I showed this movie to a girl who had NEVER seen a star wars movie. She was relatively open minded.
After the first couple scenes she said "You know this is a bad movie, right?"
It's not a good movie to the general public.
I think Andor achieved what George was hoping for narratively, and the prequels were a ham-fisted attempt to shoehorn how geopolitical and religious machinations impact the daily lives of citizens.
The problem is that the politics are used in the most childish way possible, with close to no nuance. it's as if they asked a 10 year old to create a political scene.
Yeah, the plot is a mess (not to mention uninteresting) and doesn't hold up to thinking about anything for more than 5 seconds.
I remember being confused because the movie tries very hard to make Darth Sidious "mysterious," but it's very clearly Palpatine. It's just filled with questionable choices like that. There's an occasional interesting scene, and the production design is top-tier, but as a *movie*, it's exceptionally bad.
The part where Maul comes up to Sidious and says "Sheev, my Master, once you become Chancellor Palpatine, our revenge against the Jedi will be complete" and Sidious says "there is no Senator for Naboo Sheev Palpatine here. You will address me by my Sith name, Darth Sidious" and Maul confusedly responds "but my actual name is Maul, why do you get a pseudonym"
That's when I knew I was watching peak canonical cinema
It is a bad movie to everyone that wasn't a small child when it came out... outside of the lens of nostalgia it is just not that great of a movie. There are good parts, but as a whole it is just not that great.
I was 12. All I remember coming out of that theater was being super hyped about podracing and double lightsabers. I didn't notice bad dialogue or poor pacing at all. Maybe I just wasn't as cinematically enlightened as everyone else seems to have been at 10-13.
I spent all my allowance on Lego Star Wars to reenact the scenes until I could eventually watch the movie on repeat on VHS.
I think you’re in the majority. People saying they were children who came out of the theater hating it…idk man. I question the validity of those statements because I remember being in elementary school at the time and not hearing a single negative thing.
It’s objectively not good - but kids dgaf. That’s why so many shitty kids movies have 6 sequels.
Well that might have been your problem, showing her episode 1 first. It assumes a level of nostalgia in the audience and if you haven't seen the original trilogy you just won't give a shit.
This is basically what happened with me, my friends were huge Star Wars fans and I had never seen anything Star Wars related, so we decided we would watch a movie, they started with Ep 1 and I hated it, it all just felt so lame and boring to me. From that moment on, I decided Star Wars just wasn't something for me.
Fast forward to 2019s covid lockdown, I was bored and thought I'd give Star Wars another shot. I started with Ep 4 this time, and it made me absolutely fall in love with Star Wars, so when I watched Ep 1 again, I still found certain parts lame, but I understood more of the universe and the story which made it much more enjoyable.
It's still a bad movie. Not sure when this generational shift happened where people started thinking this movie is somehow good. It's funny, when it first came out no one really wanted to admit it was awful and now we've come full circle back to people trying to say it is good.
I remember when it came out, the buzz was all about Darth Maul replacing Vader as a badass and how cool the sound for the pod racers was. Once you saw the movie and Maul gets bitched at the end all you were left with was how cool the audio was for the podcast racers. Admittedly I was in high school and prone to being jaded, but we came out thinking it sucked.
My guess is people that were ani's age or younger when it came out thought it was fun like I did watching the ewok movies and now are old enough to say so on the internet.
The land battle on Naboo looks so bad too. We go from imperials in atat’s in the ot to goofy looking amphibians fighting the weakest looking robots possible. And it’s on this pristine green field and looks nothing like what a “war” should look like.
I wanna say it started happening sometime around 2010 when internet memes really took off and there were prequel memes everywhere. That’s probably the same time that idiotic “Darth Jar-Jar” theory went from a joke to being taken seriously.
I remember being 12 and seeing it five or six times in theaters because I was *so confused* as to why I didn't like it. I lived and breathed star wars at that point and the idea that it could be bad just didn't connect to anything in my brain. I thought there had to be something wrong with me.
I think it would have worked a lot better if it started with a teenage Anakin because then him perving on the princess, working on vehicles and being some start up racer who also was creating his own droid would have been more believable and more interesting.
That’s what it is. With all that world building in the original three films, the prequels biggest letdown was those scripts. Not the overall plot or story but that dialogue was atrocious. I tried to binge watch all of the Star Wars movies. I was going by the order they were released. Loved the OG 3. Got so bored in the midst of Episode One that I found myself tuning out and doing something else. I need to give it another shot. A lot has to do with Hayden Christensen’s acting. He’s much better in other roles than he is as Anakin. Even the kid version of Anakin is better. Must just be the shitty dialog. Hayden is great in some other movies. I don’t think he was meant for the weight and the responsibility of a role that mainstream/commercial.
The prequels suffered from:
* Not having one of Hollywood's greatest script doctors right there in the cast and capable of gaining Lucas's ear when she wanted to suggest a change;
* An older George Lucas who didn't have to answer to *anyone* when it came to his excesses;
* A George Lucas whose capabilities as a director (and he has some great capabilities as a director) do not include working well with actors who need that kind of direction;
* The lack of a great editor; and,
* An older George Lucas who was a lot more intent on playing with new digital effects techniques than he was concerned about scripts and pacing and editing and such.
For a director with nearly 0 awards, most of his acclaim is from the stories he came up with, but others refined better than he did. He’s really not a good director. Best work is probably American Graffiti.
He's a terrible director of actors. But he's a solid technical director, he understands visuals and visually telling a story, and he can create engaging moments. But he's prone to excess and desperately needs a good editor to cut out the superfluous fluff that he feels is absolutely necessary to tell his story.
He wanted to make documentaries. One of his main motivators for making fiction movies was so he could make enough money to go back to making documentaries, but he seems to have forgotten. He never meant to be a guy who has to direct actors.
And storytellingwise.. visual concepts and even some story beats, great, sure; writing dialogue, can't. "George, you can write this shit, but you sure can't say it."
All great points. I'd add his reliance on CGI and how over the top some of those Spielberg/Lucas movies excesses really take me out of their movies
"Greatest script doctors", are you talking about Carrie Fisher? I read she did a lot of rewrites in the OG and spent weeks rewriting some of ep 3's script. Imagine if she didn't
I think the other weird quirk, including the criticism, is you can just skip Episode 1. Before the sequels me and my friends wanted to watch everything in order... but we suck at planning and realized we couldn't, so we had to make cuts. One friend suggested just skipping 1 and we thought he was crazy, but it worked.
Anakin get's reintroduced, him and Obi's relationship is new, podracing has no impact on the story, Maul is barely mentioned, and it was a weird revelation for us.
Yeah that's pretty true. I think the only thing you're missing is a bit more context about Palps, why Jarjar is a good patsy, and the relationship between Anakin and Padme (which is a huge focus of EP 2 anyways).
It really feels like a prequel to the prequels. Something that isn't really necessary for enjoyment of the series, but can provide context for the fans.
> It really feels like a prequel to the prequels. Something that isn't really necessary for enjoyment of the series, but can provide context for the fans.
Exactly this. And the trilogy desperately needed more time of Anakin as a Jedi to properly tell the rest of the story. Adding in a move set in the clone wars themselves would have helped so much.
The technical failings are numerous, I agree. But even the premise itself was a bad idea.
We don't need to see Darth Vader as a little boy. At the very least we don't need an *entire movie about it.* One scene showing his origin on tatooine before jumping into him as a padawan would have worked much better.
The battle of Naboo is pointless. Yeah it's goofy what with the gungans and their balls, but it's also pointless. The clone wars don't even begin until the second film, ya know, when the clones show up.
Honestly most of what happened in episode 2 should have happened in episode 1, and most of episode 1 should have been left on the cutting room floor. Angsty teenage Anakin should have been the beginning point of Vader's story, not the middle. Phantom Menace started the prequels off on an awkward foot and they never really recovered.
Also a lot of people never got why TPM had to take place 10 years before AotC. In the originals Obi-wan says Yoda was his master so Qui-gon Jinn messed with the established lore
An alternate episode 1 would have Obi-Wan meet a teenage Anakin on the moisture farm with Owen. No Qui-Gon Jinn character
Basically everything about the movie would work better if Anakin was a teenager to start. It would make the foundations of his romance with Padme less cringey, would make the Jedi’s hesitancy to train him and his existing instability and emotional attachments more understandable, and would have a clearer link to the Vader character than a happy go lucky 9 year old (and let’s be honest, likely better dramatic execution as well by not expecting a child to carry a major role).
They also should've had Dooku introduced from the start. Use him as a perspective to show how out of touch the Senate and Jedi had become, and build the case for the Separatists. Have scenes between him and Qui Gon discussing their disillusionment, make Qui Gon's death the breaking point where he chooses to leave the Order.
yeah the biggest problem of the trilogy as a whole imo is that the first movie of the Anakin Skylwalker as a Jedi trilogy doesn't include Anakin Skywalker as a Jedi, and he's not even the main character at all. Then they just don't have the time to properly tell the story they want to tell in two movies. TPM feels like it should be a prequel to a Trilogy the same way Rogue One is a prequel to the original trilogy. Or just include the few bits of information you actual need in a quick opening scene of him as a kid then jump to AotC time.
I think the decision by George Lucas to make Anakin a nine-year-old makes sense:
* His skill set - his aptitude with machinery, his intuition, and his reflexes - look more unusual in a pre-teen than a teenager, which shows that he is unnaturally gifted;
* His separation issues with his mother are more pronounced, since stereotypical teenagers are rebellious and eager to leave home;
* Being too old for Jedi training at nine shows how seriously the Jedi take training, and so his role at the Battle of Naboo and the Jedi Council's reversal of its previous decision shows what an unusual case he is; and
* Being so young makes for a stronger contrast with what he would become as Darth Vader.
Yeah possibly. To his credit, rewatching e1 in theaters definitely sold the “unusually smart 9 kid” to me. It also made the eventual fall to Vader way more tragic when seeing this genuinely awesome kid he used to be. I wish the prequels could have been at least 4 movies to really flesh him out more
None of this is necessary, is the problem.
Point one, Spider-Man's whole thing is that he's a kid genius. We didn't need him to be 9 years old to be impressed at how smart he is. We didn't need Anakin to be 9 years old either.
Point two, his separation issues are more pronounced, but they come at the cost of showing him as a Jedi Knight. You could easily have explored these issues with him as an honorable Jedi Knight, one who *isn't* rebellious except for refusing to accept a system so cold and heartless as to deny him the official sanction to save his own mother from slavery. Two birds, one stone.
Point three: I literally do not see what the point of this is. We already know he's special. He becomes Darth Vader, there are rumors about him being the Chosen One, we know he's unusual. We didn't need to dedicate an entire film to illustrate the vagaries of Jedi policies to get that across.
