Not a Ground-Breaking Success, But Not a Menace

Rating: 7/10 (30 May 2007)

I'm a Star Wars fan, and always have been. In fact, I saw "A New Hope" for the first time at one of its re-releases at age one and immediately fell in love with the franchise. For this reason, I was enormously excited when I found that a new prequel to the series was being created. Needless to say, I was disappointed by the film.
I expected to see an adolescent cool-cat Anakin step up and turn bad. Instead, I got a terrible child actor trying to save his mother and not even bearing a hint of his imminent future. I expected immense and glorious space battles, but instead got a particularly boring scene in which the above-mentioned child takes on a fleet of comically ridiculous droid fighters. I was expecting to see storm troopers marching around in some form, but all i got was some dorky droids.
Iwasn't happy about the film.
However, now that I have viewed the entire new trilogy, the film makes more sense, though not much. It seems to lack any real plot developments in the long run, unlike Episodes Two and Three. Still, the film is visually competent, and it is nice to see the first modern interpretation of the Star Wars galaxy since the early 1980s. There's also another factor that bumped my score up from a 4 or 5 to a 6. This factor is Darth Maul.
Darth Maul is one of the coolest Star Wars villains in the history of the films, falling short of Vader and Boba Fett, but falling only a small bit short of General Greivous. His scenes are the high points of the film. They are fast-paced, fun, and truly suspenseful. More importantly, they take us away from Jake Lloyd and Natalie Portman, who give awful performances. This film is not even in the same league as any of the original trilogy, and it falls short of the other two newer ones. However, it's not a terrible film, and can be enjoyed.
Warning: Make sure that you take a bathroom break anytime an alien called Jar Jar Binks comes on-screen to truly enjoy the experience.