I Rate This Film 10, The Best of the Series

Rating: 10/10 (16 March 2016)

1. JarJar Binks does not break the movie. He is background, including his battle, from a flubby wubby locality that begins a galactic movement, not a distraction, and not important except to pause to appreciate his continual survival, somehow.
2. Jake Lloyd makes the movie, by naturalism, badly needed after the schmaltz of the first three films and its "star power". Just a kid, and the hub of his entire performance is just 30 seconds of adjustment to his pod to win. The kid wins. By grit. And it is the tiniest grit of his tiny teeth as he goes through the sequences that is the hub of the film.
3. Liam Neeson, is the next best thing, again naturalism (and McGregor falling into line), and all he needs to be is iron willed to get the kid cred by self sacrifice.
4. Watto, one the coolest characters on film, let alone Star Wars, brief, but enough of his intensity to show why Binks' friendliness is actually welcome. That is a purple Eli Wallach, great.
5. The mum and child separation, deeper than the loss of an aunt and uncle in Star Wars, though apparently less severe. This is a more mature plot, riding on a kid with tiny grit in every way, the most unlikely of everything conspiring from "nowhere", as this plot builds. Flubby wubby land has a kid as a friend, and so what?
6. They scrapped until they won, great action.
7. It set up Vader to acquire the disinterested power of a human atomic bomb. He is not prone to emotional crippling for the later schmaltz. It stands alone in its cold nuclear core potential, as if winter is coming. He just turns his back on everything, sharing boredom with his emperor, to coldly sequence the sorting of everything, daring anyone to stop him.