Disappointing eye-candy, hype-fueled mess

Rating: 3/10 (19 March 2011)

Star Wars, the Phantom Menace, is perhaps one of the most disappointing movies of all time, but that's not so much the director to blame, but also the fact we all were expecting almost the Second Coming, and then, all we got was just a mediocre movie, with boring characters, boring story, and a bunch of eye-candy. George Lucas should have known that special effects without a good story aren't impressive anymore. In the seventies, watching "Star Wars", the "fairy tale in space with cool effects" was ground breaking, because it mixed a recognizable story "peasant saves the princess and becomes a knight" with a creative environment. But in the 90s, watching "a pointless tale with computer effects" was just boring.
This movie isn't the "worst movie ever made", but it's just boring: it hasn't any endurable or classic value as the original trilogy. The characters are undeveloped or just annoying (and borderline racist), the story is a pseudo-political fiasco with boring dialog ("but the fans won't accept these are movies for kids!", yeah, kids are eager to watch arguments about taxes, trade federations, bureaucracy, etc.), which sums up the dullness of the movie. George Lucas is telling us: take my eye-candy, and buy tickets and props, you mindless drones.
Of course, fan-boys who like this movie will try to justify everything: "The plot DOES make sense", "the story DOES make sense", "Lucas had it all planned from the beginning", guess what: all the explanations and justifications won't make this movie more entertaining.
3/10