Star Wars sabotaged!

Rating: 1/10 (8 August 1999)

The myth of Star Wars which has been the birth of a lot of Science-Fiction adventures, some good, some not so good now seems to sabotaged by it's inventor, the great George Lucas himself. It would take a long time to explain what could have been done better on "Episode One" but most is just to obvious to oversee. If you look at some of the breathtaking scenes of "Star Wars" or "The Empire Strikes Back" and compare it with the battles and intrigues of "The Phantom Menace" you've to ask: "Where did all the people go?" You cannot make a movie which has to represent something like one of the greatest Fantasy Adventures ever with a dozen actors and tons of computer generated imagery. Would there have been no other way to put in a character like Jar Jar Binks than a computer animation? Why the droids? Weren't the Storm Troopers of the three first movies not good enough to fight for the Trade Federation which seems to be technologically far more advanced than the evil galactic empire? In an interview Lucas once said that he wasn't sure about putting in a puppet to play an important character in a movie, now he replaces most the supporting characters in "Phantom Menace" by not even touchable computer animations. Lucas put it some really great effects in this movie, but they're so great they don't seem believable. Everything is just to big, to fantastic, to nice rendered. The ships of Star Wars always were machines and not living quicksilver drops. And about the cast. It's a good cast but Lucas really neglected them. He did all he could for the effects and the promotion but he ignored the cast, ignored the living people inside his giant video game. Sometimes it seems he didn't even want them to be more realistic than any of the bits and bytes enemy lines. If this should be the future of film making, men like Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor shouldn't cooperate with the force which intends to wipe them out, all of them.