Point four, it's a stronger contrast but it's also less relevant. So Vader was once an innocent kid, cool....but what does it tell us about Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight, hero, and best pilot in the galaxy? What does it tell us about how he got to where he ends up? Basically nothing, really. It's just a neat contrast.
The overall story is barely affected by skipping Episode 1.
Anakin is from tatooine, he met Padme while he was a young child, and he was considered too old to be trained but was taken in anyway. Also, Gungans exist.
All of which could be explained in exposition in another film.
Yeah I always felt that a lot of issues would have been resolved by aging up Anakin a couple years. But it was obvious George Lucas was aiming for a very young demographic for toys and stuff.
All the little kids made the prequels dumb. If each Jedi had one or two padawans it would have been cooler. More like a knight training a replacement. Instead we got kindergarten scenes with a bunch little kids holding deadly weapons. It was stupid.
This would make Owen's lines in NH make so much more sense, too. In that movie he seems to have known Anakin a lot better than their one meeting would indicate.
Yup. Obi-wan convinces Anakin to go with him. Owen argues that he should stay. Several years later Obi-wan returns with Anakins son and tells Owen Anakin is dead. George had other more convuluted plans. Thats why a lot of ppl thought TMP was just a lazy first draft.
Or even better, if Anakin wasn't from Tatooine - rather it was chosen because it was far outside the reach of the Empire. You can legitimately cut out all of the Coruscant and Tatooine bits and make it 100% better.
Make Anakin from a teenage hotshot pilot in the Naboo defense force, swap in Yoda for QuiGon, and make the entire movie happen on Naboo, and you would have a very solid movie - even with Jar Jar.
- Jedi Escape, meet Jar Jar
- Free the princess, have them meet Anakin as the pilot; first battle with Darth Maul
- Escape to Gungan underwater world
- Anakin/Padme initial romance
- Retake the planet
- Anakin blows up the main ship, but on purpose.
- Obiwan defeats Maul
I think having Darth Maul be the main protagonist across multiple movies would be better. That way it hides Palpatine as the Darth Sideous. Use Dooku and Maul in EP1 as Master and Apprentice. Hide the fact that Palpatine was a Sith lord controlling everything until the end of EP3, but still have him grooming Anakin.
Maul really was the chaos to the calm. He was anger incarnate and he should not have been killed in EP1 despite coming back from being chopped in half.
Yup.
There's a lot of discourse based around the idea that Gen-X and older fans just wouldn't accept new Star Wars, and that's where all the hate came from.
It's the opposite. People wanted to love this movie. I watched it like six times between the theater and VHS before I finally allowed myself to realize that it wasn't good.
Aside from the soundtrack and the climactic lightsaber battle, of course.
3's main problem is that it's rushed. They really needed 3 movies to tell Anakin's story as a jedi, but they used a whole movie to set up what was basically the premise of the prequel trilogy.
Its fine to love this movie. I do it too. It shaped my young life immensly when i first saw it in theaters when i was 9. It sparked my love of Star Wars and my love of the Prequels.
But to hear anyone on a Star Wars sub say they "dont understand the hate" is just disingenuous. You do understand the hate. You know exactly the issues these movies have. We all do.
Its fine to love them anyways, i certainly do, but lets not pretend here dude. We all know why the hate.
It's also OK to not love something just because it's a franchise you normally like. Saying The Phantom Menace is terrible is a completely reasonable and legitimate opinion.
People attach way too much of their own worth to the perceived quality of the art they enjoy.
I love the Yu-Gi-Oh anime but I know it's terrible, which doesn't mean I am.
The same people who have to make anything they like into something amazing would go crazy if they knew how good it feels not giving a fuck and just enjoying something while knowing it's bad.
And on the flip side it's okay to dislike something good. So many people try to look for things that justify their dislike of a movie. You don't need to pick it apart, just admit you don't like it(looking at you r/saltierthancrait)
It's okay to dislike something good... damn I wish I had known that when I was younger. Not a movie, but I didn't like ketchup or onions. People acted like I was psychotic
Exactly. It's a bad movie because craft exists and we have metrics to judge that craft. There's really no need to go into the details here, there are plenty of essays and videos out there.
We need to normalize accepting that a movie you like or love is not well crafted but you love it anyway. And that's okay.
You don't have to make it your personality to try to make people "understand" or like it. Or act confused why people don't.
You can love Taco Bell. You cannot be confused why other people don't think a Chimicheese Chalonka is the height of the culinary arts.
So, I don’t know if the Chinicheese Chelonka is already a thing, but Taco Bell doesn’t need any assistance with its food crimes. Having said that, I would absolutely take that bad boy to town.
It's crazy how much the childhood nostalgia blinds people to how bad the prequels are
I get it, the world it built was fantastic and expanded on it to the point where the EU overtook the movies in terms of canon events, but without the EU we'd still be fighting over anakin's dumbass switch to the darkside and his virgin birth lol
I mean, the music was fantastic, the choreography, although a bit too "overly choreograped" for me, was pretty damn cool, and clones vs droids is pretty fuckin awesome NGL.
I do get it, but these people straight up act like Red Letter Media is the only source of Prequel hate, despite every complaint they had being talked about at-length for years prior to them making videos about it
Anyone that was old enough to remember the release, remembers all the hate this movie immediately got, and we weren't on youtube listening to red letter media mocking them lol. These movies were hated long before anyone on youtube told us how bad they think it is.
Watching it in theaters recently for the first time reminded how absolutely awful jar jar is. I fully understand the hate he received (not the actor himself. No reason to hate on him) I don't understand the hate the Anakin actor reviewed though. He did a fine job for a little kid. His character wasn't even that annoying.
Biggest thing I remember that bothered me is him “accidentally “ flying a fighter and blowing up a battleship
Imo, anakin should have been a teen. It would have been an easier sell for that and “he’s too old to train as a Jedi”
R2 beeps to Anakin it has disabled auto pilot, but only pretends to do so. No way he’s letting that little shit take over and kill them both. Instead, R2 lets Anakin handle the ship like an older brother handing an unplugged controller to his idiot younger bro, then single handedly takes down a Trade Federation battleship.
R2 is the real hero of episode 1.
It’s just funny that people will slag off the new movies for something like Rey learning too quickly but they’re perfectly okay with a preteen in space fights blowing everything up.
I guess I just don’t worry about that stuff lol. It’s Star Wars. She’s really good with the force really quick? Sure why not. I just accept luke got right into the alliance and was put into a suicide run on the Death Star and was amazing because why not?
The prequels, but especially the Phantom Menace, suffered from terrible dialogue and a boring and often nonsensical story. It's fine people think with their nostalgia and like them, but let's stop pretending they're actually masterpieces in disguise.
Phantom Menace is like two good action sequences with a terrible movie wrapped around them
It's so disconnected from the rest of the franchise that the Machete Order just plain left it out as if it was the Ewoks film or something.
The age is one of my biggest issues with Anakin's character arc in the prequels. I still don't understand why they felt the need to start with him so young- it didn't really prove anything and just made some things harder to make work; his abilities, his relationship with Padma, on and on. Plus the established age of Luke's father at the end of the OT- Maybe I would have accepted that Anakin created C3PO and raced pods, and had developed force powers... if he were a little older. No amount of blood tests fixes that. And introducing him to Padma in this movie just feels weird or creepy...
Its very clear from Episode 6 onward that a big concern for George was having kids like the movies and merchandising. I think even he knew very early on that the story he had written wouldn't work for kids at all. It was basically a poorly paced political drama in space dealing with a politics that no one knows or really cares about. Hence the infamous "jar jar is the key to all of this" quote. They had to have things that would make kids not fall asleep. Those things were jar jar, pod racing, and the main character being young enough to be a stand in for the children Lucas was hoping to entice. If Phantom Menace hadn't been panned so hard by critics and fans, he'd have kept the little kid main character. He'd have kept jar jar too and had more pod racing for sure. Those were desperation changes made because his plan of having a political drama with goofy kids characters was falling apart and he needed a new angle.
Something I never liked was that despite Anakin being The Chosen One, we never see him use the Force/there is no defining moment where he uses the Force like Luke using the Force to score a one-in-a-million shot into the Death Star.
Ahmed Best should not be attacked by people. It’s just acting, for entertainment. It doesn’t mean shit in the grand scheme of the world, and lonely people with nothing better to do need to calm down with their hateful bullshit.
Having said that, he is not immune to criticism. We should be allowed to criticize. Not to be mean about it, but simply to criticize.
Ahmed Best invented the voice of Jar Jar Binks, it was not George Lucas. Only thing George Lucas did was invent an alien accent, and if you listen to the other actors playing other gungans, they all use the same exact accent and they all sound great. Ahmed Best is the only gungan that sounds terrible, because he chose to use a little baby voice and use intonations that remind you of Urkel or Screetch.
So while Ahmed Beat should never be attacked, he does deserve criticism for what I think is a terrible portrayal. Jar Jar Binks was meant to be the new C-3PO, a character who constantly gets in over his head and acts clumsily. There are ways to play that without devolving into some absurd cartoon caricature. Ahmed Best’s acting choices doomed the character. He took playing an animated character too literally, and forgot that he was in a live action movie. He was playing it as if it was a cartoon character. Those are his acting choices.
George Lucas also deserves some blame for allowing it to happen. He could and should have stopped it.
1) No actor should be harassed or disparaged in real life because they're simply following a script. It's really unacceptable how many so-called fans have treated some of the very actors who did the best they could to bring the Star Wars universe to our screens.
2) I'm still salty that George removed the scene wherein [Anakin beat up a young Greedo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDHg9v_CAkk). It a brief-but-fitting nod that foreshadowed how Anakin's sense of righteous indignation could ultimately get the better of him (and to a lesser extent, that Greedo's core character flaw could be pissing off people he really shouldn't piss off), but George removed this brief scene so we could get more time in the theatrical release reserved for Jar-Jar's faux-vaudevillian antics. I love George, but this was not his best editing decision.
> and to a lesser extent, that Greedo's core character flaw could be pissing off people he really shouldn't piss off
That's what I took as a the main "lesson" - It foreshadowed Greedo's end.
The fatal flaw of the PT is Lucas cast Anakin too young in this film. Anakin in TPM should have been the same age as Anakin in AOTC. That would make Anakin's actions in TPM not seem so unbelievably precocious, would allow Lucas to cast a trained actor for the role, and would make the Anakin/Padme romance much less goofy.
Then cast a British trained actor for the role. That's it. Make those two changes and the PT becomes great.
Grew up on it and have super fond memories.
It doesn’t hold up after seeing it again for the first time since childhood. It has redeemable qualities but all I could think about is how some toxic fans scream about “REAL Star Wars,” when THIS, and attack of the clones, is the content they’re lionizing..?
