Why do I keep doing this to myself?

Rating: 5/10 (19 January 2020)

No other trilogy has received as much good will from me as the Star Wars prequel trilogy. The Hobbit movies I despise and will not revisit, but every few years, I come back to the SW prequels, wanting them to be the finely crafted tragedies their fans claim they are over and over. After the soulless incoherence of the Disney SW, I wanted to go back and see if THE PHANTOM MENACE is much of an improvement.
Well, it certainly has more imagination. Say what you will, Lucas wanted to expand the setting and try new things. He didn't just repeat the same scenes from the OT over and over, even if he did make certain scenes and characters "rhyme" as he infamously stated. The problem is all of these characters are so flat, their interactions lacking anything like heart or charisma. Wooden puppets are more expressive than these dead-eyed, monotone marionettes, existing solely to move this wrecked, rambling screenplay along.
I cannot decide what is TPM's fatal flaw: the vague characterizations or that awful story. I have seen this movie about five times over the years and I still cannot make heads or tails of Sidious's evil plot. I get he wants to create a crisis on Naboo to make himself chancellor, but the amount of coincidence that the plot hinges upon just... it makes fridge logic an art form. The queen and her decoys also make little sense, though I feel that particular element of the plot was inserted in there as an homage to Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, not as an essential part of the narrative proper.
I mean, yeah, I'd watch what is essentially a big-budgeted Saturday morning cartoon over the disrespectful annoyance that was THE LAST JEDI-- but to be honest, TPM isn't that much better a movie. Just because Disney SW is awful and corporate to a fault does not make the prequels suddenly masterpiece-level cinema.