In fairness, that’s exactly the look/feel George Lucas was aiming for.
I had been a Star Wars fan ever since I saw the original in theaters back when I was 10. I was interested in PM when it was announced, but not overly excited because I knew the next films would be prequels instead of sequels. When I finally saw PM I thought it was an okay film, but not great. The pacing was too slow and the narrative was muddled. Honestly, the story of Darth Vader becoming Darth Vader could have been handled in a single movie. The time gap between 1983 to 1999 was far too long. If I had my wish there would be something akin to the Thrawn trilogy released around 1988.
I just stopped in to say that I was young, and very excited about seeing the first new Stars Wars movie to come out in yeeeears! Big fan of the original three, etc, etc.
But seeing the movie crushed all of that. I still liked Eps 4-6, but never saw the next 2 prequels, never want to see TPM ever again. It basically kicked me out of the fandom, and I even stopped reading the extended universe books. I did eventually see TFA, because my brother-in-law really wanted my wife to see it, and it was fine, because I had heard about it, and expected Ep4 with New! Improved! looks, which is kinda what we got.
I quote Kenobi here, because I have now ‘seen’ the other 2 prequel movies and Rogue One, due to the 1744 strips of DarthsAndDroids that they linked to, and likely enjoyed the comic/DnD version of them more than I would the actual movies.
I’m a SW fan from 'way back, thought the trailer looked good, and was looking forward to it. I liked all the sfx eye candy but thought both Jar Jar and the kid were really annoying. The story on Naboo really plodded. I soon realized it was an average movie, at best, and never really changed that opinion.
@RickyJay
Exactly.
Seeing it again, it’s like watching action figures clashing on a table top. These don’t feel like real people with real histories.
I will say that the design of Queen Amidala’s royal costumes were pretty cool-looking, and I liked the weird vocal distortion they gave her when she speaks in costume. I think she would have been far more interesting if that was her normal personality. Like she was raised to be a queen, very serious, proper, etc. That would have been a nice eventual contrast to the more casual, hot headed, but compassionate Anakin.
Regular Padme in Phantom Menace was boring.
A friend of mine and I talked about it after we saw it separately. It’s fairly interesting and exciting while you’re watching it, but once you pick up your brains on the way out the door and begin to think about it, the tissue-paper plot and acting make themselves painfully obvious. I like to say that Jar Jar was the best and most believable acting in the movie. It’s still ahead of BATTLEFIELD EARTH.
My friend said that they took the wonderful, mystical Force and turned it into an STD in this movie.
I have watched scraps of parts 2 and 3 and none of the new ones. Sorry, but except for a few rare exceptions, I still think SF is a print genre. The puerile Star Wars fankids make too much interest in the franchise embarrassing.
Oh, yeah, the midichlorians thing was just embarrassing. I actually wondered if I misheard it and whispered to a friend, “Did they just say the Force comes from doohickies in your blood?”
At the time I saw it when I opened, I liked it. I suppose I was hyped and predisposed to do so.
Since then, however…it’s just awful.
The one good part was the fight between Obi-Wan, Qui-gon, and Maul. That was well choreographed, and the actor portraying Maul just reeked of menace, without saying a word. He was gleefully evil.
The joke I’ve seen made in several places, including that Red Letter Media guy, is that the fights basically look like a video game - not just in terms of being CGI, but the way they’re staged and fought. This guy uses Double Weird Attack and does 11 points of damage, and that guy uses Force Push II and does 17 points of damage! Oh look out, now this guy is using Force Lightning, that’s a Level 15 skill!
It has been noted that in “Star Wars” Lucas was going for a homage of Flash Gordon serials interspersed with a homage to dogfighting movies. The prequels, to my eye, look liker a homage to video games; they have the look of “Knights of the Old Republic” with Street Fighter scenes popped in there. That really is not a good decision; video games make for great video games, but shitty movies.
I could go on about problem with the prequels all day but the misuse of the Force as a plot concept is a really, really big one. In the first trilogy, the Force is a mystical concept. Its use is mysterious, implied to be very difficult, and the precise nature of it is never fully explored, but what is for sure is that belief in yourself is a key to using it. It’s not like a video game, where if your Jedi Consular hits Level 10 you get 289 force points and can select between Force Whirlwind and Advanced Force Persuasion as your new skill, and hey I got this item off a mob that increases my force regeneration by 4.6 points/second! It’s that Luke has potential, Vader has a shitload, and Yoda has a metric shitload but he’s an old hermit who talks in riddles and doesn’t like weapons. Luke does not become a Jedi by passing a number of experience points; he is supposed to become a Jedi by facing Vader.
In the prequels, it really feels like video game rules. Mitichlorians determine your base Force points and then you go up in levels but you still aren’t strong enough to beat Count Dooku, a Level 25 Sith Executor or whatever. Yoda isn’t a wise old sage, he’s just another CGI guy killing people with a light saber.
I disliked Jar-Jar too but here’s the fact: Had the movies been fundamentally good, even Jar-Jar wouldn’t have ruined them. It would have been an irritation but the movies would otherwise have been enjoyable. Conversely, take out Jar-Jar and the prequels are still terrible.
