8. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
Almost always, a genre picture will be ruined by too much exposition when it comes to the bad guys. Sometimes, you really need the villain to be two-dimensional. The less we know, the more that character remains in shadow. A good example of this can be found in
No Country For Old Men, where a hired killer moves like a spirit through the film; there's so little to hang on that character, he begins to take on almost supernatural properties. Not so with
Star Wars - at least, not now, thanks to those pesky prequels made years after the original trilogy. The ruler of the Galactic Empire was Emperor Palpatine, who didn't even appear properly until the third film, where he looked eerie and shrivelled, hidden under a heavy black cloak and hood. With lightning bursting from his fingertips, he was formidable. Now George Lucas has given us the prequel movies, we get to see how it all started. In
The Phantom Menace, Palpatine is introduced as nothing more than a civil servant, a bureaucratic bean-counter who'd toadied his way up the Imperial career ladder. It's rather like finding out Sauron from
Lord of the Rings used to muck out the stables at Rivendell. Palpatine's previously grim countenance is gone - now, he looks like someone who runs a fishing tackle shop. These humble beginnings serve only to diminish and dilute the mysteries that make some villains so effective in the first place. The rule for space opera Sci Fi must surely be 'keep it simple'.