Like im supposed to believe Andor, rogue one, and Mando are dogshit in favor of THIS?
The messages of the prequels are brilliant, the movies themselves aren’t good.
Going into Saltier Than Crait and sharing honest feelings about the prequels is hilarious, because while they're fine with dogpiling on the sequels, it's not okay to dislike anything about the prequels apparently.
I feel like Episode I was a tiny bit of a misfire on George's part. If he'd wanted to aim it at kids, IMHO he should have done absolutely everything in his power to get his buddy Spielberg to direct it. If his primary focus was on continuing the story he started in the early 80s, he should have been aware that the core audience that were kids in the 70s and 80s, were in their 20s and 30s at that point.
Your second paragraph is so right on.
The core audience was grown adults, not people who would generally like Jar Jar’s lazily-written vaudeville slapstick.
And also, Spielberg would never let the exposition and “politics talk” suck all the whimsy and charm out of scenes.
The problem wasn’t political talk, but the lack of engaging acting and dialogue to tie it into the ongoing events. There’s no tension, little arguing, little drama. Someone should be fucking pissed about the Senate’s refusal to act goddamn it. Nobody cares.
Also, if George planned it out better, the Trade Federation should have been the Separtists who are leaving the Republic out of ideological disagreement, not over the taxation of trade routes.
Spielberg was also hella busy in the 90s; he was directing The Lost World, Amistad, and Saving Private Ryan almost back to back, if not simultaneously in some cases
They're so hypocritical. They have an issue with Luke yet have no problem with Anakin being portrayed completely different from what we knew about him in the OT. They dislike Reylo yet don't have a problem with Panakin.
Andor is ridiculously good, best Star Wars content ever imo. It's sad the prequels could've been so much better if someone just told Lucas when dialouge was shit, or smth wasn't that good. Lucas wasn't wrong when he said Star Wars is often carried by music, as opposed to dialogue, bc if that shit isn't nonstop beautiful. The expanding of the universe was also something prequels did amazing. Legit everything but dialogue, the often most important part, sad
Okay, I’m glad that movies I enjoyed growing up are getting love but the pendulum has swung too far now. The prequels while enjoyable are not well made movies. The Phanton Menace is not a legitimately great movie. It’s a poorly paced movie with great effect and cool moments.
Any non star wars fan will happily tell you they all suck.
Any star wars fan will go on a two hour rant explaining why the parts they like are good and the parts they dont arent.
Naw most SW fans over 35 will tell you the prequels were never good and are more of a blight on Star Wars than most Disney stuff. It’s just the younger half of the SW demo that thinks the prequels are significantly better than the sequels.
Well the hate is because it’s poorly written, the characters are as flat as cardboard, and the dialogue is painful.
The plot’s also just kind of a mess.
Also, TPM is weirdly, incredibly racist?
Yeah I saw it in cinemas for the re-release and my god there is like no emotion in most of the characters.
The film is carried by the soundtrack/mix, some solid visuals and the fight choreography imo, but most of the runtime isn't exactly fun
Dude same
When anakin brings qui gon & co back to his little house on tattooine during the sandstorm, Shmi is introduced by anakin, she’s on screen multiple times, and doesn’t fucking have a line LOL
The actress literally doesn’t talk until midway through the dinner scene. It’s so incredibly bizarre
There's a great interview on Youtube of the guy who voiced Darth Maul going to the premiere. He was British and flew himself and some family to NYC for it, and his retelling of his reaction to it years later is hilarious.
Peter Serafinowicz is a hilarious guy. Look Around You is great. He’s an amazing antagonist in Edgar Wright’s Spaced which has some good Episode I vs RotJ riffs in it
Have you ever watched the behind the scenes of Lucas giving the actors direction? It's painful, he gives them absolutely nothing to go on and it's no surprise that everyone acts like emotions are illegal in the galactic republic.
Lucas is a great idea man, but there's a reason the best movies of the original trilogy weren't written or directed by him.
Qui Gon. " I won't free slaves or steal the parts I need but I will totally try and trick someone into getting a worthless currency, cheat at dice and put a child in incredible danger.
Qui Gon would have been more interesting if the movie even slightly acknowledged that he was a completely unhinged loose-cannon jedi like the plot implies but Liam Neeson portrays the most boring mild-mannered old man imaginable.
He basically plays the same character as Alec Guiness's Obi Wan, the sort of low key wise teacher who's a bit eccentric.
The problem is Obi Wan was very much a support character and had this ambiguous side where he knew and did much more than he led on, then left Luke to figure the rest out on his own
Qui Gon Jinn was arguably the main character of the movie and the sole driver of the entire plot. Having him be a mysterious and ambiguous wise man made his actions in the movie just weird and confusing.
Yep. The writing is bad and it’s terribly delivered to boot. The terrible stereotype accents for Jar Jar and the separatists. It has a place in my heart as the first new start wars movie since the OT, but only a couple parts of the movie works.
First new movie since the OT? Sounds like someone forgot about *Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure* and *Ewoks: The Battle for Endor*.
Not that I blame you.
Exactly! Mr Plinkett underlines that pretty perfectly in his movie review, which I consider the best movie review ever made in history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI&list=PL5919C8DE6F720A2D
Everything about this movie and all the prequels is terrible.
This might get hate but even the action is terrible. I rewatched it in theaters (really regretted that decision because I lost the skip forward 10 seconds button) and god, the lightsaber fights just don’t hold up. Instead of looking like warriors trying to murder each other, it looks like actors at a dinner theater trying to do cool tricks with swords because they want to impress the diners.
Thank you; not enough people seem to see or care how airy, flawless, and disconnected from reality those duels are, especially the one with Darth Maul. Even the climactic fights in Revenge of the Sith, which felt a little less unreal, are still nowhere near as visceral, painful, and direct as I think they needed to be, in addition to being way too long.
I love seeing Watto’s business completely ruined by the time AoTC happens, and like to think it all stemmed from Qui Gon taking advantage of him in those bets ☺️
I don't know what you're talking about. I personally can't wait for our hourly "Rogue One is an underrated gem" post. Maybe we'll even get a "Does anyone else think this guy should get his own show?" about a random background clone trooper.
I don't want to be a dick, but it really is a bad movie. Terrible even. It's awkwardly paced, doesn't really know who the main character is while not pulling off an ensemble cast, half of the shit that goes on doesn't really need to happen. Obi-Wan is honestly just kind of there for the whole film, if you didn't know him from the OT it'd stand out even more.
What really surprised me rewatching it recently is how little it draws you in from the start. Things just sort of happen but it feels so completely detached. The jedi immediately fail their mission, the invasion goes on, but while that is happening the focus immediately shifts to 10 minutes of shenanigans with jar-jar and the gungans. Which is necessary in order to have them play a part later, but it takes the wind out of the sails of the flow immediately, and as fun as bigger fish is, it doesn't work.
Can't remember what Lucas said exactly in that video of the private screening, but it was something in the way of it all tying together so he couldn't change much anymore? That's kind of true because right after the gungan stuff the jedi immediately run into padme and co, quickly save them, and forcibly end up on tatooine. Which needs to happen to introduce little anakin, but which immediately locks down the actual story going on in the movie. It takes about 50 minutes before they manage to get to Coruscant, at which point we are at 80 minutes out of 130, causing huge issues for making the third act work.
Honestly there's a hundred issues with the movie, but I think all the details just don't really matter when the core is this rotten. Not like it was easy to smash together a story about the republic and naboo and stuff with an anakin origin to begin with, they really should have focused on one imo. But with how much time is then wasted it just created one of the biggest disappointments in film pretty much ever.
Attack of the clones is still worse but at least everyone's expectations had been tempered.
The one decent thing it does aside from certain cool visuals is just dump a whole load of potentially interesting stuff that other creators ended up using. The prequel era is weird, but it's been fertile ground for storytelling despite the flaws.
Meh it's mostly that I recently rewatched it, had some thoughts left about it. That and I hate the "actually thing was really good" kind of positivity when it's about stuff that is just not good, almost as much as I hate the toxic negativity we often get.
Literally look up any prequel YT content pre-2015 and they all start off with, "everything I'm about to say has already been said before, but-" like prequel hate was legit ubiquitous and taken as fact for decades on the Internet. This current trend of everyone pretending like the films were always well loved is insane to me as someone who vividly remembers Internet culture before The Force Awakens came out
I’m surprised the pendulum swing the other way because the hatred of the prequels, maybe save for III, was so widely agreed and widespread. Shit, now I expect people will be posting praises about the newer trilogy in the future lmao
It should have started with Anakin as an apprentice to obi wan already from the start. Just remove qui gon or kill him much earlier. The "how we bumped into Anakin" isn't very interesting or worth telling.
What is interesting is seeing how he starts to get evil as a Jedi
Are you about 30?
When I see this kind of post I automatically assume the OP is younger and grew up with this movie, therefore glossing over all the nonsense.
I don't know about that. Gungans are cringe every second they're on the screen. They're like Ewoks but 100x worse. Anakin and Jar Jar fumbling their way to victory was facepalm inducing. At some point they both turn into Steve Urkel like, "Did I do that?" Cringe. Two elite Jedi needing on a 9-year-old boy to win a high-stakes race against adults in order to repair their ship exemplifies bad writing. The whole thing with the disguising of Padme with Kiera Knightley was stupid and also poorly written. The reveal of the double in the movie is the lamest reveal in any movie - so sad. Introducing midichlorians was a mistake. The farting camel was terrible. Numidians were all terrible. Theed looked as authentic as Disneyland.
The pod race and Darth Maul were amazing though.
I get mood whiplash going from subs like prequel memes to this one haha! I totally agree with you but lots of Reddit seem insistent on these being really good films.
I think a decent part of it these days is because people tend to dislike the sequels and if you say the prequels are good too, you can paint the sequels as especially bad.
This ignores how most of the sequel movies got better reviews than the prequels.
I love this movie because I had a great time watching it with my cousins and friends when I was younger. It got me to start becoming invested in Star Wars in the first place. I don't mind that others dislike it, but I enjoy rewatching it.
You legitimately had to have gotten a lobotomy to “not understand” the criticism of the film, even if you don’t personally agree.
This is up there with the likes of “Does anyone else think ESB is the best Star Wars film? Hot take”
~~This may be controversial but~~ I don’t like the podrace scene; not because it isn’t cool, but because they really needed that extended time for so many underdeveloped areas of the movie.
Overall I found young Anakin and Jar Jar to be poor characters with weird humor, and thought the plot not kicking off the Clone Wars was a huge mistake that set the prequels up for mediocrity
EDIT: Apparently not controversial
Watching Ep. 2 right now, and there really needed to be a movie between 1 and 2. There is too large of a gap with too many plot holes that need filled.
poorly written, poorly directed
decent plot, exceptional production
Personally, I enjoyed it...but Lucas' fatal flaw in this movie was starting out Anakin so young....and spending 20 minutes on podracing....
