NOT CRAP, NOT GREAT : 'Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace'.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace arrived after six months of unprecedented ballyhoo that prompted hundreds of people to camp outside theaters literally for days in order to see...the previews! What film could live up to such expectations? The cinematic equivalent of War and Peace, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and Wagner's Ring cycle all miraculously blended into one slam-bang work of art? I doubt it. And what kind of movie, in fact, has The Phantom Menace turned out to be?

A pretty good movie. No more. No less. A pretty good, efficiently made, second-rate science fiction movie that cost a gazillion dollars and is expected to earn a hundred gazillion. Is that what all the press rage ("Crap!" shrieked Anthony Lane in the New Yorker) is really about? And is that why the box office returns, though quite impressive, aren't living up to predictions? Because a movie that cost so much, that was ten years in incubation and six more years in actual production, simply had to deliver more than it actually delivers? Or was it because the first three Star Wars were so great and this new installment falls so far short? But I saw all three again upon their re-releases two years ago and, though I enjoyed them once again, I saw no greatness then just as I see no cause for Mr. Lane's outcry now.

But is there justice in any of the accusations-the charge of racism, for instance? Well, the amphibious creature, Jar Jar, who serves as comic foil, does bear a fair resemblance in gait to Steppin Fetchit, while his speech mannerisms are akin to Butterfly McQueen's. But will the kids who compose the bulk of the audience for Menace actually know who Fetchit and McQueen were?

Another criticism is right on target: The acting is bad and bad nearly straight across the board. The trusty Liam Neeson brings his wonted dignity and strength to the Jedi master Qui-Gon-Jinn but also gives the first dull performance of his career, probably because he got bored performing with a cast half of which was computer-generated. (Still, Bob Hoskins surmounted the same problem in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) Ewan McGregor is a flyweight as Obi-Wan Kenobi (this guy ages into Alec Guinness?), and Natalie Portman is a joke as Queen Amidala. Twenty years ago, Harrison Ford, after playing Han Solo in the first Star Wars film, complained that George Lucas knew nothing about directing actors. Lucas has learned nothing since.

On the other hand, I don't think that another charge, that Lucas's storytelling and staging are klunky, has merit. But all the criticisms, fair and unfair, are, I suspect, motivated by something in the nature of the Star Wars cycle that has always been there but only now, after twenty years, penetrates critical and popular awareness.

And that is the utter provinciality of the mind and sensibility of George Lucas. The opening credits of each installment announce, "In a galaxy long ago and far away," yet we never get out of Southern California! Each of the four completed episodes is an artifact confected by the ten-year-old, California-suburban, comic-book reading, pinball playing, TV watching, neighborhood-movie-theater frequenting proto-nerd that still survives within Lucas's head.

This was clear from the very start in 1977, when we found that the hero of this intergalactic epic was to be a snub-nosed, blonde, surfer-type named Luke Skywalker, that the heroine looked like the pretty Jewish girl next door, and that the secondary hero, Han Solo, was a clone of all those Bogart tough guys who start out cynical and wind up on the side of the angels. True, Darth Vader was a more original creation, but it's in the Hollywood tradition to allow the villain some malevolent uniqueness. I already hear the objection: but Star Wars is popular everywhere in Europe and Asia! To which I reply: Southern California rules the world. It is the Pop Empire of the mind. This works to make Star Wars accepted pop mythology.

To be sure, the overall narrative isn't provincial, for there are universal implications to any story about oppressed people, divinely destined liberators, black-clad villains, a "force" that represents divine virtue, fallen knights who turn into monsters (think of Klingsor in Wagner's Parsifal), and sons who outdo their heroic fathers by clinging to absolute virtue (think of Malory's Galahad finding the Grail while his formidable but adulterous father, Lancelot, fails). Schematically, Star Wars is a true descendant of chivalric legends.

But, in a work of art or even pop entertainment, God is in the details, in the tone and diction and visual rhetoric. And it was in its execution, in the California-cute casting and in the tooth-aching All- American dialogue that Lucas betrayed his provinciality.

