It's been two years and still...

Rating: 2/10 (22 May 2001)

Phantom Menace is the weakest of the series. Over the last 4 or 5 days I have watched the entire four films over again. Here's my objective reasonsing behind my opinion. First, two things that I will not hold against this movie or Lucas. 1) It is impossible to follow the original trilogy, especially after 16 years. Expectations combined with the grossly overdone media hype pretty much sealed Phantom Menace's fate as a dissapointment. 2) I'm sure it is very difficult to SPECIFICALLY write a movie as part one of a trilogy and have the story make any real sense. While Lucas has always claimed that A New Hope was envisioned as the start of a trilogy, I just don't buy it. The ONLY aspect of New Hope that lent itself to a sequel was the fact that Darth Vader didn't die.
Here are the big problems with Phantom Menace that were never problems with the original trilogy. 1) Lack of direction. While the CGI shots were all gorgeous, and the sets and locales very nice, the actors were all very wooden and appeared bored. While directing was never a strong suit of the original trilogy, at least it wasn't a liability. 2) Lack of character development. Some might say this is due to lack of direction, but I think it's due to a fairly weak script. In A New Hope the main protagonists really pulled you in and you were interested in their struggles. In Phantom Menace, the characters were just too shallow. Anakin was VERY unconvincing, due to a combination of horrid dialouge and wooden acting. Obi-Wan wasn't even needed in the film at all until the climax. The characters in Phantom Menace simply didn't inspire any great emotion. Something that you cannot say about A New Hope some 24 years later. 3) The BIGGEST fault in the film and something that is DIRECTLY against Lucas' own views. SFX that take precedence over the story. That should be the tagline for Phantom Menace. The story is very compelling, deep and interesting for about 20 minutes total. The rest of the movie is simply padding for the next blockbuster CGI overload. The Pod Race scene and the journey to the underwater Gungan kingdom being the two biggest offenders. Sure, these scenes look great, but both could have been cut down by at least half and the movie would have been just as good. Another example is Jar Jar. While upon repeating viewings, he gets less and less annoying, being annoying isn't my biggest fault with him. My biggest Jar Jar issue is that Lucas forced him on us. It's as if he said, "Maybe if I put JarJar in 85% of the scenes, the audience will forget he's a fancy computerized cartoon." Of course this horribly backfired. The majority of the audience found Jar Jar annoying, therefore concetrating on him more, which made him look that much more like a cartoon as opposed to being just another character. Sure CP30 was annoying here and there in the original movies, but you never thought of him as a man in a suit, he was always a character. I quickly wrote off Jar Jar as a computerized Looney Toon only put in the movie to fall over himself. Lucas never pulled him off as a character. (The other CG characters were much more convincing however).
In my opinion, these are the three major faults of Phantom Menace that place it squarely on the bottom of the Star Wars movies. None of the original three films had any of these same faults. That being said, I still thought it was an enjoyable movie overall. I don't share the love it / hate it mentality of many of the reviewers here. As a stand alone film, I would give it 7/10. Here's my ranking for the Star Wars films.
Episode 1: 5/10 Episode 4: 9/10 Episode 5: 10/10 Episode 6: 8/10 (NOTE: I thought Episode 6 was only 7/10, but it gained one point for the final space battle. That scene simply hasn't been equalled by ANY movie in the last 18 years)