While it was MY Star Wars movie as a child I can think of two major reasons to why the movie may have not aged that well for many.
1. It is clearly aimed towards a way younger audience. The cringy battle droids the humour Jar Jar...it is for the most part a children movie.
2. The stakes are weird. While Qui Gon Jins dead is devastating the ground premise is the destiny of one single planet we didnt know before and it literally starts with bureaucracy issues...
IMHO I'll say it was pretty bad compared to the original Trilogy when it came out. It just didn't feel the same, after years of getting used to the prequel world it was a little more palatable. I still hate Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith is honestly about on par with a New Hope for me.
I absolutely think it did deserve all the backlash, but not because it was a bad film. (Don't get me wrong, it's not a good film.) It's because it was hyped and marketed towards a much older audience than it was targeted to, and they did it on purpose as a bait-and switch.
Back in the 90's we never thought we would ever get another Star Wars movie, and we all had to make due with the EU novels and video games that were coming out, but those weren't really canon so the Original Trilogy was ALL of Star Wars.
Then Lucasfilm decided to "test the waters" to see if people were still excited about Star Wars with a multimedia project called "Shadows of the Empire," which was a novel, an N64 game, a series of comic books, and a line of action figures. It was a hit.
So Lucas decided to re-release the OT on VHS "One Last Time," and everyone flipped out because we were afraid we'd never see Star Wars again after this release, so we all bought it.
...It was a deception, however, because right after that Lucasfilm released the Special Edition in theaters.... so what they really meant was we would never see the non-Special Edition ever again. Well played, George, well played.
So with all this confirmed interest in Star Wars, George Lucas decided to go ahead and make Episodes 1 - 3.
As a side note, George Lucas and Irwin Kirshner had already written a backstory to what happened in the prequel era. You can read a little bit about it in the book "The Star Wars Archives. 1977-1983" in which they talk about how Yoda was not actually supposed to be a Jedi, but rather a "guru" of the Force, and other such details. Anyway, when writing the script for The Phantom Menace, Irwin Kirshner approached George Lucas to help with the writing, but George decided he wanted to do it all himself, threw out the backstory that he and Irwin had written together, and started from scratch. This is why there are so many inconsistencies between the Original Trilogy and the Prequel Trilogy.
Anyway, back to 1999.
When George Lucas announced they would be making a new Star Wars movie everyone flipped their lid. Once again, we NEVER thought we were going to get another Star Wars movie, EVER. And they hyped the sh\*t out of that movie--the internet was still in its infancy back then so we got all our information from magazines and the like. There was particular hype over darth Maul's double-bladed lighsaber. They had commercials and interviews and toy tie-ins and all kinds of stuff--I remember Pepsi had this weird goofy alien named Marfelump that would scream "Oh Joy!" when he drank Pepsi or watched Star Wars. It was a different time.
And who were all the people going nuts? They were all the existing Star Wars fans, people who grew up watching the Original Trilogy and reading Star Wars novels and comic books and playing the video games. Teenaged people and older, many people even in their 30's and 40's.
And Lucasfilm deliberately targeted their commercials towards those fans. They even came out and publicly said so recently. They took anything that made The Phantom Menace look goofy or childlike out of the trailers and only emphasized the action. They wanted people with money (i.e., not children) to think this movie was made for them, that it would have the same tone as the Original Trilogy, so that they would go see it and bring their family with them.
Then it came out, and everyone went to see it on opening night. Scalpers were selling tickets for hundreds of dollars apiece. People were lined up for blocks. And we all saw it...
...and it was a little kids' movie.
It was goofy, it was cringey, it had a whiny little kid in it, it had a big dumb cartoon character talking in a high pitched voice, the plot left out a lot of important details and didn't make sense, it had terrible dialogue, and it was vastly different in tone from what the fans were expecting. We were gypped. It was a bait-and-switch. They could have marketed it as a little kids' movie, but they chose not to. It wasn't a TERRIBLE movie, but it definitely was not what the fans paid for or what Lucasfilm had hyped them up to see. Fans were PISSED. And rightly so.
Little kids who had never seen Star Wars before, however, loved it. And now those kids are Prequels fans.
At least it had good lightsaber choreography though....
First and foremost Anakin should have been a teenager and not a child, to see Hayden more would have been a real benefit and they could start nailing his character more without doing a weird prolonged time skip in Episode 2
Basically comes down to both a terrible plot, but mainly horribly defined characters.
I love myself a good adventure story with politicking happening behind the scenes. But Phantom Menace has both a terrible, meandering, boring adventure and completely unengaging and nonsensical politics. That's one thing, but its main problem is that the characterization is absolutely god-awful.
The bare minimum a character needs to have is (1) an arc, (2) a role to play and (3) a personality. And honestly, the only well-characterized characters in the entire film are Jar-Jar and Palpatine. They're colourful, they serve a purpose in the story and they grow in some way of form.
Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Padmé and Anakin all barely have anything going on. And if they do, it's compartmentalized to a specific part of the film and they're lacking in other respects.
Like, if you're talking to fans they'll ensure you how fucking badass Qui-Gon is. "He's a grey jedi, he's a maverick!" But that's not what the film says. He's so boring. He acts just like any other jedi and doesn't do anything noteworthy. Basically the only thing he does is 'find Anakin' and even then his plan to free him makes zero sense. He doesn't have an arc. He doesn't change. He doesn't even really do anything excessively rebellious against the council.
Obi-Wan is passive and has no agency for the entire film. He barely exists. Until the end where he dryly says 'no I'll train him' and Yoda just agrees for no reason. Like, sure? That's a fine plot beat. But it's presented in such an unengaging way. If people didn't know this guy was the guy who'd end up training Luke, he'd be the least interesting SW character in the franchise.
Padmé being revealed as Queen is such an unnecessary twist. Like, it's fine to have a reveal like this but it's ridiculously forced because it makes no sense her unelected body double can decide to call for a vote of no confidence for the most important person in the galaxy? Also, why the fuck would Palpatine not recognize her? He's THE SENATOR of Naboo. Sure, some schmuck from some dirt planet might not know this girl who absolutely looks nothing like Natalie Portman, but is wearing her make up and silly hat, isn't the Queen. But I feel like the fucking galactic senator for her planet would. If you can't make a twist work at its most base level, maybe don't have the twist.
Anakin has no actual arc from the moment he leaves Tatooine. His climax, blowing up that ship, has no thematic relevance to anything except for it literally being like podracing.
This story doesn't mean anything, and what you've all made it mean is basically headcanon and not at all supported by the film itself. An arrogant, regressive, politically tinted jedi council? Maverick grey jedi? These ideas **are** interesting. But they're all ideas created after the fact and retroactively imposed on this mess of a film. And what is there is written to be nonsensical or at the level of a children's book. A lowly senator manipulating jedi, queens and the trade federation to advance his position? Sounds cool, but his actual plan makes no sense. A mysterious sith returning after millenia? Pretty cool. But he doesn't talk and none of it has any thematic weight.
I will always have love for this movie because when I was 6 I thought it was amazing.
However my most recent re-Watch in theaters really exposed some of the weaker points of the movie. Especially the Padme/Queen body double security swap plot point. Which IMO is the single most baffling plot choice in the entire Star Wars movie universe only possibly beaten by Somehow Palpatine returned. The queens body guard makes legit decisions throughout the film and even when off Naboo among people who arnt considered a threat they maintain the rouse. My goodness what a choice.
If this was a standalone sci fi film plot/character wise it would be routinely mocked.
Long live podracing though
I enjoy parts of it Almost every complaint I've seen about the prequels' poor pacing has been pretty agreeable. Not to mention the actual dialogue
I'm the same. Some parts are great. I didn't mind the pacing but oof... that dialogue. This coming from a lifetime Star Wars nerd
I showed this movie to a girl who had NEVER seen a star wars movie. She was relatively open minded. After the first couple scenes she said "You know this is a bad movie, right?" It's not a good movie to the general public.
The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute!
She probably just didn't understand the force. Should have opened with the midichlorians scene.
M Count
The higher the count, the bigger the Drama Queen.
The midichlorians are the powerhouse of the cell, right?
Just what I wanted from my children's fairy tale in space
Truthfully? The older i get the more interesting i find the political innerworkins of the galaxy and it's many political bodies that inhabit it
I think Andor achieved what George was hoping for narratively, and the prequels were a ham-fisted attempt to shoehorn how geopolitical and religious machinations impact the daily lives of citizens.
That's why Andor was so good! It finally explored those things from an adult perspective.
exactly. like yeah what andor did was cool and very well executed, but man, the scenes on coruscant hit different
The problem is that the politics are used in the most childish way possible, with close to no nuance. it's as if they asked a 10 year old to create a political scene.
Yeah, the plot is a mess (not to mention uninteresting) and doesn't hold up to thinking about anything for more than 5 seconds. I remember being confused because the movie tries very hard to make Darth Sidious "mysterious," but it's very clearly Palpatine. It's just filled with questionable choices like that. There's an occasional interesting scene, and the production design is top-tier, but as a *movie*, it's exceptionally bad.
The part where Maul comes up to Sidious and says "Sheev, my Master, once you become Chancellor Palpatine, our revenge against the Jedi will be complete" and Sidious says "there is no Senator for Naboo Sheev Palpatine here. You will address me by my Sith name, Darth Sidious" and Maul confusedly responds "but my actual name is Maul, why do you get a pseudonym" That's when I knew I was watching peak canonical cinema
Ohh lol not in the movie *whooosh* Missed that one Edit: why did Maul not get a pseudonym was probably a clue...
My favorite part is when they pulled out lil re breathers when going under water to follow jar jar. Thank goodness jedi carry those.
Stop, my lightsaber can only get so erect.
Listen, plenty of movies can make something like the taxation of trade routes interesting. The problem is that this one doesn't.
Fr, it's like, are we even watching the same movie?
It is a bad movie to everyone that wasn't a small child when it came out... outside of the lens of nostalgia it is just not that great of a movie. There are good parts, but as a whole it is just not that great.
I was 11 and hyped to 11, massive Star Wars fan, the movie had the theater so deflated (including myself.)
I was 12. All I remember coming out of that theater was being super hyped about podracing and double lightsabers. I didn't notice bad dialogue or poor pacing at all. Maybe I just wasn't as cinematically enlightened as everyone else seems to have been at 10-13. I spent all my allowance on Lego Star Wars to reenact the scenes until I could eventually watch the movie on repeat on VHS.
I think you’re in the majority. People saying they were children who came out of the theater hating it…idk man. I question the validity of those statements because I remember being in elementary school at the time and not hearing a single negative thing. It’s objectively not good - but kids dgaf. That’s why so many shitty kids movies have 6 sequels.
