Still good, even now.

Rating: 8/10 (8 November 2019)

It's hard to take off your nostalgia glasses when going back to a movie that is such a strong memory from the past, but today, as an adult I went back and watched this movie.
It's still good.
And most surprisingly, my time watching it flew by. Whereas with TFA and TLJ could drag on. I think a sign of any good movie is how strongly it pulls you in, and makes you forget about the world around you. This movie didn't fail that for me. Even more so, I think the popularization of this movie and the jokes/memes around it made it even more interesting to watch. The quotes, scenes and jokes land so much better now. I could see how anyone who saw the originals would hate this shift in tone in the prequels. But I loved the cheesiness of it, but it didn't lack heart either! Anakin leaving his mother, Qui Gon Jinn's death are great emotional moments.
Now the most controversial character in all of star wars, Jar Jar Binks, the epitome of a utterly stupid character. In general I did not hate his antics, my only issue with Jar Jar was the amount of times he was used in intense action scenes, especially where the Gungars face the Droids on Naboo. There would just so many scenes of Binks being clumsy and somehow disabling a ton of droids it took out the emergence of the scene. And the fact many of his own people where being killed. Aside from that he was fine as a comic relief, and it was needed as he was the only one in the movie that wasn't all too serious. He was just edited in a bit too much.
Aside from that, yeah some visuals are pretty damn bad and didn't age well. But honestly it didn't at all bother me aside from 2-3 scenes. The Pod Racing cgi is still great to this day. The droids sometimes look great, other times.. not so. And the Gungars... the biggest offenders pretty much look awful..all the time. But then again, it was 2001.
The editing at times was a little odd as well, mainly during the main fight with Maul. The flow in that fight was weird in some places, and definitely right before Qui died. The saber effects also show their age. Although I tried pretty hard, I couldn't see many ''phantom'' hits whilst viewing. So even though I sawa those reviews and analysis videos where they show them hitting nothing at certain points.. I didn't see it in realtime.
The acting.. is alright, Padmé, Qui and Obi are great, but the others are very much flat and dry. Chancellor Palpatine had some good lines, but the memes around it might have tainted me a bit.
TLDR: All in all, I was afraid going into this movie because I thought I would HATE it now as an adult versus me as a little kid loving the fantasy spectacle. But no, its still good to this day, and after seeing TFA and TLJ, this definitely still beats those two in my opinion.