Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace - EMC's Review

Rating: 7/10 (7 March 2015)

It had been 14 years since Return of the Jedi hit the big screen, one day you hear Star Wars is coming back in the form of a prequel trilogy which will be directed by the guy who made the original Star Wars, George Lucas. The globe was in a frenzy once you saw the trailer, wow a NEW Star Wars movie! With such fond memories of the originals you anticipate this movie more than your own Birthday! Then once you bought a ticket, grabbed some sweets and sat down into that dark theater, your dream had come true. Then the movie had finished and you walked out of your local theater, trying to think about what you just saw, and we can tell you one thing.... it wasn't Star Wars! The film isn't that bad itself but it just doesn't feel like a Star Wars movie! It crushed the hopes of millions of geeks and just plain movie-goers over the world, with characters like little Anakin and Jar Jar Binks, you questioned your own judgment, and those two flaws (Jar Jar & Little Ani) alone serve the film a major problem, but we'll try delve even deeper into what ruined this film, or who ruined it (George Lucas). This film suffers from a very bad script, some dialog is OK but some really isn't. The scenes at Coruscant with all those parliament meetings and talks bore the hell out of you! With such big stars like Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor and Samuel L Jackson, why didn't the script utilize them!? Jar Jar Binks is supposed to be comic relief for the kids but this saga really doesn't know what audience it's aiming for, sometimes there's funny scenes even adults and children like but then bring that up that when you see Anakin Skywalker's cut-in-half burning body at the end of Revenge of the Sith. But before we go any further let's address some of the good things about the film: The Pod Race, Darth Maul, The Lightsaber Duel and the opening scene where Qui Gon Jinn and Obi Wan Kenobi battle the droids. That's about it, and Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan Kenobi is perfect, but he spends most of the film in a ship on Tatooine just talking, yeah... This is how that masterful Jedi Guardian in A New Hope started out! Now we come to Jar Jar Binks and Little Anakin Skywalker. Jar Jar is just really annoying, he makes tasteless jokes throughout the whole film, why he's even in most of the film is beyond us! Why did George even put him here, did he seriously think the audience would find this character funny, well maybe for three year-old's but that's it! If you watch the movie over the years you'll find you just get used to him and can let him pass but little Anakin is where things get serious. The whole point of this prequel trilogy is to show how Anakin Skywalker transforms into Darth Vader, and this is how it began........ One of cinemas most iconic villains begins off as a poorly acted character who says such lines as "yippee". As a kid I imagined him to be lean and blunt, but still a good kid deep down. It's hard to get interested in the movie when you see this kids (Jake Lloyd's) acting, you can tell its unrealistic, taking you out of the moment. The plot's also got a few errors in it, did Darth Sidious want the Jedi to be killed at the beginning or not? If he's been planning his eventual victory at the end of Revenge of the Sith since this movie, why would he want Obi Wan or Qui Gonn dead if they're the key element to finding Anakin Skywalker. Or did he know that they'd survive the separatists' droid attack, who knows..! Talk about lazy directing, George Lucas wasn't even thinking when he wrote the script, now we don't think he did it for merchandising purposes, we truly believe he did it because he loved his franchise. But the writing is so bad in this one, Viceroy Gunray orders his droids to "destroy what's left of them" regarding Qui Gonn and Obi Wan at the start of the film, after injecting a toxic gas into their room. By destroying what was left of the Jedi did he mean for the battle droids to shoot their corpses!? It's just a pointless error that could have been removed. One more good thing about the film are in fact the battle droids, their subtle humor and design makes us like them more than Clone Troopers. Anyway, here is EMC's review on chronologically the first in The Star Wars saga. It's OK but just fails in a lot of areas, like the discovery of Anakin and how it didn't have a main character which was supposed to be Obi Wan Kenobi. George's stunning visuals in the film prove that he adds more style than substance. There's all these neat action scenes but it means nothing if we're not invested in the actual film. Out of the six EPIC films, this one is for sure the weakest....