This movie should never have been made

Rating: Null/10 (25 August 1999)

Earlier today I saw "Phantom Menace" and I have to admit that I was stunned. Stunned by how BAD the movie was. During the more than two hours (and they FELT like two DAYS), I did not encounter a single character that I could care about. Each and every character was two-dimensional. Pure surface. None of the characters were three-dimensional. It was cardboard characters from start to finish. Good guys and bad guys. It made no difference.
The contrast to the three original Star Wars-movies was mindblowing. We all cared about Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca etc. etc. They all came across as real people of flesh and blood. While watching The Phantom Menace, I more than once caught myself thinking: "I wonder if Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor and the rest are real people (i.e. actors) or just Computer-Generated Images like most of the movie." (I read somewhere that 95 per cent of all frames contained some sort of CGI or special effect. Talk about OVERLOAD.)
Watching Phantom Menace was like watching one big VIDEOGAME and not a motion picture. Sure, the special effects were fantastic - but I left the cinema with the feeling that SPECIAL EFFECTS was all this movie was really about. There was only a very small, extremely confused plot. Bad acting. Not a single character to care about. When something good happend to a good guy, you didn´t care. When something bad happened to a good guy, you just didn´t care, Because how can you get emotionally involved in two-dimensional characters ?????????
Sure Phantom Menace LOOKED great, but it FELT WRONG. Sorry, this should never have been a movie. Lucas could have released PHANTOM MENACE as a VIDEOGAME, but the MOVIE angle was as big a mistake as Steven Spielberg´s movie "1941" or a certain movie called "Speed 2".
I will love, love, love the original three SW-movies untill the day I die. (Especially "The Empire Strikes Back") But PHANTOM MENACE is pure crap. I have the nasty feeling that PHANTOM MENACE was only made for the sake of selling a lot of merchandice. I´ll give it 3 (three) stars out of 10 (ten).(And then I am being nice !) It should never have been made, sorry.
George Lucas should instead have made Episode 7 (seven) with the original cast: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford.