FINALLY SAW Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace Sunday night, during its free-TV debut. It was just as mediocre as its worst critics had claimed.

It was indeed full of not-so-thinly disguised ethnic slur characterizations. It indeed had long, long sequences intended to promote spinoff video games. It indeed depicted a Top Gun attitude toward warfare as a hunting adventure in which the good guys can kill without any nagging guilt complexes (most of the enemy foot soldiers were robots!). And it indeed substituted the original films’ pseudo-Nazi villains (creatures Just Like Us, only evil) with pseudo-Asian and pseudo-Arab heavies.

The one intriguing aspect of George Lucas’s story came at the very start and was fairly quickly faded into the backgorund. The future Galactic Emporer has acquired his first army of conquest by secretly taking over a stateless, intergalactic organization called “The Trade Federation.” In a film released five months before the Seattle WTO debacle (and written at least a couple years before that), Lucas already knew to exploit the growing public fears of transnational capitalism and its potential powermongering excesses.