Basically, there's one big problem...

Rating: 5/10 (23 May 1999)

Most people say that the movie lacks a little something that the original had and this is what : There is no villain. We have no one to root against. In Star Wars, it was established early on that Darth Vader was the bad guy. The characters were fighting the Empire but we felt that Vader was in control. Now, this allowed us to care for the protagonists. We knew who they were fighting and who had to be defeated.
In The Phantom Menace, we're not even sure what they are fighting. So the characters are up against a big inhuman corporation which takes away from their own humanity and makes us care a little less about them than we did Luke, Han and Leia.
Other than this, it's a very good action movie. The visuals are fantastic and some sequences will just blow you away (I particularly liked the three-way lightsaber fight). And to follow on the characterization, some scenes try to make up for the lack of villain. They always start good but, in typical Lucas style, they always end up being too charged because he tries to put too much in everything. In the other films, he should try to hold back in the scenes that are supposed to be character driven, lay off all the CGI stuff in the background that drives our attention away from the people.