Well worth seeing, but there is room for improvement

Rating: 9/10 (22 May 1999)

I'm going to ignore the nay-sayers and rabid fans both for this review and tell you, yes, this is indeed a movie worth seeing. In describing what's good about it, well, it's hard to do so without simply copying other reviews.
The special effects are impressive, not so much for their flashiness and so-on. You CAN achieve that without CG and the like. The thing I liked was that this was the first time I've seen such consistent use of CG that doesn't advertise itself as such. The fact that such work was put into this movie for the sole purpose of hiding the tell-tale markers of CG was impressive. Other, previous movies have made use of the new effects technology, but there was always little signs; like the black border around such characters and the like that you simply couldn't ignore them. SWE1 melded real-life and computer generated life wonderfully.
Aside from the effects, the movie had other merits, McGregor has done a bang-up job capturing the essense of Guinness' Kenobi while providing a glimpse of that same character as a head-strong apprentice Jedi. We can see the Obi-Wan to be in Ewan's acting. The other characters are portrayed well, even young Anakin although as an old Star Wars fan it's difficult to see the Vader to be, but there's time and two episodes to go. Darth Maul's battle scenes were truly awe-inspiring bringing a real sense of battle that was slightly lacking in IV-VI.
Otherwise, Maul was disappointing. Previews, trailers, and yes, hype made Maul out to be a larger villain than he turned out to be. He ended up little more than a henchman and not much of a menace (although I suspect the movie's name sake was meant to be Palpatine more than Maul). Nevertheless, Darth Maul hardly seemed worthy of the Darth title.
As for other points, the movie is fun, but you can definitely see the influence of parenthood on Lucas in this episode. George admitted this movie would be geared more towards children this time and such intent is understandable considering his own children. However, I think he underestimated the intelligence of today's children, unless he was aiming for the pre-school bunch. The Gungan's simply couldn't be taken seriously at all with Jar-Jar's annoyingly cute bumbling and the incessant mugging of the Gungan leader. Humour in the previous movies was subtle, but hardly out of the grasp of even children in their first decade. TPM seemed to rely more on obvious physical comedy that just looked out of place in the Star Wars universe.
If the last paragraphs made you think I didn't like SWE1:TPM, sorry, I enjoyed it a lot although I'm somewhat biased being a fan from my first big screen experience when A New Hope was simply Star Wars. Hopefully though, Lucas listens to the fans when he puts together the next two movies. Ignore the "professional" critics. Any criticism from them is simply a few sad sacks hedging their bets in case this movie doesn't do well so they can say "I told you so." Reviews like the ones found here on IMDB are from the real people who actually shelled out their own hard earned cash and Lucas has claimed that's who he's interested in.
I still have hope for the two episodes to come.