Phantom Menace Is The Worst Film Ever Made

[by-tor]

Personally, I thought American Graffiti sucked too.

[magnusblitz]

@MrDibble

So, not seen the Transformers series, I take it…

The Transformers films have a lot of problems, but they aren’t boring to watch (unless/until you reach oversaturation of what’s going on). They certainly aren’t full of boringly-shot scenes of characters sitting on couches talking about trade disputes.

[terentii]

@by-tor

Personally, I thought American Graffiti sucked too.

Oh, no. No. No, no, no, no! :mad:

[SykoSkotty]

@Miller

Thing about this argument is, when I was a kid, there were a lot of TV shows and movies that I loved. And very, very few of them hold up today. In terms of sheer numbers of hours, I spent significantly more time watching the GI Joe cartoons than I did Star Wars, and watching those cartoons as an adult, they’re just dire. I could give you a list of other stuff I loved as a kid that followed a similar trajectory. Even the kid stuff back then that was actually good, I still engage with on the level of, “This is really well made children’s entertainment,” not just, “This is really good.” Star Wars is one of the few exceptions.

And that’s accepting the idea that it was meant to be kiddie fare in the first place, which I don’t think stands up. Star Wars, when it came out, was a genuine cultural phenomenon. Darth Vader was on the cover of Time Magazine, back when that meant something. It was nominated for Best Picture. Part of that was that Lucas was banking on people having nostalgia for the Republic serials of their own youths, but that doesn’t change the fact that a significant (if not majority) of the original audience for the movie was adults.

If nothing else, with Star Wars, Lucas made a film that had both cross-generational appeal, and significant staying power. I don’t think anyone can make that claim about The Phantom Menace. There are a lot of adults who saw Star Wars as a kid, and still list it among their favorite films. Where are the adults who saw The Phantom Menace as a kid, who still rank it among their favorites?

Very good point. No argument from me on this one. It was a bad movie. No doubt. I just think that since we had so much of the back story built up in our heads, there was no way it would be justified once it became a movie. It was doomed to fail before it began.

[Max_Torque]

TPM is the Star Wars movie that has not only Jar Jar, but a freakin’ fart joke in it. Therefore, it’s automatically worse than AOTC.

[Snarky_Kong]

@Blake

Avatar characters were 2 dimensional, but they had clear personalities and clear objectives. In contrast, the characters in TPM… weren’t. They had no character, no personality, no motivations, no purpose. Nothing.

That is, IMO, the single biggest failing of the movie, and the key reason why it failed everywhere else. The characters weren’t personalities. They weren’t even 2 dimensional personalities. They were just empty costumes. Obi Wan wasn’t brave, or clever, or honest or cowardly or foolhardy. He was just… there. Princess Armadillo wasn’t snobby or ditzy or charismatic or manipulative. She was just… there.

There was just no characterisation in the movie. Any character could have been put into the costume of another character, and the movie would have been identical. At least in Avatar, the general was gung-go, the scientist was compassionate, the marine was cocky and conflicted. Sure, those are 2 dimensional characters. But they were characters. Now try the same thing with TPM. Give two personality traits of any of the characters. Princess Armadillo was…… RastaFrog was…. Nope, not a trace of character in any of them.

That then flows through to their motivations. Why were the Jedi the spaceship at the start? They were ambassadors, but were they meant to threaten the other party? Use their wits? Mind control them? What were they doing right from the outset. Then they decide to warn the planet it was being invaded by travelling with the invading army. Why? What was the motivation? The planet must have known that an invading army meant an invading army. Why would two guys running in front of the army shouting “The Red Coats are coming!” make it any more apparent? Once again, there’s no obvious motivation. Then we find out that the army has landed on the opposite side of the planet from the city it wants to invade, and can somehow travel across a densely populated world without anybody seeing it. Why? How? Once again, no motivation.

And this goes on throughout the movie right up to the climactic scene where the good guys take a 10 yo boy and a 13 yo girl out of a safe city and drag them into a warzone. And as soon as they get into the warzone, they abandon the boy in a parked car. And they do this because…. Nothing. No reason, no motivation. Just because.

The problem isn’t that the characterisation and motives are cartoonish as they are in Avatar. The problem is that there is no characterisation and not motive for any character at any point. The characters just jump from one action to the next because the script demands it, for no logical reason. As a result the whole movie ends up a complete, unwatchable mess.

There are 2 hour reviews of each movie done by Red Letter Media (which I highly recommend. In the review for the Phantom Menace the guy asks several people to describe characters without saying what they look like. Everyone could go on and on about Han Solo, but couldn’t think of a single thing to say about any character in the prequels.

[Gerald_II]

@MikeG

Battlefield Earth

Definitely.

@Deeg

My guess is that the second trilogy failed because of Lucas’ growing hubris.

He made a kids film, like the original was supposed to be. Empire Strikes Back wasn’t necessarily supposed to be so dark.

The bad thing was that all the things that made Star Wars cool seemed boring in The Phantom Menace. Are first introduction of the light saber is see it used to cut open a sealed entry way. Strange beings like the sand people and the rough necks in the Tattooine bar are now rendered like Pixar characters…

[Miller]

@The_Winkler

And why exactly did Darth Vader die?

He was electrocuted by the Emperor?

[msmith537]

@SykoSkotty

Very good point. No argument from me on this one. It was a bad movie. No doubt. I just think that since we had so much of the back story built up in our heads, there was no way it would be justified once it became a movie. It was doomed to fail before it began.

