meh

Rating: 3/10 (19 June 2003)

This movie kinda killed the whole Star Wars thing for me. I remember actually being disturbed that I was bored thirty-minutes into the film. Being bored was pretty much the last thing I expected.
Aside from the ambitious animation, everything seemed diminished. The Force went from being a limitless potential that some people were in tune with to something you test for like AIDS, pregnancy or allergies. Hammy characters like Vader and Han Solo (or even Leia's inexplicable haughty phase) gave way to one of the blandest casts I've ever seen in any film not by Antonioni. The brittle American Graffiti/jet engine aesthetic of the ships in the first films is gone in favor of glossy-plastic ships that dissolve into explosions. The clumsily abrupt scenes separated by wipes were replaced by interminable sequences of clunky dialogue. I never thought that there would be a step down from Ewoks, but there's Jar Jar.
I think this film exterminated much of the devoted Star Wars fanbase in the same way that Voyager thinned the ranks of Star Trek fans. I went to see Nemesis recently and couldn't help but notice that there weren't throngs of people who had been camped out in Starfleet uniforms awaiting the opening. Ditto with Attack of the Clones - the population of costumed campers had dwindled to almost nothing. (Now they're all wearing Lord or the Rings outfits and designing Matrix fansites - Lucas pretty much lost them, which, despite what he says, has to matter to someone who built an empire on merchandising to exactly those people.) Another indication of this falling off is the degree to which the new films have failed to penetrate the wider culture. You can still quote Darth Vader and people know what you're talking about. Say `use the force, Luke' and almost anyone on earth knows what you mean. Does anyone quote the Phantom Menace? Ever? The only reference to the Phantom Menace that I think pretty much anyone could get is Jar Jar Binks, universally understood to be an unwelcome annoyance.
The choreography of the final saber duel was really wonderful (even though Darth Maul dies standing there like an idiot while Obi-wan flips over him and stabs him in a move that doesn't seem much more impressive than any of the other moves that Maul previously shrugged off.) Even so, when I think back on 1999 sci-fi fun, The Phantom Menace pretty much sucks compared to The Matrix and the video game Half-Life. Actually, now that I think about, playing Jedi Knight II is much more fun than watching PM. Also, the console flight-sim based on PM was mediocre.
NOTE: Of course it was the forth-highest grossing film in history. It's Star Wars! There are tens of millions of us that HAD to see the extension of the movies that were the most influential franchise of our childhood and changed Hollywood. If Titanic II is ever made by Cameron and the latest teen stars, it would bring in a similar (but probably not nearly as huge) tidal wave of people that had to see for themselves if the magic cotton candy of their teens could come again. Lucas could have made the Phantom Menace ten times worse than it is and it still would have had an opening weekend that set records.