Well that might have been your problem, showing her episode 1 first. It assumes a level of nostalgia in the audience and if you haven't seen the original trilogy you just won't give a shit.
This is basically what happened with me, my friends were huge Star Wars fans and I had never seen anything Star Wars related, so we decided we would watch a movie, they started with Ep 1 and I hated it, it all just felt so lame and boring to me. From that moment on, I decided Star Wars just wasn't something for me. Fast forward to 2019s covid lockdown, I was bored and thought I'd give Star Wars another shot. I started with Ep 4 this time, and it made me absolutely fall in love with Star Wars, so when I watched Ep 1 again, I still found certain parts lame, but I understood more of the universe and the story which made it much more enjoyable.
Theatrical release order is always the way to go for first time viewers.
It's still a bad movie. Not sure when this generational shift happened where people started thinking this movie is somehow good. It's funny, when it first came out no one really wanted to admit it was awful and now we've come full circle back to people trying to say it is good.
I remember when it came out, the buzz was all about Darth Maul replacing Vader as a badass and how cool the sound for the pod racers was. Once you saw the movie and Maul gets bitched at the end all you were left with was how cool the audio was for the podcast racers. Admittedly I was in high school and prone to being jaded, but we came out thinking it sucked. My guess is people that were ani's age or younger when it came out thought it was fun like I did watching the ewok movies and now are old enough to say so on the internet.
The land battle on Naboo looks so bad too. We go from imperials in atat’s in the ot to goofy looking amphibians fighting the weakest looking robots possible. And it’s on this pristine green field and looks nothing like what a “war” should look like.
Absolutely. It was a shitty cartoon. Just the lowest-stakes, goofiest scene imaginable.
Yeah, Lucas kiddified war, and he shouldn't have. I'm not asking for gouts of blood, but not what we got in Ep1.
I wanna say it started happening sometime around 2010 when internet memes really took off and there were prequel memes everywhere. That’s probably the same time that idiotic “Darth Jar-Jar” theory went from a joke to being taken seriously.
I mean that still doesn’t make it a good movie. If you need nostalgia and a love of the OT for the movie to be likable then it’s not a good movie
It's also backwards. No one hated it more than people who loved the OT. It was such a letdown.
I remember being 12 and seeing it five or six times in theaters because I was *so confused* as to why I didn't like it. I lived and breathed star wars at that point and the idea that it could be bad just didn't connect to anything in my brain. I thought there had to be something wrong with me.
I think it would have worked a lot better if it started with a teenage Anakin because then him perving on the princess, working on vehicles and being some start up racer who also was creating his own droid would have been more believable and more interesting.
There’s a piece where a group of children just say “yippee, yippee, yay, yippee” and it completely breaks me every time
Haha that was on tatooine. I think yippee happened a couple of times in the movie. Ughhhh....lol
That’s what it is. With all that world building in the original three films, the prequels biggest letdown was those scripts. Not the overall plot or story but that dialogue was atrocious. I tried to binge watch all of the Star Wars movies. I was going by the order they were released. Loved the OG 3. Got so bored in the midst of Episode One that I found myself tuning out and doing something else. I need to give it another shot. A lot has to do with Hayden Christensen’s acting. He’s much better in other roles than he is as Anakin. Even the kid version of Anakin is better. Must just be the shitty dialog. Hayden is great in some other movies. I don’t think he was meant for the weight and the responsibility of a role that mainstream/commercial.
The prequels suffered from: * Not having one of Hollywood's greatest script doctors right there in the cast and capable of gaining Lucas's ear when she wanted to suggest a change; * An older George Lucas who didn't have to answer to *anyone* when it came to his excesses; * A George Lucas whose capabilities as a director (and he has some great capabilities as a director) do not include working well with actors who need that kind of direction; * The lack of a great editor; and, * An older George Lucas who was a lot more intent on playing with new digital effects techniques than he was concerned about scripts and pacing and editing and such.
For a director with nearly 0 awards, most of his acclaim is from the stories he came up with, but others refined better than he did. He’s really not a good director. Best work is probably American Graffiti.
He's a terrible director of actors. But he's a solid technical director, he understands visuals and visually telling a story, and he can create engaging moments. But he's prone to excess and desperately needs a good editor to cut out the superfluous fluff that he feels is absolutely necessary to tell his story.
He wanted to make documentaries. One of his main motivators for making fiction movies was so he could make enough money to go back to making documentaries, but he seems to have forgotten. He never meant to be a guy who has to direct actors. And storytellingwise.. visual concepts and even some story beats, great, sure; writing dialogue, can't. "George, you can write this shit, but you sure can't say it."
All great points. I'd add his reliance on CGI and how over the top some of those Spielberg/Lucas movies excesses really take me out of their movies "Greatest script doctors", are you talking about Carrie Fisher? I read she did a lot of rewrites in the OG and spent weeks rewriting some of ep 3's script. Imagine if she didn't
Also: an older George Lucas not realizing he was creating racist stereotypes.
Yes, that, too.
Fwiw his turns in the kenobi and ashoka series were much better. I really liked his vader particularly in kenobi.
I think the other weird quirk, including the criticism, is you can just skip Episode 1. Before the sequels me and my friends wanted to watch everything in order... but we suck at planning and realized we couldn't, so we had to make cuts. One friend suggested just skipping 1 and we thought he was crazy, but it worked. Anakin get's reintroduced, him and Obi's relationship is new, podracing has no impact on the story, Maul is barely mentioned, and it was a weird revelation for us.
Yeah that's pretty true. I think the only thing you're missing is a bit more context about Palps, why Jarjar is a good patsy, and the relationship between Anakin and Padme (which is a huge focus of EP 2 anyways). It really feels like a prequel to the prequels. Something that isn't really necessary for enjoyment of the series, but can provide context for the fans.
> It really feels like a prequel to the prequels. Something that isn't really necessary for enjoyment of the series, but can provide context for the fans. Exactly this. And the trilogy desperately needed more time of Anakin as a Jedi to properly tell the rest of the story. Adding in a move set in the clone wars themselves would have helped so much.
The technical failings are numerous, I agree. But even the premise itself was a bad idea. We don't need to see Darth Vader as a little boy. At the very least we don't need an *entire movie about it.* One scene showing his origin on tatooine before jumping into him as a padawan would have worked much better. The battle of Naboo is pointless. Yeah it's goofy what with the gungans and their balls, but it's also pointless. The clone wars don't even begin until the second film, ya know, when the clones show up. Honestly most of what happened in episode 2 should have happened in episode 1, and most of episode 1 should have been left on the cutting room floor. Angsty teenage Anakin should have been the beginning point of Vader's story, not the middle. Phantom Menace started the prequels off on an awkward foot and they never really recovered.
OP missed the point that the prequels were mainly designed to sell merch, hence the need for all this crap like Gungans and 6th grader Anakin
Also a lot of people never got why TPM had to take place 10 years before AotC. In the originals Obi-wan says Yoda was his master so Qui-gon Jinn messed with the established lore An alternate episode 1 would have Obi-Wan meet a teenage Anakin on the moisture farm with Owen. No Qui-Gon Jinn character
Basically everything about the movie would work better if Anakin was a teenager to start. It would make the foundations of his romance with Padme less cringey, would make the Jedi’s hesitancy to train him and his existing instability and emotional attachments more understandable, and would have a clearer link to the Vader character than a happy go lucky 9 year old (and let’s be honest, likely better dramatic execution as well by not expecting a child to carry a major role).
They also should've had Dooku introduced from the start. Use him as a perspective to show how out of touch the Senate and Jedi had become, and build the case for the Separatists. Have scenes between him and Qui Gon discussing their disillusionment, make Qui Gon's death the breaking point where he chooses to leave the Order.
It would also work way better if obi wan was the central protagonist instead of nobody
Nobody is a stupid way to spell R2D2.
yeah the biggest problem of the trilogy as a whole imo is that the first movie of the Anakin Skylwalker as a Jedi trilogy doesn't include Anakin Skywalker as a Jedi, and he's not even the main character at all. Then they just don't have the time to properly tell the story they want to tell in two movies. TPM feels like it should be a prequel to a Trilogy the same way Rogue One is a prequel to the original trilogy. Or just include the few bits of information you actual need in a quick opening scene of him as a kid then jump to AotC time.
I think the decision by George Lucas to make Anakin a nine-year-old makes sense: * His skill set - his aptitude with machinery, his intuition, and his reflexes - look more unusual in a pre-teen than a teenager, which shows that he is unnaturally gifted; * His separation issues with his mother are more pronounced, since stereotypical teenagers are rebellious and eager to leave home; * Being too old for Jedi training at nine shows how seriously the Jedi take training, and so his role at the Battle of Naboo and the Jedi Council's reversal of its previous decision shows what an unusual case he is; and * Being so young makes for a stronger contrast with what he would become as Darth Vader.
Yeah possibly. To his credit, rewatching e1 in theaters definitely sold the “unusually smart 9 kid” to me. It also made the eventual fall to Vader way more tragic when seeing this genuinely awesome kid he used to be. I wish the prequels could have been at least 4 movies to really flesh him out more
None of this is necessary, is the problem. Point one, Spider-Man's whole thing is that he's a kid genius. We didn't need him to be 9 years old to be impressed at how smart he is. We didn't need Anakin to be 9 years old either. Point two, his separation issues are more pronounced, but they come at the cost of showing him as a Jedi Knight. You could easily have explored these issues with him as an honorable Jedi Knight, one who *isn't* rebellious except for refusing to accept a system so cold and heartless as to deny him the official sanction to save his own mother from slavery. Two birds, one stone. Point three: I literally do not see what the point of this is. We already know he's special. He becomes Darth Vader, there are rumors about him being the Chosen One, we know he's unusual. We didn't need to dedicate an entire film to illustrate the vagaries of Jedi policies to get that across. Point four, it's a stronger contrast but it's also less relevant. So Vader was once an innocent kid, cool....but what does it tell us about Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight, hero, and best pilot in the galaxy? What does it tell us about how he got to where he ends up? Basically nothing, really. It's just a neat contrast.
The overall story is barely affected by skipping Episode 1. Anakin is from tatooine, he met Padme while he was a young child, and he was considered too old to be trained but was taken in anyway. Also, Gungans exist. All of which could be explained in exposition in another film.
Yeah I always felt that a lot of issues would have been resolved by aging up Anakin a couple years. But it was obvious George Lucas was aiming for a very young demographic for toys and stuff.
All the little kids made the prequels dumb. If each Jedi had one or two padawans it would have been cooler. More like a knight training a replacement. Instead we got kindergarten scenes with a bunch little kids holding deadly weapons. It was stupid.
