All things STAR WARS~!

[RandomAct]

Stuff like that is the exact reason I kept my copies of the "unaltered" DVDs that they put out a few years ago.

[Bustronaut]

I can see why he did it from a branding standpoint, but it's odd that everyone else appears as their appropriately aged self, while Anakin de-ages 30 years.

[odessasteps]

Christiansen was there to tie together the two trilogies. Originally it was Sebastian Shaw, but Lucas replaced him for the "Special Edition" re-releases.

He was too busy running the Hellfire Club.

[RandomAct]

I can see why he did it from a branding standpoint, but it's odd that everyone else appears as their appropriately aged self, while Anakin de-ages 30 years.

Wasn't the idea that Anakin "died" and Vader was "born"?  I always felt like that was the symbolism Lucas wanted there.

[peterien]

Ah i see, here goes Episode I...

[Jiji]

God speed.

[peterien]

This feels weird already

EDIT; This is fucking awful

[Bustronaut]

Think of it as the Star Trek-iest Star Wars movie.

[odessasteps]

Think of it as the Star Trek-iest Star Wars movie.

As a trekkie, that offends me.

[Jiji]

I am also offended.

[Bustronaut]

Everything is overly clean, political and a tad dull.  Plus, the bad guys are the (trade) Federation!  Lucas was really wearing his heart on his sleeve when making Episode 1.

[Jingus]

Yeah, and his heart said "I love shitty childish comedy! MORE SHITTY CHILDISH COMEDY! More Gungans, more jokes about big sloppy tongues flopping around everywhere. Also, make sure that the heroes mostly win their battles via goofy slapstick accidents." That's the film's real problem, it feels too much like a lame kids' movie about some toddlers foiling the plans of bumbling gangsters.

[Brian Fowler]

I really like the two overarching plots of the prequel trilogy (political manipulations of Palapatine that created the empire, and the seduction of Skywalker to the darkside) but Christ are the details and individual beats rough.

Dual of Fates is Ep I is the second best fight in the whole series to date though (behind Luke/Vader from ESB)

[Raziel]

If you thought Episode I was awful, I suggest a strong drink to slug through Episode II.

 

At least III has enough Lightsaber stuff to drown out the other shit.

[Brian Fowler]

Better make it a double.

[peterien]

Ok i got through it. After the first 40 mins it was watchable. You all know the bad stuff so...

Good stuff;

Ewan McGregor & Liam Neeson

Lightsaber duel

Setting the seeds for the future

[goodhelmet]

ON youtube, somebody edited the entire prequel trilogy into a nice 3 hour movie. I would have changed some stuff but overall, very watchable. 

[Jingus]

Doing a rewatch of Phantom Menace now, I don't see how this isn't the worst entry by a huuuuuuge margin.

-There's barely any action in the first place. The movie is 80% talking, which is especially crippling because the dialogue is flatter and more robotic here than anywhere else in the series.

-Jake Lloyd's best moments as Anakin contain shittier acting than Hayden Christiansen's worst moments in the follow-ups. It's not even close. Not a single thing Hayden ever did was nearly as terrible as every time Lloyd shrieks "YIPPEE!" (which happens at least a dozen fucking times).

-Every other main actor is also much worse here than they are in the sequels. Even Yoda just feels off, his voice and eyes and posture and everything all don't feel right. Natalie Portman seems like she's deliberately trying to put on the worst performance of her entire life. Liam Neeson barely even seems awake. Ian McDiarmid is the only one who isn't phoning it in, and even he is doing his franchise-worst work here.

-The Trade Federation are incredibly boring villains; confusing in their motivation, inexplicable in their long-term goal. What the hell was their endgame, their exit strategy, what was the entire point of their plan? There seems to be zero chance that their scheme would actually benefit them. They're the very opposite of threatening or intimidating, it's just like ten cowardly guys commanding an army of robots which are so laughably useless and ineffective that they make Imperial stormtroopers look like the goddamn Borg in comparison. Also, holy shit they're just the worst collection of No-Tickee-No-Shirtee yellowface "inscrutable Asian" stereotypes.

-The characters... aren't characters. With only a tiny handful of exceptions, they're the most vaguely-defined ciphers imaginable. Seriously, what the hell differentiates Qui-Gon from every other Jedi ever in terms of his personality? At least Obi-Wan eventually develops some personal traits over the next couple episodes, but he's got absolutely none here.