Menace has more of the same. The director dresses his heroine like a Chinese princess out of Turandot, but every time Natalie Portman opens her mouth, it's Valley Girl time. The character of Jar Jar may act like Steppin Fetchit, and the villainous heads of the Trade Federation may sound like the "Japs" of World War II movies, but this isn't because Lucas is a racist. He most certainly is not. But he simply can't get those 1930s and 1940s movies (that he watched on TV in the 1950s) out of his head, and they were crammed with stereotypes. One man's racism may, I fear, be another man's visual mythology and, though Lucas draws on Arthurian myth for his story, he depends on old Hollywood for his visual and verbal language. And I sense that people are just beginning to tire of this.

Lucas's provinciality particularly disables him when he has to create a conceptually bold character. Anakin Skywalker is a gallant, even angelic kid who will nevertheless grow into the ferocious Darth Vader, avatar of the "Dark Side." So this role had to be cast with a boy possessing a certain inherent strangeness which could subtly suggest genius and malevolence and doom. (Martin Stephens in The Innocents possessed exactly this palette.) So whom did Lucas cast? A boy who is indistinguishable from any of the kid actors who infest Saturday morning TV programs. But, then again, for Lucas, perhaps, Saturday morning TV is a viable version of childhood.

However:

Lucas may be unable to create interesting human characters but he is a whiz at the fabrication of fantastic creatures and the realms they inhabit. Jar Jar is tiresome but the king of Jar Jar's fellow Gungans is a worthy cousin of Kenneth Grahame's Mr. Toad, being both impossibly pompous and unexpectedly generous. When this king has a tantrum and shakes his head while foaming at the mouth, he makes even slobber seem a royal prerogative.

Other creatures are just as delightful. Anakin's master, owner of a sort of intergalactic hardware store, is a gigantic mosquito with that insect's ability to annoy and sting (one's wallet). At the arena where Anakin races his "pod" (racing car), the announcer has two heads, each of which eggs on the other just the way our network sports announcers do. (Here is Lucas's provinciality working positively.) For the scene in which underwater monsters attack the Jedi's miniature sub, Lucas has come up with creatures based on the standard underwater horrors- dinosaurs and sharks-but he has distorted and rearranged body parts just enough to suggest something extraterrestrial. The same goes for the pack animals in the desert scenes, creative variations on camels and llamas that are just exotic enough to titillate but not so strange that they distract us from the narrative.

Lucas has always been a good action director and in this department he has gotten better. The pod race is derived from the chariot race in Ben-Hur but the imitation is even better than the prototype. There is a laser-sword duel between the two Jedi and an assassin, Darth Maul, which is a model of how to shoot such scenes. Lucas situates the combat in a palace room of mounting platforms with force fields functioning as transparent sliding doors that often separate the warriors and temporarily interrupt the fight. This gives the action ebb and flow, plus variety in composition and point of view. At one pass, with Obi- Wan incapacitated, a force field separates Qui-Gon from Darth Maul. The noble Jedi lowers himself to the floor, shepherding his strength like a yogi, but the assassin, insatiable in his blood lust, paces back and forth like a caged wolf. This moment isn't just an effective ploy for increasing suspense; it's good characterization. To compare this scene with the monotonous kung fu matches in The Matrix is to understand the difference between the artful use of violence and the lazy exploitation of noise and special effects.

And that duel in Menace is only one of the four areas of combat in the big battle scene that climaxes the movie. Lucas cuts from one zone to another with a skill worthy of D.W. Griffith, and he keeps the far- flung action coherent, tense, and increasingly suspenseful.

Lucas may be spotty as a director but he is infallible as a producer. (The producer's relation to the director is the armorer's to the knight.) He has gotten his designers, technicians, cameraman, editors, and composer to do their best work. The composer John Williams has evidently been listening to Carmina Burana and Carnival of the Animals, but he's synthesized his influences nicely. The scoring of the concluding victory march brings the story to a surging close.

So The Phantom Menace is a masterpiece, right? Get that word outta here! This movie isn't great, it isn't the heir of Malory or Wagner, it isn't the artistic counterpart of the collected works of Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell, it isn't the secular religion Star Wars fans want it to be. It is...a pretty good movie. An underrated overrated movie. If you've stayed away you could go to it casually and you might have a great casual time.