The Phantom Menace review

                    Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace



        The original three star wars movies are among the best science fiction movies ever made. Therefore, it is rather difficult to believe how appalling bad the Star Wars prequels are, especially The Phantom Menace. So, what is wrong with The Phantom Menace? Read on to find out.                                                                                
First of all, the plot is the kind of thing that a two year old could write. The basic plot of The Phantom Menace is this: A big company is angry about taxes, but they conveniently have a big army, so they try to deal with the taxes by blockading a planet. For some bizarre reason, the government sends people to negotiate with the company instead of arresting all of them, destroying their blockade, and shutting down their company. In other words, they give the company exactly what it wants, encouraging them and other companies to blockade more planets for personal gain. Then the company invades the planet. The government still refuses to intervene and so the person who runs the planet has to get a bunch of savages help her reclaim the planet. Meanwhile a group of fighter pilots have to try to destroy one of the ships that the company is using to blockade the planet. Fortunately for them, all of the many other ships that were in the blockade have vanished for no apparent reason. While the trained pilots are failing in destroying the ship, some child with practically no piloting experience manages to destroy the ship with a fighter that he has no idea how to control.
     
        The basic plot of The Phantom Menace is that an evil scheming public official is using the crisis with the blockade to get into a position of more power than his current one, but the actual plot takes up about ten minutes of the movie, with the rest being the boring setup described above.
     
      The Phantom Menace is riddled with numerous boring fight scenes that add nothing to the plot. One of the keys to movie making success is that the main enemies pose some sort of challenge for the good guys, yet the enemies in The Phantom Menace, with the one exception of Darth Maul, either are dealt with easily or in one case can simply be avoided. This means that when the enemies appear all I can think is: "Oh, some more generic enemies are going to die." This effectively eliminates all suspense in the fights and the movie as a whole.

      I am only listing the main things that make no sense about the movies plot here, but there are hundreds of other things about the movie that make no sense and could have been easily fixed if anyone had actually thought about whether or not the script made sense.


          The characters are another major disaster. Several characters, R2-D2, C3-PO, Jabba the Hutt, and Yoda are added in from the original movies to make The Phantom Menace feel more familiar even though none of them add anything to the plot. All of the characters, including the wise man archetype of the movie, are total morons who say stupid things and do stupid things constantly.

          Of course no disaster could be greater than the new character Jar Jar Binks. His basic role in the movie is to be the comic relief, but the real comic relief is the sad excuse for a plot. Jar Jar is more the kind of thing I would make people watch to torture them. Also, I am going to ask this question concerning his character: Is a Star Wars movie, which is supposed to be hardcore science fiction at its best, really the place for slapstick humor? I say no. It also can be noted that it is third rate slapstick that would make the creators of great movies like The Pink Panther cry. 

        Typically, every movie has one protagonist who has some obstacle to overcome and who can be clearly identified as the main character, such as Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars movies. The Phantom Menace, however has no protagonist. The important characters all have underdeveloped personalities and do not really do anything significant, with the exception of Anakin, the kid mentioned in the last paragraph, and he does not overcome any challenges. He just does something completely impossible and out of his control in the last twenty minutes of the movie.

        I want all of you to think about original Battlestar Galactica, or thinking even farther back Star Trek: The original series. These are some of the best things television has to offer and they were made when things like computer generated images(CGI) and green screens had yet to be conceived, much less invented. That said it is disgusting how now in many new movies including the Star Wars prequels every scene or close to every scene is shot with a green screen as the one and only backdrop. It ruins the beauty and charm of the movie and kills of the magic that was found in earlier films and TV shows.

         I would say something like “I spit on this movie”, but it’s not  worth the valuable bodily fluids that would take. This entire movie could have been easily eliminated from the disastrous Star Wars prequel trilogy with the few important events that do occur in the movie put five minutes of dialogue in the sequel to this movie, The Attack of the Clones. Read my next review for more information on that. All in all, this movie was a complete waste of my time and the fact that it is called a Star Wars movie is an offense to that which is holy(the original Star Wars movies).