-Some of them feel like they're supposed to have more personality, but the movie literally left it out. Like during Darth Maul's only dialogue, he tells Palpatine something like "good, we'll finally have our revenge on the Jedi"; revenge FOR WHAT?! It's literally never mentioned again. Never even unspecifically implied. And it makes even less sense in light of the Jedi Council seeming to regard the very idea of Sith warriors as mythical fairy-tales.

-In fact, this is easily the worst episode when it comes to contrivances. The Rube Goldbergian level of plot manipulation it took to get Padme and the Jedis stuck on Tatooine was downright insulting. And what the hell was with the entire subplot about Padme and her decoy double? They spend an inordinate amount of time pretending that Portman is playing a simple handmaiden (when we already know she's credited as being the queen) and also insulting the capabilities of the Jedi by acting like they can't tell the difference between the real leader and her lookalike.

-The action scenes blow. Worst in the franchise. The podrace has NOT aged well. Almost all of the rest of it is either "Jedis rip through endless droids with no effort or conflict" or "anonymous robots shoot it out with anonymous soldiers, we don't even know any of these fuckers' names". With, of course, the sole exception of the handicap lightsaber battle. And rewatching that right now, that one unfairly benefits from several intangibles: Ray Park being the only human actor in the movie to display ferocious natural charisma, John Williams composing perhaps his best-ever score for this one scene, and also looking so much better in comparison because all the rest of the action in this movie sucks. One great sequence (shown in little bits, in between three other much-less-impressive battles) don't give Phantom Menace an edge even over Attack of the Clones in terms of cinematic carnage, let alone the other entries in the series.

-Hey, dumbass Jedis, ever thought you maybe FORCED Anakin to turn heel by being gigantic douchebags to him even literally onthe day when you first met him, when he was eight years old?

-The movie has several fanboy-angering moments where Lucas engages in bits of self-plagiarism, blatantly recycling material from the original trilogy. "Did you like the Millenium Falcoln barely escaping from the asteroid worm? Then you'll LOVE the unnamed submarine (available at a toy store near you!) much more improbably escaping from several worm-like underwater predators! The final climax cuts back and forth between a land battle involving native inhumans versus the faceless forces of evil, a space battle where heroic pilots use their tiny fighter ships to blow up a space battle station from the inside, and a lightsaber fight between Jedi and Sith... JUST like Return of the Jedi! And does said lightsaber fight take place in some deserted mechanical area of the building, involving a lot of narrow walkways and dangerous pits which are so OSHA-unapproved that apparently nobody ever comes down here because the swordfighters are otherwise alone? OH YEAH BRO YOU KNOW IT! And oh yeah, let's end the whole thing with this military parade ceremony where our heroes walk up a long aisle to be given a shiny reward by the female authority figure, and then all the rows of peons on both sides break into deafening applause for the good guys... and then we cut to the credits! GENIUS, genius I tells ya!"

-Finally: gungans. FUCKING GUNGANS. Once Jar-Jar shows up, he's literally omnipresent in almost every single scene thereon; and honestly, dead fucking seriously, how does that not automatically make this into the worst-ever Star Wars movie by this fact alone? He's just awful, so much worse than every other comic-relief character in the franchise that there's no possible comparison; and he dominates the movie like a thunderous fart in a crowded elevator (his blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameos in the following episodes are like a stubbed toe in comparison with Phantom Menace's shotgun blast of All Binks, All The Time).

-Worse yet, he's not the only one, he brought his entire goddamn species with him! And they're a bunch of arrogant pricks, an uptight society of prideful losers who won't even bother to lift a finger to fight off a planet-wide invasion unless the leader of the entire globe debases herself by bowing and begging at their feet. Never has SW made me more embarrassed than when Boss Nash is doing his "BURBBLE BURRBLE BURBBLE" routine with the shaking cheeks, it's legit something you'd do to entertain the youngest of infants. And their stupefyingly cutesy "battle" with the droids is my vote for the single worst action scene in the series: a bunch of anonymous Caribbean minstrels fighting it out with an army of identical robots, on a flat featureless plain, and we don't even see a single one of the Gungans get killed in the fight, making the entire thing have no stakes whatsoever. (Compare this to episode VI, where we clearly saw several Ewoks getting barbecued by Imperial lasers and sometimes shrieking horribly in their final death-throes.)

