Initial Reaction

Rating: 6/10 (10 February 2012)

This is a review from a fan's perspective upon my first viewing in '99. This review will not focus on the positive and negative things, big and little; there are plenty of other reviews here that will do that. This is a professed Star Wars fan's initial reaction from over a decade ago when I saw it, that hasn't much changed since.
The original film was the VERY FIRST film I ever saw when it was first out in theatres. I was a mere nine months old, but my parents said I loved it. Like everyone else who grew-up on Star Wars, I was also caught-up in the hype and would have severed a (minor) appendage in order to see it first. So on opening day, I went to see it after work with some like-minded friends.
I remember the movie was something like thirty minutes in (somewhere around the underwater Gungan scene) and I was thinking, "When is this thing really gonna start?" By this point in the originals, the sand people were causing havoc, Imperial Walkers were about to start something in the snow and Luke was escaping the ultimate monster in the basement.
"Maybe because this is the beginning of the whole saga, the pieces have to be set-up first," I remember thinking. "Okay, I'll give it time."
Then we got to the pod race almost half-way through the movie. "Now we're talking!" I thought, "THIS is Star Wars!" And it was truly breathtaking. It lived up to what Star Wars had been before, but it didn't last long. The story moves soon after to Courescant and devolved into C-SPAN. Political maneuvering, Anakain's "college" acceptance interview, blah...blah...blah...
Then there was the ending. Everything felt forced, except for the lightsabre duel. Between this and the pod race, it made the movie. The pure physicality of it made me tingle. But yet even here, there was something missing; tension. Here were two jedi squaring off against a really cool bad guy, Darth Maul. This guy was the Boba Fett of the prequel trilogy; cool baddie, too little screen time. We all knew that Obi Wan was gonna live, so that released some of the tension, but that wasn't quite it. In the original, we had Obi Wan vs. Vader; former teacher taking on his old student and dying in the process. In Empire we had Luke avenging his fallen buddy and in Jedi it was the re-match, now knowing the family connection. In Menace, it was like the interstellar Don King had just made a match, they combatants showed up and cameras rolled. It was a sight to see, but the tension created by emotion just wasn't there.
The movie ended and we left the theatre. I felt strangely numb to it all. "Maybe it was me?" I speculated. "Maybe I'm on an off day? Maybe the hype prepared me for more than this could ever truly deliver?" Maybe. But as we were all walking out, these were guys 'n gals that loved Star Wars like I had. We looked forward to this like Christmas morning, yet Santa Lucas brought us socks. Bulky, itchy socks. But we had to act like we loved it, lest we be run out of town.
Each of us went to see it again in the days following, but went alone. Each of us. We all felt the same way, but wouldn't admit it to one another until a few weeks later. One of us bravely asked the rest if we MAYBE didn't really like the movie all that much. Episode I became the highest grossing movie of the year and with the entire saga and is one of the most financially successful movies ever made. Know why? Everybody had to see it multiple times just to know for sure that the reason it wasn't so good wasn't because of our over-hyped nostalgia.
The bottom line is this; its not a bad film. Its not a great film, but it is entertaining and quite a spectacle. It does not, by a long shot, live up to the standard set by the original trilogy. Could it ever? That is a good question and up for debate. But when Episode III came out, that was the one that I had waited since the new films were announced to see. I consider it to be the third best of the entire saga, better than Jedi. So the excuse that the new films could not live up to the original I feel is not true. The focus here was trying to force a square story into a round hole and make things fit, come hell, high-water or midichlorins. It was a display to show what George Lucas likes best; the technical side of filmmaking.