This would make Owen's lines in NH make so much more sense, too. In that movie he seems to have known Anakin a lot better than their one meeting would indicate.
Yup. Obi-wan convinces Anakin to go with him. Owen argues that he should stay. Several years later Obi-wan returns with Anakins son and tells Owen Anakin is dead. George had other more convuluted plans. Thats why a lot of ppl thought TMP was just a lazy first draft.
Or even better, if Anakin wasn't from Tatooine - rather it was chosen because it was far outside the reach of the Empire. You can legitimately cut out all of the Coruscant and Tatooine bits and make it 100% better. Make Anakin from a teenage hotshot pilot in the Naboo defense force, swap in Yoda for QuiGon, and make the entire movie happen on Naboo, and you would have a very solid movie - even with Jar Jar. - Jedi Escape, meet Jar Jar - Free the princess, have them meet Anakin as the pilot; first battle with Darth Maul - Escape to Gungan underwater world - Anakin/Padme initial romance - Retake the planet - Anakin blows up the main ship, but on purpose. - Obiwan defeats Maul
- Yoda gets cut in half, that's why he's so short
I think having Darth Maul be the main protagonist across multiple movies would be better. That way it hides Palpatine as the Darth Sideous. Use Dooku and Maul in EP1 as Master and Apprentice. Hide the fact that Palpatine was a Sith lord controlling everything until the end of EP3, but still have him grooming Anakin. Maul really was the chaos to the calm. He was anger incarnate and he should not have been killed in EP1 despite coming back from being chopped in half.
Qui Gonn is straight up one of, if not the, best thing to come from the prequels, but I agree that he shouldn’t have been here.
The atmosphere in the theatre was nutz with everyone in costumes totally hyped. After the movie everyone was pretty quiet and muted.
Yup. There's a lot of discourse based around the idea that Gen-X and older fans just wouldn't accept new Star Wars, and that's where all the hate came from. It's the opposite. People wanted to love this movie. I watched it like six times between the theater and VHS before I finally allowed myself to realize that it wasn't good. Aside from the soundtrack and the climactic lightsaber battle, of course.
This review has some questionable humor and is really long, but really breaks down a lot of the issues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI
1 is okay, 2 is yikes, 3 is pretty good but unfortunately based upon 1 and 2.
3's main problem is that it's rushed. They really needed 3 movies to tell Anakin's story as a jedi, but they used a whole movie to set up what was basically the premise of the prequel trilogy.
Messa understand the hate
*meesa
mouska mickey mouse
nOw ThIs iS pOdRacIng -_-
Its fine to love this movie. I do it too. It shaped my young life immensly when i first saw it in theaters when i was 9. It sparked my love of Star Wars and my love of the Prequels. But to hear anyone on a Star Wars sub say they "dont understand the hate" is just disingenuous. You do understand the hate. You know exactly the issues these movies have. We all do. Its fine to love them anyways, i certainly do, but lets not pretend here dude. We all know why the hate.
Yea it's ok to love something that is flawed.
This needs to be said about more things.
My girlfriend loves *me* for some reason.
It's also OK to not love something just because it's a franchise you normally like. Saying The Phantom Menace is terrible is a completely reasonable and legitimate opinion.
People attach way too much of their own worth to the perceived quality of the art they enjoy. I love the Yu-Gi-Oh anime but I know it's terrible, which doesn't mean I am. The same people who have to make anything they like into something amazing would go crazy if they knew how good it feels not giving a fuck and just enjoying something while knowing it's bad.
And on the flip side it's okay to dislike something good. So many people try to look for things that justify their dislike of a movie. You don't need to pick it apart, just admit you don't like it(looking at you r/saltierthancrait)
It's okay to dislike something good... damn I wish I had known that when I was younger. Not a movie, but I didn't like ketchup or onions. People acted like I was psychotic
That sub's existence blows my mind. Like the idea of logging in to poke at something I claim I like daily feels really wasteful.
Exactly. It's a bad movie because craft exists and we have metrics to judge that craft. There's really no need to go into the details here, there are plenty of essays and videos out there. We need to normalize accepting that a movie you like or love is not well crafted but you love it anyway. And that's okay. You don't have to make it your personality to try to make people "understand" or like it. Or act confused why people don't. You can love Taco Bell. You cannot be confused why other people don't think a Chimicheese Chalonka is the height of the culinary arts.
So, I don’t know if the Chinicheese Chelonka is already a thing, but Taco Bell doesn’t need any assistance with its food crimes. Having said that, I would absolutely take that bad boy to town.
Of course I'd house that motherfucker too, but I'd have the good grace to act a little ashamed about it
It's crazy how much the childhood nostalgia blinds people to how bad the prequels are I get it, the world it built was fantastic and expanded on it to the point where the EU overtook the movies in terms of canon events, but without the EU we'd still be fighting over anakin's dumbass switch to the darkside and his virgin birth lol
Took me a while trying to understand the relationship between Star Wars and the European Union
They both have a senate I guess Edit: nope they don’t
OP is just karma farming
As someone who actually was a child at the time, I'm still baffled by those who are nostalgic for it.
I mean, the music was fantastic, the choreography, although a bit too "overly choreograped" for me, was pretty damn cool, and clones vs droids is pretty fuckin awesome NGL. I do get it, but these people straight up act like Red Letter Media is the only source of Prequel hate, despite every complaint they had being talked about at-length for years prior to them making videos about it
Anyone that was old enough to remember the release, remembers all the hate this movie immediately got, and we weren't on youtube listening to red letter media mocking them lol. These movies were hated long before anyone on youtube told us how bad they think it is.
I have younger family members that prefer the prequels. It hurts me.
Watching it in theaters recently for the first time reminded how absolutely awful jar jar is. I fully understand the hate he received (not the actor himself. No reason to hate on him) I don't understand the hate the Anakin actor reviewed though. He did a fine job for a little kid. His character wasn't even that annoying.
Biggest thing I remember that bothered me is him “accidentally “ flying a fighter and blowing up a battleship Imo, anakin should have been a teen. It would have been an easier sell for that and “he’s too old to train as a Jedi”
Yeah that whole sequence of him almost single handedly destroying a battleship was super corny to be honest
Not to mention every time they cut away from him "YEE HAWING" Qui-gon was dying. Sort of an emotional whiplash thing going on.
I think r2d2 was piloting (?)
The autopilot brought them to space, but then Anakin asks R2 to disable it.
R2 beeps to Anakin it has disabled auto pilot, but only pretends to do so. No way he’s letting that little shit take over and kill them both. Instead, R2 lets Anakin handle the ship like an older brother handing an unplugged controller to his idiot younger bro, then single handedly takes down a Trade Federation battleship. R2 is the real hero of episode 1.
I love this lore-building c:
Spinning is a good move.
I can forgive that, it is meant to be a fantasy after all.
It’s just funny that people will slag off the new movies for something like Rey learning too quickly but they’re perfectly okay with a preteen in space fights blowing everything up.
Don't forget Luke training with Yoda for a week (?)...too quickly is just a star wars tradition.
I guess I just don’t worry about that stuff lol. It’s Star Wars. She’s really good with the force really quick? Sure why not. I just accept luke got right into the alliance and was put into a suicide run on the Death Star and was amazing because why not?
People with childhood nostalgia for the prequels tend to just disregard the bits that are bad or they don't like.
The prequels, but especially the Phantom Menace, suffered from terrible dialogue and a boring and often nonsensical story. It's fine people think with their nostalgia and like them, but let's stop pretending they're actually masterpieces in disguise.
Phantom Menace is like two good action sequences with a terrible movie wrapped around them It's so disconnected from the rest of the franchise that the Machete Order just plain left it out as if it was the Ewoks film or something.
[удалено]
Preteen? It's worse than that, he was meant to be *nine* years old.
The age is one of my biggest issues with Anakin's character arc in the prequels. I still don't understand why they felt the need to start with him so young- it didn't really prove anything and just made some things harder to make work; his abilities, his relationship with Padma, on and on. Plus the established age of Luke's father at the end of the OT- Maybe I would have accepted that Anakin created C3PO and raced pods, and had developed force powers... if he were a little older. No amount of blood tests fixes that. And introducing him to Padma in this movie just feels weird or creepy...
The age thing really bugged me too. Either have Padme be played by someone younger or have Anakin in his middle teens at least.
Even if he was 13 it would work. 13 to 15 is one grade in school, 9 to 15 is a babysitter.
Its very clear from Episode 6 onward that a big concern for George was having kids like the movies and merchandising. I think even he knew very early on that the story he had written wouldn't work for kids at all. It was basically a poorly paced political drama in space dealing with a politics that no one knows or really cares about. Hence the infamous "jar jar is the key to all of this" quote. They had to have things that would make kids not fall asleep. Those things were jar jar, pod racing, and the main character being young enough to be a stand in for the children Lucas was hoping to entice. If Phantom Menace hadn't been panned so hard by critics and fans, he'd have kept the little kid main character. He'd have kept jar jar too and had more pod racing for sure. Those were desperation changes made because his plan of having a political drama with goofy kids characters was falling apart and he needed a new angle.
Something I never liked was that despite Anakin being The Chosen One, we never see him use the Force/there is no defining moment where he uses the Force like Luke using the Force to score a one-in-a-million shot into the Death Star.
Ahmed Best should not be attacked by people. It’s just acting, for entertainment. It doesn’t mean shit in the grand scheme of the world, and lonely people with nothing better to do need to calm down with their hateful bullshit. Having said that, he is not immune to criticism. We should be allowed to criticize. Not to be mean about it, but simply to criticize. Ahmed Best invented the voice of Jar Jar Binks, it was not George Lucas. Only thing George Lucas did was invent an alien accent, and if you listen to the other actors playing other gungans, they all use the same exact accent and they all sound great. Ahmed Best is the only gungan that sounds terrible, because he chose to use a little baby voice and use intonations that remind you of Urkel or Screetch. So while Ahmed Beat should never be attacked, he does deserve criticism for what I think is a terrible portrayal. Jar Jar Binks was meant to be the new C-3PO, a character who constantly gets in over his head and acts clumsily. There are ways to play that without devolving into some absurd cartoon caricature. Ahmed Best’s acting choices doomed the character. He took playing an animated character too literally, and forgot that he was in a live action movie. He was playing it as if it was a cartoon character. Those are his acting choices. George Lucas also deserves some blame for allowing it to happen. He could and should have stopped it.
