no phantom, no menace, and sod all entertainment....

Rating: 2/10 (20 July 1999)

please, george, explain the significance of the title too me, as i saw little of menace and no phantoms neither...... i can only recall once going to a cinema with such low expectations - that for the last batman film, and it managed the unlikely feat of falling miles below them - and so was almost pleasantly surprised that this wasn't that bad. lucas manages to keep things moving at sufficient pace that you're left with no time to think about all the film's many, many faults. at least, that was my experience. and the lightsaber battles were amazing.
but what a wasted opportunity - the original trio, by giving us enough info about the characters to make us give a damn, and by staging the battles on an epic scale, made us care about the fate of the people concerned and the universe : this one was just a lot of clever, crisp scenes. we learn nothing of the background of qui-gon or obi-wan, so why should we care when the former is killed? and there is not a hint of evil in the film - not in palpatine, certainly no trace of it in anakin, and darth maul's scenes fly by so quickly..... even the battle droids pale into comparison with the stormtroopers and their semi-human / semi-automaton feel....... and why in a movie tailored for kids is that first text roll-up couched in trade-barrier talk and the whole plot driven by legal technicalities.... oh we could just keep on going on couldn't we? finally - people in costumes or puppets still work much better than the cgu stuff - there's one scene where ewan mcgregor is supposed to be talking with jar-jar but seems to be looking somewhere at the back of his head.....