About on par with the first Star Wars.

Rating: 7/10 (23 May 1999)

Like the first Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace lacks involved character development, concentrating instead on whiz-bang, gosh-wow special effects. The plot itself is much more sophisticated than that of Star Wars, with mildly convoluted political maneuvering taking the place of the first movie's straightforward save-the-world, fairy-tale type story. While still pretty obvious, the overarching plot doesn't reach out and clobber you over the head like those of the first three Star Wars movies.
Special effects are quite well-done. The computer-generated characters, while still displaying the preternatural, almost gelatinous flexibility common to their ilk, are quite realistic and for the most part meld in well with their real costars. Other effects are at a similarly high level of excellence. You can't tell that most of the sets and vehicles don't really exist.
Speaking of sets, I believe that sets and costuming were the strongest feature of The Phantom Menace. They conveyed very effectively an atmosphere of opulent, otherworldy decadence. If the court of Louis XIV were to be transported to a galaxy far, far away, I can easily see it looking like Coruscant or the royal palace on Naboo. Even those outrageous costumes that Natalie Portman is made to wear fit in with the film's ambiance.
Now for the bad news. The biggest item of bad news has a name, and his name is Jar Jar Binks. This easily-merchandised virtual actor is easily the most obnoxious feature of the movie. His antics effectively defuse most any dramatic tension in any scene he's in... and he is in more scenes than practically anyone else. His accent (and that of the other Gungans) verges on the offensively stereotypical, and a lot of times is almost incomprehensible. Why not simply have him talk in an alien tongue, as was common in the first three films? The same question applies to the Trade Federation aliens, whose bizarre quasi-East-Asian accents were inexplicable.
The humans have a pretty rough time of it too. Jake Lloyd gives a game performance for a nine-year-old, but the fact that he's a little kid means that he's not quite as good as his grown-up colleagues at delivering bad lines in a way that won't make the audience groan. Ewan McGregor is given hardly any opportunity to exercise his considerable acting talents; most of Obi-Wan's words and actions are nothing more than reaction to Qui-Gon. His imitation of Alec Guinness' accent is dead-on, though. Liam Neeson gives a fairly good performance as stoic Qui-Gon, and Natalie Portman is likewise pretty good as the Queen. All of them, though, have a common problem: awful lines... a problem which is common to the first Star Wars movie, before George Lucas started CO-writing the screenplays instead of lone-wolfing it.
To sum up: a very entertaining movie. Also a movie that could have been made better in many, many simple ways. It sets the stage well for the next few installments in the series; we'll see if the next two pay more careful attention to character development and other non-computer-generated things.