A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...George Lucas knew how to direct a movie

Rating: Null/10 (26 May 1999)

Humor that would only delight the overfed children of a visiting Mittel-Europa dictator; dialogue evoking the title cards of silent movies; good guys defined by their English accents and lack of expression--everything about THE PHANTOM MENACE is a bewildering disaster. If a fusty Viennese professor and a scrofulous teenage video-game designer collaborated on a piece of Pop Art, this would be the result--a dense, clotted, mirthless affair that has none of the visual and storytelling clarity of the first movie, and none of the cheesy cliffhanging appeal of the other two.
This rambling, plotless expenditure of vast sums of money is about as impossible to criticize rationally as a Burger King cup or a bath towel. In its favor, it can be said that in the chariot race Lucas has devised one of movies' all-time most viscerally enthralling set pieces--but enthralling only as a video game, not a movie, is. Scenes end with Lucas' beloved old-school wipe of the screen, and you feel the audience saying, "That was a scene?" As the Jedi knights, Liam Neeson and Ewan MacGregor look as if they must have fallen into each other's arms laughing at the end of each take. (Neeson's attempts to commit fully to Lucas' unmouthable hooey is the one poignant thing in the movie.)