Doesn't fit well in the Star Wars saga

Rating: 4/10 (20 August 2008)

As the first of the three prequels, and therefore the most distant from the original story, Phantom Menace was probably always destined to be the least interesting. I was prepared to accept this film would be mostly background and story development, and that I wouldn't fully appreciate it until I'd seen Episodes II and III. All fair enough.
But Lucas made the problem worse by starting too far back, to the point where the movie feels almost disconnected from the Star Wars story. The political crisis at the centre of the plot is supposed to highlight the beginning of the Republic's downfall, but is too mundane and obscure to be engaging. Some trade companies are protesting- big deal. And it's impossible to make any connection between the obnoxious boy Anakin and the greatest villain ever seen. Perhaps Lucas was trying to highlight "from little things big things grow"- how Anakin's bratty cockiness foreshadows Darth Vader's evil? It might have worked if the child Anakin was an interesting character, but he's just plain annoying and adds nothing to the story. There's no real reason the prequels couldn't have started as Episode II did, with Anakin already a young Jedi, which makes this whole movie a waste of time.
There's also a very leaden feeling to the production, a problem which plagues all three prequels. The spontaneous fun of the originals is missing, and the acting and dialogs is often predictable and wooden. Jar Jar was the one attempt at injecting some humour, and fails horribly. And Darth Maul, the most interesting character of the lot, is largely sidelined. In fact, pretty much everything ends up sidelined by the complicated political posturings that clog up most of the film. Even the battle scenes have a very sterile and forced nature to them, probably because you're so bored by that stage you don't care anymore.
The only thing I really liked about this movie was watching Palpatine skilfully manipulate the trade crisis as his first step to becoming Emperor. That's probably the one and only key element in this movie for fans of the original. As for the rest, you could easily begin at Episode II and not miss a thing.