A below average pile of uninspired uninvolving s**t

Rating: 1/10 (17 July 1999)

I had the misfortune of seeing Episode 1 last night. It is an over-glorified cartoon, it's badly written, badly acted and unbelievably uninvolving, I didn't care what happened to any of the characters, except for Natalie Portman who was fantastic in it. She and Liam Neeson were the only two actors in the film with true presence. Ewan McGregor was awful, Jake Lloyd tragically miscast, he was by far the most annoying thing to appear on the cinema screen ever. It shows how bad a writer and director Lucas is, when the computer animated characters have more life than the actors.
Darth Maul is perhaps the most pointless character ever, he was in it for 5 minutes, said about one line, and showed absolutely no background or anything. He just stood there, not looking like a Dark Lord of the Sith, but like a guy with bad red and black face paint and crudely stuck on horns on his head.
There were some good things, Natalie Portman was fantastic and did extremely well, especially considering how badly written it was. Liam Neeson was perfect also, truly captured a Jedi Knight.
But as I said, the worst thing in the movie was Jake Lloyd, he couldn't act, unlike all the other actors, he had an extremely annoying grating American accent and said some of the most woefull, line and delivered them terribly.
Lucas must have felt that he didn't need to give the characters background as technically this was the background for episodes 4-6 and as a result I didn't care whether anyone lived or died, and as you knew who was going to live and who was more than likely going to die it was immensely predictable. The film lacked any emotion, I had no feeling other than boredom during the film, the acting was wooden and one dimensional. At one point in the film Jake Lloyd said "Woah, this is tense," yeah right!