions, though the film treats her primarily as a romantic prospect for a Jedi and a mother figure for Anakin, rather than exploring her agency with any depth. The film contains numerous alien races and cultures, but this diversity serves the narrative machinery of a galaxy far away rather than functioning as a statement about representation or inclusion.

The more substantive cultural criticism concerns the film's casting and character design choices, which have aged poorly under contemporary scrutiny. Ahmed Best's motion-captured Jar Jar Binks and the trade federation aliens, with their vaguely Asian-coded accents and mannerisms, have been subject to retrospective analysis as embodying problematic stereotypes. Yet these elements were not created with the deliberate social consciousness that would characterize modern progressive cinema. They emerge instead from a pre-2015 sensibility about what constituted acceptable alien characterization. The film's treatment of slavery (Anakin's backstory) is presented as tragic backdrop rather than as a platform for exploring systemic oppression. The narrative accepts the existence of slavery in the universe without interrogating it, much as a medieval fantasy might.

In terms of the specific markers of contemporary progressive cultural sensibility, The Phantom Menace barely registers. There is no LGBTQ+ content, no climate consciousness, no body positivity discourse, no neurodivergent representation, and no lecture energy about the systems it depicts. The feminist agenda is muted at best. The film is, in short, a product of its time, which is precisely the point. It cannot be scored as though it were made in 2024. The score reflects not moral condemnation but rather an honest assessment of how little the film engages with the specific cultural preoccupations of the 2020s progressive sensibility that defines "wokeness" in the contemporary sense.