I’m still hoping JJ can salvage that wreck of a movie with the next one. I don’t see how, and JJ is not exacly known for ending things well, but we’ll see. Johnson, really, really, screwed up with Luke, and then killed him off. That’s unforgivable in my mind. Honestly the only way I can see it being truly saved is having TLJ being a bad force vision dream of a possible future that Luke wakes up from in a cold sweat. But then you’d either have to break the trilogy into a quadrilogy, because no WAY you could wrap it up in one film. Not gonna happen though.
If JJ can’t salvage things, then TLJ will jump over TPM to be my the movie I most wish was excised from canon.
I was psyched to see it in the theater. Was mightily disappointed. It had cool stuff; Qui Gon, Obi Wan, Darth Maul. It had really stupid things, Jar Jar, too much politics, the whole underwater city thing was pretty much a waste.
Then I saw The Last Jedi and realized just how great The Phantom Menace was. TPM had a cohesive plot and it didn’t shit on the original trilogy.
Agree with all those things.
Anakin should have been an adult and played by the same actor in all three films, just like Luke. The whole point is to tell the story of a Jedi named Anakin Skywalker. Not Vader as a little kid.
I liked the aliens that populated the original Star Wars universe. Not so much for the Phantom Menace. The Neimodians in Phantom Menace looked and sounded like some Asian caricatures, not to mention they also looked too close to X-Files type grey aliens. Jar Jar and the flying middle eastern bug with the hooked nose…kind of takes you out the movie.
Tattooine I wouldn’t have minded revisiting if it was this exotic, dangerous place like the first one. But instead, despite “Annie” and his mom being slaves, it seemed pretty tame compared to the roaming sand people and dangerous scoundrels in the first one.
But the biggest stand out was the technology. Everything was new, shiny, and smooth looking. Lucas was doing another “homage” to the way spaceships looked in old sci-fi/fantasy, but it made it feel like it was a completely different film universe.
Hard to even describe the anticipation and excitement of finally getting a new Star Wars story and one that covers “The Old Republic”, the fall of Anakin Skywalker to the dark side, and all the back-story hinted at in the original trilogy.
I think most people also covered the disappointment. There were brief moments, the only one that sticks out to me now is the final lightsaber duel, but nothing else in that movie was even redeemable. Over use of CGI (which got worse in the next two) made it all feel so fake/unreal, Young Anakin, Jar-Jar, the Trade Federation nonsense, 'Oopsie" to save the day, a hyped Darth Maul that ended up being really undeveloped and only real moment was that final lightsaber duel, miticlorian-what-now?!? It was just awful. Sadly, it got worse with the remaining two prequels with the horrible scripting/story and awful acting performances. Lucas significantly tarnished the brand with those poorly done sequels. Maybe in 20 years someone else will take another shot and make the prequels right.
Until then, the only Star Wars that exists to me is the originals and Rogue One. The rest are… well maybe not as bad as TPM but they’re not stellar either.
Okay, I should have mentioned this. If there is one truly great thing about all three of the prequel films, it’s Ewan MacGregor ENJOYING THE HELL OUT OF HIMSELF while doing his best Young-Alec-Guinness.
I would watch a compilation of just Ewan MacGregor scenes.
A few of my friends were massive fans and the local movie theatre re ran the original series the weekend before release. I’d always liked Star Wars and got swept up in the hype.
My overall response to The Phantom Menace was puzzlement. I didn’t bother seeing the second and third installments on a big screen.
TPM converted me from a fairly big fan (hell I even went to an All Blacks test dressed as a stormtrooper with a busload of other fans and one Darth Vader!) to a totally apathetic “I guess I’ll catch the new movies one day if they pop up on Netflix” kinda guy.
I think he just had the best character, and even then he’s not generally all that good in “Phantom Menace.” No one is.
I don’t think in most cases actors really know how a movie will turn out. What to you and I can be viewed, considered and judged in two hours or so is, to the people making it, months of effort that is very separated from the final product. They don’t even shoot stuff in order, and in many movies, change the script as they go. Stories about movies that are utter clusterfucks when they’re being shot and turn out to be masterpieces - “Back To The Future,” for instance - are plentiful.
Making a large budget movie is roughly equivalent to starting up and running a fairly large company, one with hundreds of employees. On a day to day basis there’s just no way an employee can honestly tell for sure if the place is being well run purely from her or his subjective observation.
I think you can make a pretty educated guess. Employees “in the trenches” are often more in tune with things that the big executives, and actors are probably better able to gauge how rotten a script is than George Lucas…
Ewan is the best. I don’t care if they make any more anthology films, but if they only do one more, it MUST be an Obi-Wan film starring Ewan. I’d pay to see that even if it scored 1% on Rotten Tomatoes and was just about him scaring Sand People. He is the one bright spot of the prequels.
I believe Ewan McGregor has rarely spoken about his experience on these movies, but I did see him on Graham Norton and he let a little nuggest slip. He talked about that scene where baby Bobba Fett meets him. He said something like, “I’m not saying that the director didn’t give any direction to this child actor…(but he didn’t)…”
You could tell in that brief moment that McGregor was well aware Lucas does not direct actors. He likes the technical side of movie production and he should focus on that.