Since this thread has turned somewhat to nitpicking, here’s what’s always seemed like by far the biggest plot hole to me, despite the fact that it never seems to show up in other people’s lists of irritations:
-Everything (meeting Annakin, the need to pod race etc) is all kicked off because Wato won’t sell them a spare hyperdrive because he doesn’t take imperial credits. Wait, what? He doesn’t? Why the fuck not? so you’re selling spare starship parts on an independent planet very near to a massive galactic empire and when rich customers from that empire wander by and want to spend lots of nice fresh clean money in your presumably-struggling establishment, you not only don’t accept their money, you also make fun of them for even attempting to spend it, and you don’t in any way suggest anyone nearby who might work as a moneychanger? What the f kind of businessman are you? There’s no WAY that imperial credits wouldn’t be the de facto currency on which markets in Tatooine ran, or, if maybe there’s some law stating that officially everything has to be in local Quatloos so the local government can tax them, then Wato would have strongly hinted that they go visit the dentist who streets over who could convert some imperial credits into Quatloos.
It just painfully highlights how that section of the movie was plotted out, which is (I’m quite sure) that Lucas really wanted there to be a pod race, and had already settled on “queen’s starship stops on Tatooine with engine troubles”, and completed that thought enough to realize that there had to be a reason they couldn’t just buy a new engine, came up with two possible ways that they could get that new engine without a pod race (buying it, using the force to influence Wato), wrote in paper-thin justifications why neither one would work, and then, presto, conflict!
Nitpick 
it’s Republic credits. Not Imperial.
But yes, it was clunky. Easier solution: it costs too much, and they don’t have enough cash. Gotta do something fast to come up with the cash. Of course, using Jedi Mind Tricks to easily win some local poker games would’ve been better than a pod-race, betting it all on a kid who’s never even finished a race, but that’s another…not a pot hole, but a plot improbability.
After a while it became obvious to me that the prequels were not meant to be anything more than infomercials for ILM and toy products.
Oh… another thing.
My older son, who’s seven, has seen the original trilogy, and the latest four Star Wars movies (TFA, TLJ, Rogue One and Solo).
I can’t get him to actually sit through Phantom Menace, much less the other two. But he asks me all the time to rewatch the original trilogy.
That has to be informative in some way…
Ehh… I like a good dose of cynicism as much as the next man, but… I think that George Lucas truly was trying to make an entertaining movie that would charm kids while thrilling adults and expand the Star Wars universe. But he just failed.
Whatever the flaws of the prequels (and there were many) they didn’t leave me with a feeling of “everyone involved was just cashing a check”, more like “people tried really hard but the entire endeavor was wrongheaded from the start”, if you see the distinction I’m making.
Yes! that was bugging me when I watched Revenge of the Sith for the first time. In ROTS, Anakin tells Dooku, “My powers have doubled since the last time we met, Count.”
Who talks like that? It just struck me as odd, but I couldn’t fully explain why, other than it sounded like bad dialogue.
@MaxTheVool
This also is something that stood out when first watching it. Watto is supposed to be a slimy businessman. Why wouldn’t Qui-Gon shop around? He just believed Watto when he said he’s the only one that has that part?
And Padme and someone in the Republic can’t just go back to Tattooine to free Anakin’s mother?
I understand there are plot holes in many films, especially in stuff like Star Wars. But usually you notice them much later, or on subsequent viewings. With the prequels it stuff that stands out immediately.
My Episode I story.
I was about to pursue my Master’s degree is in Film Archiving so I attended a SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) conference where they were discussing digital projection systems which were going to “revolutionize” cinemas. They also announced that the first four commercial multiplex digital projection systems had been deployed in the country–from what I recall, 2 in LA and 2 in NY. And The Phantom Menace was screening on them. Note: This was before I was hired to work at Skywalker Ranch.
So out of curiosity, I thought I would check it out. Now Ep. I had been out several weeks already, but I knew it wasn’t going anywhere so I stayed away from the crowds for the first few weeks and so hadn’t seen it yet. I had heard some things in passing but tried to stay spoiler-free so didn’t delve into the reviews in much detail.
Now I live in the SF Bay Area and my business trip was going to take me to LA, so I was resolved to see the film twice–first on the digital projector, and then again on film when I returned back home. This was so I could compare the relative exhibition quality of digital–light values, black densities, artifacting, etc.
So there I am sitting through the crawl and then the first “reel” (not truly applicable since it was digital after all) or so, when I decided to walk out. This was simply because I thought the film was so terrible, so phenomenally stupid and visually uninteresting, that I could not ever imagine sitting through the entire thing twice, especially just a week apart from each other. So I watched enough to get some idea of the visuals within the first half hour and thought that might be enough to do a cursory technical comparison. But man-oh-man, just the prospect of eventually enduring the rest of that film was something I did not look forward to.
As I mentioned in the thread I linked to, my mantra once Lucasfilm hired me was, “They would have to pay me to watch the prequels. And they do.”
I believe the digital cameras were not ready for Episode I. It was Episode II that was the first one filmed digitally. I saw Episode II projected digitally when digital projectors were still rare.
No, you’re absolutely correct. When I started at the Ranch, there were hundreds of thousands of feet of 35mm dailies for TPM. But when I inherited the dailies for AOTC & ROTS, they were just banks and banks of tapes.
But my point was that the screening I was in was digital, so there were no reel changes occurring at all (though at that time, all film projection was platter-based in multiplexes anyway, but they still had the reel change marks in the upper corners in the last few feet of each “tail”.).
And of course, when I got all of Indy 4, they were palettes of dailies again, all in moviola winds, because Steven has sworn he’ll shoot on 35mm for the rest of his professional career (heck, last I heard, he and his life-long editor Michael Kahn still edit on a flatbed and don’t use any non-linear systems).
Count me in with the left the theater disappointed crowd. In those days James Earl Jones was still young enough to have played the voice of Vader for three movies. I was really hoping the trilogy would basically be Darth Vader (not Anakin Skywalker), The Early Days. Needless to say, I was quite disappointed in the way it turned out.
Han Solo would have punched him in the face, dropped the cash on the counter, and strolled off whistling.