Good movie? Yes. Good STAR WARS movie? No!

Rating: Null/10 (25 May 1999)

Before I take this movie apart, I will say this. I thought it was very enjoyable, it was action packed, and was a dazzling visual achievement! It's really a lot of fun as a movie alone. This is actually a really good movie! However, there is one thing wrong with it. They are calling this part of the "Star Wars" saga! Once you've seen the film, and you think about it, it's just not possible to compare this to any of the previous films. Not because the characters were different, because whoever said that we knew who Han Solo and Luke Skywalker were when the first "Star Wars" film first came out? But, for a lot of other reasons, and the characters can also be attributed to the many flaws in this prequel.
First of all, I got the impression that the characters were undeveloped, overhyped, and written entirely for the sole purpose of marketing and selling action figures and toys. For example, they hyped up the satanic looking Darth Maul for quite some time now, as this incredible and despicable villain. He was only in the film for about 5 minutes! I don't think Darth Maul was so bad, because I hardly got to know him. He just sort of came and went. I honestly thought that they could have done so much more with him, as they could have done with the overall film itself. Although I like Liam Neeson very much in this film, because he is so commanding, serious, reverent, and never afraid. They need more characters like him in this movie. There were millions of opportunities open for character development and storyline fulfillment, yet nearly all of them were bypassed for time, or as my brother and I saw it, to market all of the ships and creatures that took up(or plagued) the 2 hour episode.
And speaking of creatures, that is my real vendetta and overall upset with the film. The creatures are childish and ugly, or as my sister saw it, racist and stereotypical. One can only stand the astonishingly annoying Jar Jar Binks for a while, before contemplating his horrible murder! And the race, which is a sci-fi chariot race, has a two-headed ESPN announcer! What the hell? It's almost as if they were trying to spoof the "Star Wars" saga! C-3PO's presence in this film is implausible too, because it just seems so unlikely that C-3PO was the droid of Darth Vader as a boy, and that he bounced around the galaxy in the wars long enough to eventually land back on Tattoine and become Luke Skywalker's droid. R2-D2 and the lightsabers are the only semblance to the original films.
As far as mythology goes, it's gone! The force has been clarified as some sort of bacteria certain people contain in their cells, and Anakin Skywalker is some kind of "Immaculate Conception". It's no longer "Star Wars". It's an overly "eager to please" film that tries to satisfy the audience by trying to do and give everything away at once, instead of letting the saga conduct itself into the further films as it did with the original trilogy.
And originality is an issue here too, because after the release of the "Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition", which I thought ruined many of the already powerful scenes of the original films, it seemed like the "Special Edition" was a bad omen for the upcoming prequel. The prequel was going to be unsatisfying, overly childish, and swamped with gloppy creatures that get intolerably annoying after a while. Indeed, my predictions were correct. I'm not saying that this is a bad movie, far from it! And it's certainly something not to be missed. However, when you try comparing this to the original trilogy, you will realize that this simply doesn't measure up to what is expected of a "Star Wars" film. And if you are a hardcore fan of the "Star Wars" saga like me, you are in for a MAJOR disappointment!