Sorry, it’s not even close
Have a look at
Sahara
10,000 B.C.
2012
Sphere
then get back to us.
Threads about films and the like are best suited to Cafe Society, The Winkler. This one has been relocated.
It’s not even the worst big budget series movie made. Awful as it is, Star Trek V was worse. I’ve actually watched TPM again - you’d need to tie me in a chair and prop my eyeballs open to get me to watch ST V.
(And please, don’t play the wonderful Ninth while doing so.)
Hell, Phantom Menace isn’t even the worst Star Wars movie ever made - not when compared to the truly abominable Attack of the Clones. And even AotC is competent compared to some of the other titles mentioned in this thread.
But I disagree with the idea that Lucas is a hack who got lucky (which, I believe, has been the concluding statement of every single thread The Winkler has started here). I think the guy has genuine talent, but genuine talent alone isn’t enough to be a good artist. You need to exercise that talent constantly. And George Lucas didn’t make any films for twenty years between his two big trilogies. I think if he’d been working continuously, as a director, for that period, you’d have wound up with a very different, much more watchable prequel trilogy. Hell, you can already see it happening in Revenge of the Sith which, while not great, is significantly better than the two preceding films.
Liquid Sky didn’t have a huge budget, but hoo doggies, was it bad! :: shudder ::
I have to mention this whenever someone mentions Episode I. You have to watch The Phantom Edit - also known as “Episode 1.1”.
Just out of curiosity: Why this thread now?
Anyway, about that pod race: In all the reviews, discussions, threads, etc., about this movie that I’ve ever seen (mostly in the months just after it came out), one thing I’ve never seen mentioned (maybe it was just too obvious): That pod race was an outright overt blatant undisguised parody of the chariot race from Ben Hur. Anyone who’s seen Ben Hur would have spotted that immediately, but anyone who hasn’t seen BH might completely miss it.
(ETA: I think you can find the BH chariot race on YouTube, for anyone who hasn’t seen it.)
I took my wife to TPM on our first date.
She agreed to go out with me again. It couldn’t have been that bad.
In context. None of those had a huge audience that had been waiting 20 years for a continuation of one of the biggest blockbuster series of all time - a continuation with the original creator at the helm, with essentially unlimited budget, time and freedom.
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The Phantom Menace was boring enough that, watching it for the first time on TV, I gave up and turned it off during the pod-racing part.
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As others have detailed, there are far worse big-budget movies out there.
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Lucas was hardly a talentless hack. Even before Star Wars, American Graffiti was a very good film. And of course the original Star Wars movie was amazing for its time. (Haven’t seen it in forever; have no idea how it’s held up. But in 1977, it rocked the house.)
Seriously? Dude, Google “Pod race Ben Hur.” Tons of people made the connection. There’s multiple videos on YouTube doing a side-by-side comparison of the two scenes.
I think a far more interesting discussion is why TPM fell so far short of even modest expectations and had so much truly rotten dialogue and patently borrowed material, when it came from the same master chef with an essentially unlimited supply of the finest ingredients. Besides Lucas’s proven track record and ownership of one of the finest fx-driven film studios in the world, he could have hired almost any film talent available to ensure perfection.
But an extremely expensive movie with an extremely expensive marketing rollout that’s outdone by $100k budget B-listers resulted.
Why?
But then the Death Star attack scenes were based likewise on a shot-for-shot basis at times on WWII bomber scenes (I forget which film off the top of my head, or even if it was one particular film). So that at least is in keeping with how Lucas works.
I don’t know how reasonable the “Lucas needs reining in” argument is - certainly when you look at the huge amounts of difficulty, the necessities to curb his vision, and the delegation required on the first trilogy as compared to the, yes, yes-men, vast budget, and being where the buck ultimately stopped for seemingly everything for the second trilogy it’s easy to see there’s a profound difference. Add in the changes that Lucas has made to make things that weren’t as he wanted them into the way he prefers being… unfortunate additions.
I think it’s less that Lucas needs someone to hold him back and more the loss of those additional, talented voices that could disagree with him. The OT wasn’t one man’s vision, the NT effectively was. And no matter how talented that one guy is, it’s not surprising that it doesn’t match up to when there were more people who got to have some say in the finished product.
I submit Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which had all of those elements PLUS the original cast, and managed not only to bore the audience to death, but couldn’t even come up with a fresh plot (V’ger = Nomad from the episode “The Changeling.”)
“Ooh, LOOK! The Enterprise!”
[ten minutes later] “Yeah, we get it, the Enterprise…”
I had much lower expectations from Roddenberry, even as 10X the ST fan that I was an original SW fan. GR was a TV hack who struck gold and then didn’t quite know what to do with it. Lucas got to build his own universe on his own terms… and then decided it made a dandy chamber pot.
The Dam Busters. Star Wars has never been shy about wearing its influences on its sleeve. I know a lot of geeks who got into Kurosawa because they heard Hidden Fortress was a big influence on the films.
I think a lot of the perceived racism in the second trilogy came from Lucas reaching back to classic films with troubled depictions of race, and thinking that by coloring the characters green or bright pink, he could sidestep the race issues. It’s not an entirely bad idea in theory - Firefly did more or less the same thing by making Civil War Lost Cause romanticism palatable by completely removing the issue of slavery from the conflict. But it just did not work in the prequels.
The Star Wars Holiday Special is the worst thing ever by a long margin. Far, far worse than even Plan 9 From Outer Space.
As for Lucas, he needs a good editor. His wife edited the original Star Wars, aka, A New Hope. Someone else directed The Empire Strikes Back.
And** THIS MOVIE **too:
