This film was a joke.

Rating: Null/10 (9 July 1999)

I was raised on Star Wars. When I was in the theatre and the screen flashed "STAR WARS", followed by the familiar music and scrolling text, I felt euphoric.
Then the movie itself started.
Every complaint about this movie is 100% accurate. I won't buy "this has to set the stage", because you can set the stage and still make an enjoyable movie that can stand on its own. Midi-chlorins ruined the mysticism of the Force. Too small-scale. Too convulated. The way Anakin 'saved the day' was riot-worthy. Jar Jar was almost literally just thrown in; the main characters just bump into him while walking through a forest! Then there's the pointless underwater fish sequence...what was that supposed to be? A serious action scene? Something humorous? It was a waste of film.
Darth Maul had no point in even being in the movie. He, like Jar Jar, was thrown in. I fell in love with the character upon first seeing him in the previews, but I wrongly assumed he would play some kind of ROLE in the story... instead, he shows up, the two Jedis take out their lightsabers and run off to fight him on cue: "Oh, there's Darth Maul, right on time. Time to go run along and fight him to the death now. Later, all."
The special effects are all DISPENSABLE. Lucas DID do a good job of making his effects look real, so real that they fade into the background and you don't even really care one way or another about them. He didn't break boundaries; films like T2 and Jurassic Park broke the boundaries for this decade. All TPM did was further them.
We were shown a lot in this, and EVERYTHING was a let-down. I cannot fathom how people, true fans of the trilogy, are liking this film.... just as I cannot fathom how true Star Trek fans liked "First Contact".
Lucas didn't show us anything we couldn't have imagined ourselves as far as how the first trilogy would have gone. No plot twists. No revelations. Everything was not just predictable, but mundane.