Great graphics, bad plot. You don't empathise with the good guys.

Rating: 5/10 (18 September 1999)

The invention and detail that had gone into creating the planets / droids / landscapes / battle scenes was fantastic, but after you stop going "wow" at all the fantastic landscapes, you get bored watching a bunch of emotionless and invincible human characters traipsing around meeting up with various aliens who (unlike their human counterparts) are capable of displaying emotion and are vulnerable to droid bullets. The emotions displayed by the non-human characters generally create an impression of pathos / self-interest / evil. There are no characters (with the exception of Anakin's mother) who evoke any sympathy at all. They might as well be chess pieces or play station characters.
I thought the plot was unnecessarily complicated for a movie that is supposed to be targetted at kids. Are kids really expected to understand the unnecessary detail about the politics of trade, the pseudo-scientific-new-age rubbish about little germs that give you "the force", and the politics of some global congress. None of these complexities were at all necessary for the plot. Normally plot complexity is a tool that is used to make you understand the position of some character that is stuck between two perspectives, or is caught in some frustrating dilemma. However, this film didn't involve anything other than pure goodies and pure baddies, with goodies dealing with each problem one step at a time.
I'm not normally inclined to political correctedness, but am I the only person who noticed that (while the filmmakers seemed to have fallen over themselves to cast the good human characters by skin colour in the exact proportions of the American population) all the good guys have middle class American accents or upper class British accents, all the bad and unscrupulous guys have "foreign" (generally Asian) accents, and the pathetic dweeb has a Stereotypical American negro accent?
The fantastic graphics / landscapes of this film make me look forward to "Lord of the Rings" which will have the same sort of graphic wizardry, but (unlike the Phantom menace) can be guaranteed to have a good plot, due to it being based on an excellent book.