So, yeah, I'm sorry, I've got no fucking idea how anyone could possibly consider anything else to be worse than this, not even Attack of the Clones. At least that one had better acting, a wider variety of scenes and locations, and a much better grab-bag of visual eye-candy and explosive action. Phantom Menace looks worse and worse every single time I see the damn thing.

[Kuetsar]

One of the HUGE problems with the prequels is there is no villains to peak of until Order 66. I know Christopher Lee is okay as Dooku, but Lucas never explains what the fuck the separatists want or why they should be the heel. Retro booking the movies, II should have been the first one, and stretch the events of III out over two movies. . . .

[RandomAct]

Part of the issue is that Dooku was supposed to be in the first one, from what I understand.  Wasn't Lee busy during filming of Episode I?  Things would have made a bit more sense had he been available, at least as far as having legit heels go.  Honestly, other than the cringeworthy Anakin/Padme stuff, I actually like Episode II a good bit.

[peterien]

After watching Episode II i have to say that its by far the poorest entry so far. It just drags and drags on, i really wanted to like Christensen but he is such a bore. Ewan McGregor carries it to something passable.

EDIT;And as mentioned above, the lack of a big over-arching villain hurts the first 2 episodes.

[J.T.]

As I said before, it also does not help that the Trade Federation has the worst starship engineers ever.  Who the fuck puts the main power generator right there in the fucking fighter hangar?

 

Oh, Phantom Menace.  Why does the second best lightsaber fight of the franchise happen in the second to worst movie of the franchise.

[Jingus]

Rewatching Attack of the Clones right now (I've been doing a Rifftracked movie-a-day): oh yeah, this is so much better than Phantom Menace that it makes me slightly doubt the sanity of the people who say it's the worse of the two. Less than thirty minutes in, the car-chase scene through the city (while at least somewhat inspired by The Fifth Element) is a better action scene than the pod-race or any other action sequence (besides That One Lightsaber Fight) in the entire first episode. And the little joke with the deathstick dealer was a better moment of comedy than anything in the entire first episode. And the "who's trying to assassinate Padme?" subplot is handled with much more intrigue than any of TPM's lame attempt at mysteries.

And the movie's just BETTER on a level of simple craftsmanship: more unique and less standard-hackwork camera angles, more natural-feeling and less robotic and stifling camera moves, infinitely moodier lighting, much prettier color schemes, tighter editing, fewer seams on the CGI, much more interesting designs for the vehicles and creatures, sharper work on the sound effects, the music working to create a far superior mood of uncertainty and dread. And although the Anakin/Padme relationship is usually pretty limp, at least the characters actually have arcs and feelings in this movie; as opposed to in Episode I, where everyone felt like crude not-even-complex-enough-to-be-called-a-stereotype characters from some cheap Saturday morning cartoon, the type which would only run for one season before promptly getting cancelled and then never getting released on any home video format ever. Natalie Portman even does better acting in her very first scene here than anything she did in the first film; ditto for Ewan Mcgregor. Seriously, those who claim Phantom Menace is better: explain yourselves, sirs!

[J.T.]

Seriously, those who claim Phantom Menace is better: explain yourselves, sirs!

 

Christensen and Portman have near zero chemistry and their budding romance is supposed to be the cornerstone of the movie.  The scenes where they are together drag on FOREVER~! thanks to the lack of passion and some of the worst dialogue ever written.

 

Then there are the little stupid things like Padme's strategic costume rip which somehow only exposes her midriff to the delight of hormone driven teen male fans, Christopher Lee mailing in a performance, and Jango Fett's head being stuck to the inside of his helmet with Gorilla Glue.

 

The first act hums along so well thanks to the rather clever detective story that evolves from the assassination attempt and then it comes to a screeching halt once the plot shifts to Naboo.  Young love was never that awkward.  The third act somewhat redeems the movie as we have war going on that isn't a giant commercial for Hasbro action figures, but it is a far cry from what we've seen in the battle scenes from the now SW middle trilogy.

 

Attack of the Clones has grown on me after repeated viewings, but I still find the simplicity of Phantom Menace to be more entertaining because that middle act really does kill Clones dead.

[AxB]

The costume rip is a sci-fi tradition! How many times did Captain Kirk's shirt rip that way?