Actually pretty good (but not great)

Rating: Null/10 (18 June 2003)

When this first came out, I got dragged off to see it, and I found it really boring. Recently, I watched it on DVD, with a different mindset, and found it to be pretty good.
On the DVD's commentary track, Lucas says that he really intended much of it to be viewed as a silent film. With this in mind, it works really well - the special effects don't just revolve around a single big centrepiece, but cover every inch of the screen - this is a great film to simply -look- at. Yes, there are films with superior effects (and a lot of them are older), but none of them are as imaginative or fully realised as The Phantom Menace. Instead of blowing the entire effects budget on Jar Jar (which a lot of other movies would have done), we get entire races, huge battles, underwater cities and an alien remake of Venice. They might look like they belong in a video game, but realism wasn't ever high on Lucas' agenda, and this even helps the film by creating more of a 'fantasy' atmosphere (This is a fairy tale, not Star Trek).
A lot of the criticism levelled at the film is that its characters are underdevelloped and the dialogue is flat. This is why I wasn't that happy with it the first time I saw it. But why the hell was I expecting the elements of a great human drama from Star Wars in the first place? None of the characters in this film are any less realised than those of the original trilogy. But...
The major thing missing from Episode One is Han Solo. All the human characters are solemn and dignified, which is why the dialogue suffers - there's no laconic wise guy to act as comic relief and give the story an everyman character (Anakin is too naive for anyone over 10 to connect with). Jar Jar stops everything becoming too bogged-down, but he's... stupid. Not the horrible, movie-destroying monster everyone makes him out to be, but we only laugh -at- him, whereas in the original films, we laughed -with- the characters.
The plot is actually quite complex. Not the one that drives the action, but the one behind the scenes, about Palpatine's rise to power. It's full of manipulation, double-crosses, deception, double-double-crosses and all sort of messy stuff. It's just that this story isn't the one that necessarily drives the action, and it's spread out over episodes 1 to 3, rather than being self-contained. I didn't realise just how twisted and Machiavellian it was until I saw Episode 2, and I guess it'll all be revealed in Episode 3. I've never been a huge fan of "plot", so this didn't really make me like the film more or less, but still; there's more here than people give it credit for.
This isn't really a bad film at all. It might not be as witty or fun as the others in the series, but it doesn't collapse into a pit of plodding self-seriousness like a lot of Sci-Fi, and the action sequences are exciting and colourful as opposed to simply violent.