Aside from seeing bits and pieces of “Attack of the Clones” on TV, I have never watched a Star Wars movie since that one. Yes, I despise it and the abomination known as Jar-Jar Binks.
The pod race is a perfect example of the prequel movies.
Everyone behind the scenes was working hard and doing the best work of their lives. John Williams score is great, the effects in that sequence hold up even today, and the whole thing is well done on a technical and film-making level. I like the pod race.
It does not, however, fit into this movie and was a huge chunk of movie that we did not need. And from a story point-of-view, it was dumb beyond belief.
I do recommend the making-of feature on the Phantom Menace DVD. You can tell all the behind the scenes people really were doing great work on all levels. Only Lucas and his yes-men were screwing things up with a bad script and directing job.
I’ve been a science fiction fan starting from the mid 1960’s, so my ‘Star Wars’ was “2001: A Space Odyssey”. I never was on the Star Wars bandwagon – I thought that they were ok, but I also felt that I’d seen things like it before (primarily those old black and white SF serials, like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, that would play on a local TV station every day around the time I got home from school). In other words, it wasn’t the ‘revelation’ that it was to a lot of people. It still wasn’t as good as any of the stuff I Was reading in books, and it certainly wasn’t as smart. But I enjoyed them enough. The only thing I thought when I Saw the first prequel was ‘Are they really doing that???’ with regards to the racist overtones of Jar Jar. To me, the rest of it was kinda silly (I had a hard time appreciating how they named characters in the entire series, how planets were characterized by a single climate, without any variation like we have on earth, and so on. I was spoiled by more realistic views of planets and culture and so on. But to be fair, most non-literary science fiction was similarly poorly thought out with regards to realistic cultures and planets and economies and so on. (And, in some ways, STar Wars was ruined for me by the fact that we had a free showing of one of the movies before the official opening, at my campus, because one of our professors was a technical consultant for the film – i suspect that it was an early cut of the film, since I could see the wires holding the ‘asteroids’ as they spun around (or maybe the screen was just too big). It ruined any kind of immersion for me in that movie, and all SW movies going forward.
Just wanted to elaborate a little more.
I never saw it in theaters, but remember people getting excited for it. Then I remember the criticisms that eventually followed, with the accusations of racist caricatures, to long, drawn out scenes in the senate. The Simpsons mocked it in one episode.
Then I remember a family member, who wasn’t even into Star Wars or science fiction/fantasy, saying that it was an alright movie, and that people were just hating on it to be cool.
I rented it on DVD, around 2007, and yeah, I didn’t think it was too bad. Yeah, Darth Maul was a try-hard villain design, no substance, but it was okay.
Then I went on a Star Wars binge and watched the '77 and’80 films that I never fully saw. That was when I realized that no, The Phantom Menace wasn’t okay at all. It was pretty bad.
Maybe the reason I didn’t think it was so bad at first was because I hadn’t seen the originals in such a long time, and it “felt” like an epic movie, even if it wasn’t. The “Duel of the Fates” sounded good, but while it’s distinctive, it doesn’t hold a candle to the final duel between Luke and Vader.
It “felt” like a dramatic moment when Qui-Gon Jinn was killed but we all knew it was coming, the preceding whiffle bat fight wasn’t very exciting, and Qui-Gon’s actual death and Obi-wan’s “Nooooo,” didn’t carry any weight because both characters were kind of dull.
You care about Luke and Han and Leia and Chewie and the original Obi-Wan, because they seem like people trying to overcome obstacles. They’re relatable. If you are emotionally invested in a movie’s characters, it takes a lot of effort to screw the movie up. Caring about characters ism what really drives a movie and gets you into it.
If you don’t care about the characters, or you don’t understand their motivations, it’s nearly impossible for the movie to be good, because nothing that happens garners emotional investment.
The final light saber duel in “Phantom Menace” is technically wonderful and athletic in a way the first trilogy’s duels were not, but for the life of me I still don’t know what the fight was about, even in the context of the scene; Darth Maul just appears from behind a door, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan draw, and the fight commences. Maul makes no effort to get past them to hurt Queen Amidala or her guards, so I guess he wasn’t after them. I’ve no idea what Maul’s problem with those guys was (or anything else about him); he was just, insofar as I could tell, Palpatine’s employee. Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan were ciphers, and just all over the place in terms of what they were doing. What was the point of the fight? What were they fighting over? And if I don’t know that, why should I enjoy it?
Did not have to camp out for the movie but I did take a day off work and waited in line three hours when they were pre-selling the tickets for that to start.* They were interlocking the film in about six theaters so even on opening day there were seats enough to go around for that first showing. They were marshaling people in the lobby for specific theaters and I arrived about an hour early; I was about twentieth in line.
It was a hyu-u-ge disappointment. I saw Episode II on opening weekend Sunday but waited in no lines to do so and did not bother with Episode III for until after a month when I was in Las Vegas with friends and we were tired of gambling.
*For some reason Lukas Films said they could not sell tickets before noon local time even though it was a month or so before the movie opened.
