Painful

Rating: 1/10 (4 February 2008)

I was 13 when when I first saw Star Wars, and like most boys at that time thought it was the hands down best movie I'd ever seen. Fast forward to years later and I learn there's going to be another Star Wars trilogy. Like many males I still happily have a childish side, and looked forward to the The Phantom Menace with enormous anticipation, a must see at the cinema.
*** Spoilers follow *** It all started well enough. Some cool action scenes and we get to see what a pair of trained up Jedi can really do. Cool! OK, so the Trade Federation guys sound oriental, but that only became a problem in the context of what was to follow.
I continued to enjoy the movie as a light hearted special effects fest for a while and then Jar-Jar appeared. I couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing, another racial stereotype, but this time in the tradition of Black Face. Now those youngsters among you probably don't know what this is since old movies with this kind of content are rarely shown these days, but in these movies there was a tradition of portraying blacks as comedy morons. They say stupid things and fall about, and are treated as retards by the main characters, and there it was, an alien that behaved and spoke in exactly the same way! I hadn't seen anything like it in a movie made in the past 50 years, I think I was in shock! Then we get the Mexican style junk/slave trader, and a scene where the Gungans are portrayed like idiotic natives meeting white explorers for the first time. WTF? More and more the movie irritated me, such as when they decorate a droid (a tool) for performing it's function. And the scene where the whole Jedi concept is undermined by introducing Mediclorians, a sample of which Qui-Gon 'teleports' to Obi-Wan for analysis. I didn't know teleportation was possible in the Star Wars universe. We learn that C3PO has been custom built by a child (Darth Vader), despite his similarity to other protocol droids.
And so we have endless scenes of Jar-Jar behaving like a special needs child, and almost nothing to inform us about the baddie from the movie's title.
And then there's the dialogue and the acting. Oh my! The light sabre fight at the end was cool, but it was way too late to save this disaster for me. Just because it's a kids movie doesn't mean you can ignore the principles and ideas established in the first trilogy.
The start and the end were good. The special effects were good. But as for the rest of it, argh! I wish this had never been made.
George Lucas, you once were great. Congratulations on so thoroughly undermining your greatest achievements.
There's a scene in the series Spaced when The Phantom Menace is mentioned to Simon Pegg's character, and he flashes back to a scene where he's weeping and throwing his old Star Wars toys onto a bonfire. I know exactly how he felt.
2/10