A man named George Lucas made a movie called The Phantom Menace. It became the top-grossing science fiction film of all time, but alienated many of the faithful -- a vocal, fractious group to begin with.

Disappointment turned to resentment, resentment turned to anger, and we can all follow along to the Dark Side from there.

Suddenly, the acting was "wooden." George Lucas, we discovered to our chagrin, "can't direct actors" and "can't write dialogue." The characters were "cold" ciphers, flesh-and-blood action figures devoid of the human touch that had allowed us to see the wonder of a Tatooine sunset through Luke Skywalker's eyes.

And we won't even talk about Jar Jar Binks and his "feeble" efforts to provide comic relief. Fans were enraged when Lucas defended his Gungan creation as a character tailored for children. Was that the best defense Uncle George had to offer?

Had we grown old while Star Wars had stayed the same age?

We know that Lucas picks his actors with extraordinary care, and even then works intensively with them to shape them to his requirements.

For example, in Menace, Natalie Portman received that famous Middle Atlantic accent and Ewan McGregor became an uncanny younger version of Alec Guinness.

Why would a director take such pains with his actors, only to then allow them to coast through the film -- either through laziness or lack of talent -- without delivering the emotional fireworks that Hollywood teaches us to call "good acting?"

Maybe the trademark Star Wars flat affect and dreamy, almost stylized delivery are there by design.

Just maybe, George isn't interested in watching actors prove how loud they can cry.

A long time ago, or so the anthropologists say, the function of drama was not to reenact the everyday world but to express the patterns lurking deep below the surface.

The earliest plays were religious rituals depicting unearthly events -- the birth of the universe, the lives of the gods and heroes, the dance of fate and death. Psychological realism and the crusade to capture the inner workings of emotional life with photographic precision would come much, much later.

One of the most prominent directors working in a "ritual" style is probably Peter Brook, whose experience with Shakespeare eventually led him to stage such religious works as "The Mahabharata" and the epic Sufi parable, "The Conference of the Birds".

As he puts it, the goal of any dramatic performance -- play or film -- is "dealing with the mysterious, almost formless, movement of human relationships."

Interestingly, the performances in Phantom Menace are strikingly similar to those found in a typical Brook production.

Emotionally-charged dialogue that would become histrionics or shouting in another director's work become internalized, serene on the surface but charged with surprising flashes into the depths.

The most important things are always left unstated, where they can play on the imagination. It is a super-Shakespearean approach, rooted in decades of exploring sacred drama from around the world.

Like Brook, Lucas seems unwilling to let actors distract the audience from the mythic work at hand -- the individual actor must be subordinate to the ensemble and to his or her role in the epic retelling of the Star Wars saga.

Not surprisingly, both directors prefer to work with talented unknowns and near-unknowns. Recognizable stars tend to bring too much baggage of past roles and fame, distracting the audience.

Brook cautions his actors -- with more than a little humor -- that "to think of playing a god is madness." This line takes on special relevance to the shape of Star Wars when we remember that George Lucas, as we have been told throughout his career, is fixated on the series, with its galactic monsters, heroes and superhuman feats as a "modern myth."

Mythology, as we all know and almost always forget, is more than a collection of adventure stories and just-so fables. Myth is the twin of ritual -- the myth gives ritual performance meaning, while the ritual gives the gods and monsters of myth outward form.

How does one play Darth Vader? With a lot of maniacal laughter, or with icy restraint? If it's madness to think of playing a god, it can't be much easier to play the devil.

The myth, unlike the adventure story, takes place outside everyday linear time -- or so Campbell, Eliade and the other big mythological names say.

While a myth is being performed, the audience and actors are participating in events that may never have happened, returning to the distant past or even the origin of things. It is "once upon a time." It is "a long time ago."

Perhaps The Phantom Menace looks so much like Star Wars or its sequels because the prequel trilogy is -- at least in part -- not a new mythic cycle at all, but the same cycle performed anew.

Greek tragedies and medieval passion plays were only performed at regular intervals -- once a year, once a decade. Every time, the dialogue was the same, and everyone knew the plot -- except for the people too young to see the last performance.

In The Phantom Menace, we know what's going on. The boy hears the call to adventure, the mentor dies, the big ship at the heart of enemy territory blows up, virtue triumphs. It's like watching Star Wars one more time, only this time it's a super-Special Edition, with all new effects and additional characters, scenes cut from the original.

Of course the ending of the prequel trilogy will probably be a little different.

Whether Lucas is pandering to a new generation of children or consciously playing with mythological time depends almost entirely on how willing we are to suspend the last 16 years of waiting for a new Star Wars film. In mythic time, we can participate in the world where we were seven years old. We can become children again, see it for the first time, make the world new.

If it works.

If we aren't willing to extend that level of charity to the prequel trilogy, that's fine. Nobody was forced to love the first trilogy, and if it stops being fun, there's nothing wrong us if we put the extended modern fairy tale of Star Wars aside to look for newer excitement elsewhere.

There's no sense in doing it if it's not satisfying. Why make these absurd leaps to appreciate a film if we didn't want to like it in the first place?

 "I have the greatest respect for other people's pleasure," Peter Brook once wrote. "Entertainment is fine."

The Phantom Heresies are always going on.