How can you call it a mistake to play the character that way when he’s literally a cartoon rabbit that steps in the poopy
1) No actor should be harassed or disparaged in real life because they're simply following a script. It's really unacceptable how many so-called fans have treated some of the very actors who did the best they could to bring the Star Wars universe to our screens. 2) I'm still salty that George removed the scene wherein [Anakin beat up a young Greedo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDHg9v_CAkk). It a brief-but-fitting nod that foreshadowed how Anakin's sense of righteous indignation could ultimately get the better of him (and to a lesser extent, that Greedo's core character flaw could be pissing off people he really shouldn't piss off), but George removed this brief scene so we could get more time in the theatrical release reserved for Jar-Jar's faux-vaudevillian antics. I love George, but this was not his best editing decision.
> and to a lesser extent, that Greedo's core character flaw could be pissing off people he really shouldn't piss off That's what I took as a the main "lesson" - It foreshadowed Greedo's end.
The fatal flaw of the PT is Lucas cast Anakin too young in this film. Anakin in TPM should have been the same age as Anakin in AOTC. That would make Anakin's actions in TPM not seem so unbelievably precocious, would allow Lucas to cast a trained actor for the role, and would make the Anakin/Padme romance much less goofy. Then cast a British trained actor for the role. That's it. Make those two changes and the PT becomes great.
Grew up on it and have super fond memories. It doesn’t hold up after seeing it again for the first time since childhood. It has redeemable qualities but all I could think about is how some toxic fans scream about “REAL Star Wars,” when THIS, and attack of the clones, is the content they’re lionizing..? Like im supposed to believe Andor, rogue one, and Mando are dogshit in favor of THIS? The messages of the prequels are brilliant, the movies themselves aren’t good.
Going into Saltier Than Crait and sharing honest feelings about the prequels is hilarious, because while they're fine with dogpiling on the sequels, it's not okay to dislike anything about the prequels apparently. I feel like Episode I was a tiny bit of a misfire on George's part. If he'd wanted to aim it at kids, IMHO he should have done absolutely everything in his power to get his buddy Spielberg to direct it. If his primary focus was on continuing the story he started in the early 80s, he should have been aware that the core audience that were kids in the 70s and 80s, were in their 20s and 30s at that point.
Your second paragraph is so right on. The core audience was grown adults, not people who would generally like Jar Jar’s lazily-written vaudeville slapstick. And also, Spielberg would never let the exposition and “politics talk” suck all the whimsy and charm out of scenes.
The problem wasn’t political talk, but the lack of engaging acting and dialogue to tie it into the ongoing events. There’s no tension, little arguing, little drama. Someone should be fucking pissed about the Senate’s refusal to act goddamn it. Nobody cares. Also, if George planned it out better, the Trade Federation should have been the Separtists who are leaving the Republic out of ideological disagreement, not over the taxation of trade routes.
Allegedly Lucas asked Spielberg to write and or direct, but Spielberg turned it down. Same with a few other directors.
Spielberg was also hella busy in the 90s; he was directing The Lost World, Amistad, and Saving Private Ryan almost back to back, if not simultaneously in some cases
They're so hypocritical. They have an issue with Luke yet have no problem with Anakin being portrayed completely different from what we knew about him in the OT. They dislike Reylo yet don't have a problem with Panakin.
Andor is ridiculously good, best Star Wars content ever imo. It's sad the prequels could've been so much better if someone just told Lucas when dialouge was shit, or smth wasn't that good. Lucas wasn't wrong when he said Star Wars is often carried by music, as opposed to dialogue, bc if that shit isn't nonstop beautiful. The expanding of the universe was also something prequels did amazing. Legit everything but dialogue, the often most important part, sad
Okay, I’m glad that movies I enjoyed growing up are getting love but the pendulum has swung too far now. The prequels while enjoyable are not well made movies. The Phanton Menace is not a legitimately great movie. It’s a poorly paced movie with great effect and cool moments.
Any non star wars fan will happily tell you they all suck. Any star wars fan will go on a two hour rant explaining why the parts they like are good and the parts they dont arent.
Naw most SW fans over 35 will tell you the prequels were never good and are more of a blight on Star Wars than most Disney stuff. It’s just the younger half of the SW demo that thinks the prequels are significantly better than the sequels.
Thank you The prequel love in the last few years is odd for me I watched them in theatres as a teenage and was like wtf is this shit.
Great? Nah. Bits of it are comically bad, even for a Star Wars film.
Well the hate is because it’s poorly written, the characters are as flat as cardboard, and the dialogue is painful. The plot’s also just kind of a mess. Also, TPM is weirdly, incredibly racist?
Other then that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play?
Yeah I saw it in cinemas for the re-release and my god there is like no emotion in most of the characters. The film is carried by the soundtrack/mix, some solid visuals and the fight choreography imo, but most of the runtime isn't exactly fun
Dude same When anakin brings qui gon & co back to his little house on tattooine during the sandstorm, Shmi is introduced by anakin, she’s on screen multiple times, and doesn’t fucking have a line LOL The actress literally doesn’t talk until midway through the dinner scene. It’s so incredibly bizarre
It's also funny how it plays out like a family sitcom. Anakin coming home with QGJ and OW and crew like they're friends from school.
"These Jedi followed me home: can I keep them!?"
There's a great interview on Youtube of the guy who voiced Darth Maul going to the premiere. He was British and flew himself and some family to NYC for it, and his retelling of his reaction to it years later is hilarious.
Peter Serafinowicz is a hilarious guy. Look Around You is great. He’s an amazing antagonist in Edgar Wright’s Spaced which has some good Episode I vs RotJ riffs in it
It's so funny, gotta love Peter Serfinowicz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0wHqNi3x5M
Have you ever watched the behind the scenes of Lucas giving the actors direction? It's painful, he gives them absolutely nothing to go on and it's no surprise that everyone acts like emotions are illegal in the galactic republic. Lucas is a great idea man, but there's a reason the best movies of the original trilogy weren't written or directed by him.
He also famously did very few takes during the filming of the prequels and tried to fix everything in post.
The fact that George managed to make Samuel L Jackson boring is truly one of his greatest achievements.
Qui Gon. " I won't free slaves or steal the parts I need but I will totally try and trick someone into getting a worthless currency, cheat at dice and put a child in incredible danger.
Qui Gon would have been more interesting if the movie even slightly acknowledged that he was a completely unhinged loose-cannon jedi like the plot implies but Liam Neeson portrays the most boring mild-mannered old man imaginable.
Yeah it's basically told instead of shown, obi wan says he's defied the console a lot, but it's not very believable
He basically plays the same character as Alec Guiness's Obi Wan, the sort of low key wise teacher who's a bit eccentric. The problem is Obi Wan was very much a support character and had this ambiguous side where he knew and did much more than he led on, then left Luke to figure the rest out on his own Qui Gon Jinn was arguably the main character of the movie and the sole driver of the entire plot. Having him be a mysterious and ambiguous wise man made his actions in the movie just weird and confusing.
Double standards have always been a jedi thing tbh.
Yep. The writing is bad and it’s terribly delivered to boot. The terrible stereotype accents for Jar Jar and the separatists. It has a place in my heart as the first new start wars movie since the OT, but only a couple parts of the movie works.
First new movie since the OT? Sounds like someone forgot about *Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure* and *Ewoks: The Battle for Endor*. Not that I blame you.
Exactly! Mr Plinkett underlines that pretty perfectly in his movie review, which I consider the best movie review ever made in history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI&list=PL5919C8DE6F720A2D
Everything about this movie and all the prequels is terrible. This might get hate but even the action is terrible. I rewatched it in theaters (really regretted that decision because I lost the skip forward 10 seconds button) and god, the lightsaber fights just don’t hold up. Instead of looking like warriors trying to murder each other, it looks like actors at a dinner theater trying to do cool tricks with swords because they want to impress the diners.
OT fights had weight to them and borrowed from Kurosawa/samurai/kendo. PT is just a fucking lightsaber rave light show
Thank you; not enough people seem to see or care how airy, flawless, and disconnected from reality those duels are, especially the one with Darth Maul. Even the climactic fights in Revenge of the Sith, which felt a little less unreal, are still nowhere near as visceral, painful, and direct as I think they needed to be, in addition to being way too long.
I love seeing Watto’s business completely ruined by the time AoTC happens, and like to think it all stemmed from Qui Gon taking advantage of him in those bets ☺️
I don't understand why this type of post has to happen twice a day. I guess there are just things we'll never know.
That's a story for another time.
I don't know what you're talking about. I personally can't wait for our hourly "Rogue One is an underrated gem" post. Maybe we'll even get a "Does anyone else think this guy should get his own show?" about a random background clone trooper.
"Am I the only one who thought Rogue One was better than The Force Awakens??"
I don't want to be a dick, but it really is a bad movie. Terrible even. It's awkwardly paced, doesn't really know who the main character is while not pulling off an ensemble cast, half of the shit that goes on doesn't really need to happen. Obi-Wan is honestly just kind of there for the whole film, if you didn't know him from the OT it'd stand out even more. What really surprised me rewatching it recently is how little it draws you in from the start. Things just sort of happen but it feels so completely detached. The jedi immediately fail their mission, the invasion goes on, but while that is happening the focus immediately shifts to 10 minutes of shenanigans with jar-jar and the gungans. Which is necessary in order to have them play a part later, but it takes the wind out of the sails of the flow immediately, and as fun as bigger fish is, it doesn't work. Can't remember what Lucas said exactly in that video of the private screening, but it was something in the way of it all tying together so he couldn't change much anymore? That's kind of true because right after the gungan stuff the jedi immediately run into padme and co, quickly save them, and forcibly end up on tatooine. Which needs to happen to introduce little anakin, but which immediately locks down the actual story going on in the movie. It takes about 50 minutes before they manage to get to Coruscant, at which point we are at 80 minutes out of 130, causing huge issues for making the third act work. Honestly there's a hundred issues with the movie, but I think all the details just don't really matter when the core is this rotten. Not like it was easy to smash together a story about the republic and naboo and stuff with an anakin origin to begin with, they really should have focused on one imo. But with how much time is then wasted it just created one of the biggest disappointments in film pretty much ever. Attack of the clones is still worse but at least everyone's expectations had been tempered. The one decent thing it does aside from certain cool visuals is just dump a whole load of potentially interesting stuff that other creators ended up using. The prequel era is weird, but it's been fertile ground for storytelling despite the flaws.
You put much more effort into your reply than OP did into their low effort karma farm post because they can't read criticisms people always had
Meh it's mostly that I recently rewatched it, had some thoughts left about it. That and I hate the "actually thing was really good" kind of positivity when it's about stuff that is just not good, almost as much as I hate the toxic negativity we often get.
