Did I see the same movie as the rest of you?

Rating: 1/10 (20 May 1999)

I have seen Star Wars - "The Phantom Menace" twice now. I'm glad I waited to write this review until seeing it the second time. After the first I watched the movie I was going to give it a 3 or 4 out of 10, after seeing it again it looks like a low 6. The big question is did it live up to the hype? The answer is simply, NO.
For fifteen years I waited for this movie and created an almost perfect movie in my imagination, so I guess I should have expected a let down. I have been spending the last few weeks trying to prepare for the let down, did it help. Yea, I guess it did. I would have walked out if I haven't read all of those negative reviews. Why, you ask I felt disappointed, well for starters it is a movie intended for males 8 to 10 years old. Lucas is a brilliant businessman, luring in a new generation into his universe. But, what about the fan base of 20 something's that put him on the map? His thought, screw them.... That is what is seems. What does Lucas think? That we grew up to be mindless idiots. I'm sorry if I'm sounding harsh, but, waiting fifteen years for a 6 out of ten movie, I don't think so.
If I had to guess I would have to say that Lucas never even saw the original movie before he wrote this movie. The pieces just don't fit. Lucas will probably just try to mash them together in the next two films. I was hoping that when he sat down to write Star Wars, A New Hope, that he had some kind of outline put together. It seems apparent that he didn't. So why did he make A New Hope episode 4? I don't know. Will we ever know? May be we should call Mulder and Scully. Looking back at Empire and Return of the Muppets, I'm really curious if he had any idea of what he was doing. Don't get me wrong, Empire is one of my favorite movies. When he was writing Empire and Jedi, did he think to himself, "I will make Darth Vader, Luke's dad and Leia, Luke's sister." Did he realize the repercussions of this? I think that plays a major role in the Episode I. Anakin shows NO evidence of the dark side, other than Yoda's little speech about fear leading to the darkside. At least in Empire, Luke had his confrontation with Vader on Dagobah, which show us the darkside of Luke.
Another think about Anakin is that when he is reviewed by the Jedi Counsel, they say that he is too old to become a Jedi. What about Luke? He is only like 10 years older than Anakin, and according to Episode I it takes YEARS to become a Jedi, and Luke does it in a few months!
Some other question I have about the story line of Star Wars. What about Uncle Owen? What about the relationship between R2, C3, Anakin/Vader, and Obi-Wan? Don't you think that the droids would have remembered Tatooine and Anakin when they met Luke? Lucas sure has original ideas, not. I like how Anakin was an Immaculate Conception. Cant' get any ideas? Just take some from the bible.
Enough about the story line. Time to pick on something else. What about the direction? Okay, I understand that the last movie Lucas directed was Star Wars so he was probably a little rusty, but none the less the direction sucked. So did much of the acting. If I were a director of a large production movie I would have pushed my actors to do better. It seemed through most of the movie that the actors were reading their lines off a script they have never seen before. Did Lucas shoot the rehearsal and forgot about the movie? The scene and characters just felt empty. In Star Wars, the scene and characters jumped out at you and had a life of their own. In Phantom, you never really get attached to anyone. I think Lucas paid too much attention to his special effect and forgot to shoot half the real movie. There were very few well-made transitions in the movie. They would just jump around from scene to scene with out any real closer. I also felt that the special effects were OVERDONE. I like what he did with the background environment and some of the characters but there were some scenes that were just hokey. In comparing this film's quality of special effects to say the Matrix, I feel that the Matrix blew right on by. Using special effects to enhance a stunt is great. The Matrix did a great job at this, but Phantom, failed miserably. A lot of the jumping and falling looked fake. Didn't any of the animators take a physics class? Objects don't fall with a constant velocity. I could go on and on about other things, but I think I will stop here and go on to the stuff I did like. Oh, by the way they should have killed JarJar in the first 10 seconds of the movie.
It was nice to see Jedi in their prime fighting. I thought most of the Jedi fight scenes were done well. I haven't seen good sword fighting like that since Highlander. This excludes whenever they fight droids, which seemed to be a practice exercise and was not a real treat. It is worth the money to see the fight between Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Darth Maul. I liked how they showed how the Emperor came to power and who he was before becoming the Emperor. That is all of the good stuff I can think of. Sorry it was so short.
The second time I saw the movie I was able to ignore some of the flaws and enjoy the film. That is why I ended up giving it a 6 out of 10. If you ask me where I rate Phantom along with the others, first would be Empire (10 out of 10), A New Hope (8 out of 10), Phantom (6 out of 10), and Return of the Muppets (5 out of 10).