Now This is Podracing!

…actually Anakin, no. This isn’t Podracing. Shut up.

ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM!

In all due seriousness, the Podrace scene is the centerpiece of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Even in the early trailers, I saw the highlights and wondered about it—perhaps an obvious Ben Hur homage with the sci-fi chariot design, but I have a feeling Lucas put this in for his own love of cars and the 50s culture of cruising and drag-racing.

From the moment everybody lands on Tatooine, it t was very transparent to me what the film was doing and why, and it’s sort of a problem with the film’s plot (one of many, unfortunately). After the blockade run, the film introduced a problem: the hyperdrive’s leaking. So the ship lands and is marooned there for a good chunk of the story. Not only did this screech the story to a halt for a long time, but it also painted the story into a corner. Because at some point, we all knew going in that Anakin would have to join the party. How does that happen? Duh, winning his freedom. And all the characters put their faith in it without exploring other alternatives—Padme even gripes about this, but it’s Qui-Gon that shuts her down. Because, faith I guess.

But because we know that the ship has to get off of Tatooine at some point, we know that Anakin wins in the end. He has to. With the way the Podrace is set up, there is no other way for the story to go. Most of the Tatooine scenes are spent building up the stakes behind the race, so it’s pounded into us that Anakin must win or else he remains a slave, everybody remains stuck on the planet, and Watto gets rich off of everyone’s misery. Nobody wants to see that outcome, so of course little Ani has to win.

Because you know the outcome, the race scene can be seen as a drag. It goes through the motions of showing precisely how Anakin overtakes every other racer, or how most of the racers crash and lose, until he becomes the last racer standing. It takes 15 minutes of screen-time. Any other movie can cover loads of ground in the same amount of time. 15 minutes in A New Hope shows all of the Battle of Yavin, which includes significant strides in showing Luke and Han's character arcs (and those pieces take a matter of minutes after a long series of battle shots). The purpose of the Podrace scene? To show one small piece of the story that enables it to continue. A secondary purpose may be to keep the audience awake in the movie's already-sagging middle.

And yet, this was a scene I always loved watching. Watch it on its own, independent of the rest of the film, and it is a well-crafted setpiece with an entertaining string of action beats. The scene is loaded with obstacles and challenges that Anakin has to overcome, and it becomes an inspiring thrill ride to see him start from last place and eventually catch up to Sebulba. Hardly a minute goes by without some level of peril erupting that threatens to take Anakin out. We see these things take out other racers, and that establishes the threat. When Anakin encounters the same problems, he overcomes them through skill, persistence, or smarts. Along the way, we see Sebulba's treachery, which paints him as a villain we love to hate, and it becomes rewarding to see him crash in the end.

In 1999, the scene was fairly chilling and exciting. Few things made it age poorly—the effects remain a mixed bag, Jar Jar's commentary (brief though it is) is grating, Jabba's cameo is useless, and there are some really silly jokes scattered throughout the scene. All of that juxtapose to scenes where aliens die in horrible explosions and crashes and such. It's tonally weird.

What I think hurts the scene more is that it does nothing else to add to the movie, its characters, or its story. The best it offers is a piece of cool world-building (something that a decent video game—Star Wars Racer—provided). Like most other pieces of the movie's plot, this scene merely goes through the motions.

BOOM BOOM BOOM!

Just out of curiosity, I've wondered how else this entire subplot could have been handled. Assuming the story's problems remain the same (Amidala and the gang are stuck on Tatooine, Anakin remains a slave who has to team with them eventually), I believe alternate solutions could have been viable.

• Here's something introduced in the movie that's never covered again: explosive implants injected into the slaves. It's not made clear where these implants are, but Anakin confirms that any wrong move will cause an explosion. It's a pretty extreme solution that movies like Battle Royale, Escape From New York, and Suicide Squad use to show a brutal authoritarian means of control. It's pretty extreme for a Star Wars film, especially this one, so I was intrigued to see if this is overcome somehow. To my disappointment, it's never brought up again. The dialogue only exists to explain why Anakin can't just run away from Watto. But the kid is a tinkerer who built his own racer and protocol droid. He claims to have been working on a scanner to locate his implant. Why not finish the scanner and use it? Or for that matter, why not have the two Jedi use the Force to find the scanner inside of Anakin and Shmi and deactivate them? Then the two would have been free to walk away from Mos Espa (this doesn't solve the dilemma of how to get the ship working again though). As it is, the implant is a thread that's never tied up.  
• Taking a page from the recent film Alita: Battle Angel, this scene could have been interrupted in favor of larger stakes or concerns. Suppose there was a conspiracy to kill Anakin (possibly through Sebulba, Jabba, Darth Maul, or all of them combined). If he senses this in the middle of the race (and he could with the Force), he could go completely off-track to escape danger, and possibly lead his pursuers through an even more dangerous route. Anakin wouldn't win his freedom, but at this point it wouldn't even matter--there would be bigger issues to resolve (and this would spur Qui-Gon and maybe even Padme into action), and in the process they could free Anakin some other way.
• What if they go through with the Podrace, but Anakin loses? This would mean Qui-Gon and the gang get nothing and all the story problems remain, but now Watto profits. 
• The quickest and easiest solution to this would be to have Sebulba disqualified after the race ends, which would make Anakin the winner by default. This is a trope that other sports movies seem to use, which shows that cheaters don't win even when it appears like they do. The problem I see with this scene is that doing it this way would rob Anakin of the victory of crossing the finish line himself, and all the feels it brings. 
• Otherwise, everybody starts back on square one, and Watto would be less likely to relinquish his parts or his slave to Qui-Gon. Their next best option would be to appeal to Watto in some way, most likely by making bets with him that he eventually loses. If this ties in with Jabba some how, then Watto could be undone by the criminal network of Mos Espa, forcing him to give up control of Anakin and his shop. I wouldn't know exactly how this would happen, but it could happen since Watto's betting habits are his greatest weakness. 
• One wrench could be thrown into the story—Darth Maul, who has been hunting the characters throughout these scenes. If he arrives at Mos Espa and fights Qui-Gon in the streets, the sheer havoc could affect the outcome in a very unexpected way. Maybe this could spur Anakin to use his latent Force abilities to protect his new friends—maybe even break the explosive implant he has before running into the fight (he might be really young for this kind of engagement, but if he hops into his Podracer and rams it into Darth Maul, that might be of great help). 

The Star Wars Podrace scene might be a primo example of a movie action scene that serves no good purpose. And it's sad in a series that's defined itself with major action scenes that propel the stories in exciting directions. One gets the impression that the Podrace scene was conceived of early in the writing process as an obvious way for the characters to move forward, but without any consideration for how to weave it organically into the narrative or find ways to show character growth. If you skip this scene, you miss nothing, and that ought to be a red flag that this scene should have been shorter, or it should have run differently.

Podracing--very fast, very dangerous. In the movie, surprisingly tedious.

Sebulba secretly plots his revenge...