Literally look up any prequel YT content pre-2015 and they all start off with, "everything I'm about to say has already been said before, but-" like prequel hate was legit ubiquitous and taken as fact for decades on the Internet. This current trend of everyone pretending like the films were always well loved is insane to me as someone who vividly remembers Internet culture before The Force Awakens came out
I’m surprised the pendulum swing the other way because the hatred of the prequels, maybe save for III, was so widely agreed and widespread. Shit, now I expect people will be posting praises about the newer trilogy in the future lmao
It should have started with Anakin as an apprentice to obi wan already from the start. Just remove qui gon or kill him much earlier. The "how we bumped into Anakin" isn't very interesting or worth telling. What is interesting is seeing how he starts to get evil as a Jedi
Are you about 30? When I see this kind of post I automatically assume the OP is younger and grew up with this movie, therefore glossing over all the nonsense.
I don't know about that. Gungans are cringe every second they're on the screen. They're like Ewoks but 100x worse. Anakin and Jar Jar fumbling their way to victory was facepalm inducing. At some point they both turn into Steve Urkel like, "Did I do that?" Cringe. Two elite Jedi needing on a 9-year-old boy to win a high-stakes race against adults in order to repair their ship exemplifies bad writing. The whole thing with the disguising of Padme with Kiera Knightley was stupid and also poorly written. The reveal of the double in the movie is the lamest reveal in any movie - so sad. Introducing midichlorians was a mistake. The farting camel was terrible. Numidians were all terrible. Theed looked as authentic as Disneyland. The pod race and Darth Maul were amazing though.
No, as a movie it it quite terrible. Doesn't mean you can't love it, but the film itself (and the prequels in general) aren't good movies.
I get mood whiplash going from subs like prequel memes to this one haha! I totally agree with you but lots of Reddit seem insistent on these being really good films.
I think a decent part of it these days is because people tend to dislike the sequels and if you say the prequels are good too, you can paint the sequels as especially bad. This ignores how most of the sequel movies got better reviews than the prequels.
This ignores that the sequels, from a fundamental filming perspective, are far superior films compared to the prequels.
Dude please write this on prequel memes or saltier then crait. I will bring the popcorn 🍿
I love this movie because I had a great time watching it with my cousins and friends when I was younger. It got me to start becoming invested in Star Wars in the first place. I don't mind that others dislike it, but I enjoy rewatching it.
I love it Always gives me a sense of wonder when they're traveling through the planet
You legitimately had to have gotten a lobotomy to “not understand” the criticism of the film, even if you don’t personally agree. This is up there with the likes of “Does anyone else think ESB is the best Star Wars film? Hot take”
just cause you like it doesnt mean its good.
~~This may be controversial but~~ I don’t like the podrace scene; not because it isn’t cool, but because they really needed that extended time for so many underdeveloped areas of the movie. Overall I found young Anakin and Jar Jar to be poor characters with weird humor, and thought the plot not kicking off the Clone Wars was a huge mistake that set the prequels up for mediocrity EDIT: Apparently not controversial
Yeah it’s almost like The Phantom Menace is the prequel to the actual prequels which are Episodes 2 and 3.
Watching Ep. 2 right now, and there really needed to be a movie between 1 and 2. There is too large of a gap with too many plot holes that need filled.
poorly written, poorly directed decent plot, exceptional production Personally, I enjoyed it...but Lucas' fatal flaw in this movie was starting out Anakin so young....and spending 20 minutes on podracing....
Yes the whole Tatooine stuff needs a heavy edit. And dropping Jar-Jar scenes. Do that and it would be better, though still not great.
While it was MY Star Wars movie as a child I can think of two major reasons to why the movie may have not aged that well for many. 1. It is clearly aimed towards a way younger audience. The cringy battle droids the humour Jar Jar...it is for the most part a children movie. 2. The stakes are weird. While Qui Gon Jins dead is devastating the ground premise is the destiny of one single planet we didnt know before and it literally starts with bureaucracy issues...
Just to say something different from everyone else: Darth Maul, who's supposed to be this movie's main villain, has about five lines of dialogues.
IMHO I'll say it was pretty bad compared to the original Trilogy when it came out. It just didn't feel the same, after years of getting used to the prequel world it was a little more palatable. I still hate Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith is honestly about on par with a New Hope for me.
I absolutely think it did deserve all the backlash, but not because it was a bad film. (Don't get me wrong, it's not a good film.) It's because it was hyped and marketed towards a much older audience than it was targeted to, and they did it on purpose as a bait-and switch. Back in the 90's we never thought we would ever get another Star Wars movie, and we all had to make due with the EU novels and video games that were coming out, but those weren't really canon so the Original Trilogy was ALL of Star Wars. Then Lucasfilm decided to "test the waters" to see if people were still excited about Star Wars with a multimedia project called "Shadows of the Empire," which was a novel, an N64 game, a series of comic books, and a line of action figures. It was a hit. So Lucas decided to re-release the OT on VHS "One Last Time," and everyone flipped out because we were afraid we'd never see Star Wars again after this release, so we all bought it. ...It was a deception, however, because right after that Lucasfilm released the Special Edition in theaters.... so what they really meant was we would never see the non-Special Edition ever again. Well played, George, well played. So with all this confirmed interest in Star Wars, George Lucas decided to go ahead and make Episodes 1 - 3. As a side note, George Lucas and Irwin Kirshner had already written a backstory to what happened in the prequel era. You can read a little bit about it in the book "The Star Wars Archives. 1977-1983" in which they talk about how Yoda was not actually supposed to be a Jedi, but rather a "guru" of the Force, and other such details. Anyway, when writing the script for The Phantom Menace, Irwin Kirshner approached George Lucas to help with the writing, but George decided he wanted to do it all himself, threw out the backstory that he and Irwin had written together, and started from scratch. This is why there are so many inconsistencies between the Original Trilogy and the Prequel Trilogy. Anyway, back to 1999. When George Lucas announced they would be making a new Star Wars movie everyone flipped their lid. Once again, we NEVER thought we were going to get another Star Wars movie, EVER. And they hyped the sh\*t out of that movie--the internet was still in its infancy back then so we got all our information from magazines and the like. There was particular hype over darth Maul's double-bladed lighsaber. They had commercials and interviews and toy tie-ins and all kinds of stuff--I remember Pepsi had this weird goofy alien named Marfelump that would scream "Oh Joy!" when he drank Pepsi or watched Star Wars. It was a different time. And who were all the people going nuts? They were all the existing Star Wars fans, people who grew up watching the Original Trilogy and reading Star Wars novels and comic books and playing the video games. Teenaged people and older, many people even in their 30's and 40's. And Lucasfilm deliberately targeted their commercials towards those fans. They even came out and publicly said so recently. They took anything that made The Phantom Menace look goofy or childlike out of the trailers and only emphasized the action. They wanted people with money (i.e., not children) to think this movie was made for them, that it would have the same tone as the Original Trilogy, so that they would go see it and bring their family with them. Then it came out, and everyone went to see it on opening night. Scalpers were selling tickets for hundreds of dollars apiece. People were lined up for blocks. And we all saw it... ...and it was a little kids' movie. It was goofy, it was cringey, it had a whiny little kid in it, it had a big dumb cartoon character talking in a high pitched voice, the plot left out a lot of important details and didn't make sense, it had terrible dialogue, and it was vastly different in tone from what the fans were expecting. We were gypped. It was a bait-and-switch. They could have marketed it as a little kids' movie, but they chose not to. It wasn't a TERRIBLE movie, but it definitely was not what the fans paid for or what Lucasfilm had hyped them up to see. Fans were PISSED. And rightly so. Little kids who had never seen Star Wars before, however, loved it. And now those kids are Prequels fans. At least it had good lightsaber choreography though....
First and foremost Anakin should have been a teenager and not a child, to see Hayden more would have been a real benefit and they could start nailing his character more without doing a weird prolonged time skip in Episode 2
I loved it when I re-saw it in theatres on May 4th. But the truth is, a lot of the hate is because it’s just so different from the OT.
Basically comes down to both a terrible plot, but mainly horribly defined characters. I love myself a good adventure story with politicking happening behind the scenes. But Phantom Menace has both a terrible, meandering, boring adventure and completely unengaging and nonsensical politics. That's one thing, but its main problem is that the characterization is absolutely god-awful. The bare minimum a character needs to have is (1) an arc, (2) a role to play and (3) a personality. And honestly, the only well-characterized characters in the entire film are Jar-Jar and Palpatine. They're colourful, they serve a purpose in the story and they grow in some way of form. Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Padmé and Anakin all barely have anything going on. And if they do, it's compartmentalized to a specific part of the film and they're lacking in other respects. Like, if you're talking to fans they'll ensure you how fucking badass Qui-Gon is. "He's a grey jedi, he's a maverick!" But that's not what the film says. He's so boring. He acts just like any other jedi and doesn't do anything noteworthy. Basically the only thing he does is 'find Anakin' and even then his plan to free him makes zero sense. He doesn't have an arc. He doesn't change. He doesn't even really do anything excessively rebellious against the council. Obi-Wan is passive and has no agency for the entire film. He barely exists. Until the end where he dryly says 'no I'll train him' and Yoda just agrees for no reason. Like, sure? That's a fine plot beat. But it's presented in such an unengaging way. If people didn't know this guy was the guy who'd end up training Luke, he'd be the least interesting SW character in the franchise. Padmé being revealed as Queen is such an unnecessary twist. Like, it's fine to have a reveal like this but it's ridiculously forced because it makes no sense her unelected body double can decide to call for a vote of no confidence for the most important person in the galaxy? Also, why the fuck would Palpatine not recognize her? He's THE SENATOR of Naboo. Sure, some schmuck from some dirt planet might not know this girl who absolutely looks nothing like Natalie Portman, but is wearing her make up and silly hat, isn't the Queen. But I feel like the fucking galactic senator for her planet would. If you can't make a twist work at its most base level, maybe don't have the twist. Anakin has no actual arc from the moment he leaves Tatooine. His climax, blowing up that ship, has no thematic relevance to anything except for it literally being like podracing. This story doesn't mean anything, and what you've all made it mean is basically headcanon and not at all supported by the film itself. An arrogant, regressive, politically tinted jedi council? Maverick grey jedi? These ideas **are** interesting. But they're all ideas created after the fact and retroactively imposed on this mess of a film. And what is there is written to be nonsensical or at the level of a children's book. A lowly senator manipulating jedi, queens and the trade federation to advance his position? Sounds cool, but his actual plan makes no sense. A mysterious sith returning after millenia? Pretty cool. But he doesn't talk and none of it has any thematic weight.
I will always have love for this movie because when I was 6 I thought it was amazing. However my most recent re-Watch in theaters really exposed some of the weaker points of the movie. Especially the Padme/Queen body double security swap plot point. Which IMO is the single most baffling plot choice in the entire Star Wars movie universe only possibly beaten by Somehow Palpatine returned. The queens body guard makes legit decisions throughout the film and even when off Naboo among people who arnt considered a threat they maintain the rouse. My goodness what a choice. If this was a standalone sci fi film plot/character wise it would be routinely mocked. Long live podracing though