This is not the greatest film ever made, as some fans would have you believe, nor does it signal the death knell of artistic motion pictures, as high-brow critic-prophets cry out.

Consideration of the movie, with its strengths and weaknesses, deserves to be divorced from an analysis of the Star Wars phenomenon. Those who have camped out at a theater box office for three-plus weeks may disagree, as may those who have spent $500 on an advance charity screening, but, in the end, everyone will be doing the same thing, regardless of whether they're the first admission or the last: sitting in a darkened theater, staring at the screen, and absorbing the sounds and images that represents the vision of a film maker who has left an indelible imprint upon two generations of movie-goers. Indeed, when you get right down to it, The Phantom Menace is a movie, and can be treated as such. but when you get a situation like this where you have so much hype and expectation, a movie can't possibly live up to that.' I'm happy that Star Wars stimulates young people's imagination. In New York on May 9, he was quoted as saying, 'People should have a well-rounded life. Even Lucas, who will reap the majority of The Phantom Menace's financial windfall, is concerned. The hype has dwarfed the film, reducing it to a cultural footnote. Yet, in terms of both intensity and widespread interest, the motion picture industry has never seen anything like this before, nor is it likely to in the foreseeable future (not even in 3 years, when the next Star Wars movie is released). And Star Trek: The Motion Picture had Trekkies and Trekkers standing in lines for hours on end. Goldfinger was so popular that some movie houses stayed open 24 hours a day to meet demand. Gone with the Wind was the entertainment event of the '30s. When it comes to unbridled anticipation generated by the release of a film, The Phantom Menace has antecedents. Over the course of 22 years, it has grown into a full-blown phenomenon - an event that gives promoters orgasmic shivers and makes theater employees wish they could take a week off. When George Lucas first conceived the idea for Star Wars, it was just a movie.

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