The Phantom Grimace

Rating: 5/10 (13 October 2017)

Not a bad flick, but SW has so much to live up to, that the prequels just let a lot of people down.
I was very excited for this movie to come out as a kid, as I already loved the original SW trilogy, and this one is OK, but nothing great.
I think Attack of the Clones was worse than this one in many ways, but Phantom is cheesy in many places as well.
I think the worst thing haunting ALL of the prequels is the choice of actors, along with a bad script, CGI overload in place of substance, and George Lucas derailing into a kiddie show from his original good works.
Just as Hayden Christensen fouled up the later installments, the kid playing Anakin in Phantom just didn't fit my expectations either. None of these kids comes across as a future bad ass Darth Vader. The Jedi Masters can't seem to explain why they worry about him, and they can't sense much of anything, leading me to think that Palpatine and the Dark Side are actually smarter and better than the Jedi.
Jar Jar Beans is the worst character ever, and the CGI sucks. He looks like a flopping fish speaking with ebonics from a a bad 70s black exploitation film. He could have been a henchman on "Live and Let Die" with James Bond in Harlem.
The podrace was OK, but childish, but the N64 game it spawned entertained me for a few yrs.
The scripts in all of the prequels are trash for the mostpart, and the emotional level of acting they try to spin with it just falls flat. I feel like I'm watching someone's local children in the 4th grade Thanksgiving Play.
The lightsaber duel was cool, but I wish we had seen more from Darth Maul, other than just him being a cardboard cutout mean sith guy with horns on his head like the devil.
The underwater stuff was kind of cool, meeting the Gungans.
Natalie Portman is another poor choice of actress for this series; she doesn't bring any charisma or rawness to it at all. It was like she was blowing the writers and thrown in for good measure. Her scenes are stale, and her interaction with others is some of the worst acting/chemistry of all time.
I could go on, but this is the movie in a nutshell. Too kiddy and too much bad writing with poor actor choices for such an epic return to the greatest space opera western of all time.