Nothing new

Rating: 6/10 (13 June 1999)

A lot has changed since the first Star Wars movies. The technical aspects of film making have advanced at light speed. The Phantom Menace is loaded with great special effects - so what? My kids have video game systems that provide more entertainment than this movie. Ultimately it appears to me that this is the point of this entire enterprise. The pod race, the battle sequence and the fight sequence with Darth Maul were obviously designed with the video game market in mind, not to mention action figures and fast food garbage. These were not considerations when Lucas made the original Star Wars. The original movie did not take itself seriously. A group of unknown actors ( with the exception of Alec Guinness ) had a lot of fun making a western movie set in outer space and the audience loved it. This new movie is an attempt by a bunch of Hollywood pros to recapture this spirit and make megabucks in the process. They failed at the former but will succeed at the latter - afterall McDonald's has sold billions of 'hamburgers' by convincing millions of people that there really is some meat in there.