I didn’t have any backstory in my head!
People forget, but the Star Wars films have always been very uneven in quality and tone. Star Wars (A New Hope) and Empire were a couple of the greatest films of all time, for all ages. Jedi was mostly Muppets.

You can have Luke finding the charred corpses of his aunt and uncle or Leia witness the genocide of her planet, and then it’s never spoken of ever again.

With TPM, Lucas somehow manages to make it both targeted for children but with a dull plot ripped right from the Macneil Lehrer News Hour (because there’s anything that children love, it’s trade disputes and political gerrymandering).

Really all the prequels were “lets see how many action figures and toys we can shoehorn into this”!

As far as unwatchable super-bombs, you have films like:
47 Ronin
Mars Needs Moms
R.I.P.D.
Jack the Giant Slayer
Sahara
Stealth
The Adventures of Pluto Nash
Supernova
TPM doesn’t even crack the top 10.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@Gerald_II

He made a kids film, like the original was supposed to be. Empire Strikes Back wasn’t necessarily supposed to be so dark.

It doesn’t really work that well as a kids film, either. Goofy aliens + cool races, sure. Trade negotiations and political maneuvering, not so much.

[Voyager]

@SykoSkotty

I don’t really disagree here that TPM was pretty bad, mostly because it was so confusing, but I’d just like to point this out:

When most of us saw the original trilogy, we were pretty young. For me it was ages 7-13.

When most of us saw the prequels, we were adults.

I think Lucas had kids in mind when he made these movies. We saw the prequels as adults, but they were still made by the same guy with same target audience…kids.

I saw the original movie as an adult - in fact I saw it the second time the day after I got engaged. And some of my friends saw a sneak preview at a con in Chicago, and they all loved it.
Star Wars was loved by kids, but it was also loved by all of us who had read old pulp sf stories. The cantina scne was right out of Planet Stories. None of us had ever seen an sf movie, let alone a well made one with a big budget, that showed this stuff before. And those who remembered the serials liked it also.
Lucas was of the first generation of movie makers who grew up with sf. That is why he got Star Wars so right.

[omenran]

@Wallaby

Maybe the whole prequels would have been better, if, instead of trying to create a whole backstory of how and why Anakin/Darth became evil, the answer was ‘He just fucking is, all right?’

@SykoSkotty

Very good point. No argument from me on this one. It was a bad movie. No doubt. I just think that since we had so much of the back story built up in our heads, there was no way it would be justified once it became a movie. It was doomed to fail before it began.

I think a huge weakness of prequels is that they try to go back and explain how things got to be. And doing, or trying to do that ruins the mystery and imagination of the audience of the original movies. Plus the plot has a predetermined ending, everyone knows how things end up and it’s hard to make a story people already know interesting when you tell it again at length.

Buy no movie is totally unredeemable if it can be MST3K’d (or RIfftrax/Cinematic Titanic).

[Gerald_II]

@The_Winkler

I think a huge weakness of prequels is that they try to go back and explain how things got to be. And doing, or trying to do that ruins the mystery and imagination of the audience of the original movies. Plus the plot has a predetermined ending, everyone knows how things end up and it’s hard to make a story people already know interesting when you tell it again at length.

I hated that in the flashback scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. All of Indy’s signature character traits are founded in a single day in his young life (fear of snakes, using a whip, wearing a fredora, and even lesser known ones like having a scar).

How can there be any surprise if we know how it turns out? There’s some good ones though like Godfather II.

That said, seeing Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader when he was a Jedi, just sounds like it should pretty cool. But it wasn’t. 1st film he’s a small child. 2nd film he’s still not a Jedi but a whiny teen. It’s only at the third film that he’s a Jedi, but he’s still far from being cool or a bad ass. Not getting a better actor to portray a young Darth Vader, and not focusing on direction for the actors is what severely hurt the prequels.

All the bits and pieces that got us imagining about Star Wars pre-A New Hope was rushed in the prequels. Anakin Skywalker’s turn to the darkside and hunting of the Jedi happened pretty quick. Instead of being seduced by the darkside he’s merely tricked. “I can save Padme, but only if you join me.”
“okay.” Turns to the darkside.
“Well I can’t really save her, but I’m sure together we can figure out how to stop other people from dying.”

…I’m not going to go on a rant. The overall problem I think was due to two factors. The first was he was trying to demonstrate how good and bad isn’t so easy to distinguish. For that I give him props because if you look past the bad acting, CGI backgrounds, etc you notice that he’s trying to show nuance by showing how good people can do bad things. Even the Jedi succumbed to their own fears by accepting a clone army which was ultimately their undoing. But that took precedence over just telling a good story.

The second problem was that he approached everything else like a checklist of connections and explanations. We didn’t need this exchange: “I’m Owen and this is my girlfriend Beru.”

And why have Anakin lose his hand as well? Because it happened to Luke in the OT.
Why have a character named Count Dra…Dooku featured in the prequels played by a Hammer horror actor? Because he had a Hammer horror actor in the OT.

[bucketybuck]

@Gerald_II

And why have Anakin lose his hand as well? Because it happened to Luke in the OT.
Why have a character named Count Dra…Dooku featured in the prequels played by a Hammer horror actor? Because he had a Hammer horror actor in the OT.

Its like poetry, it rhymes.

[CalMeacham]

@The_Second_Stone

Most Christmas specials have a WTF vibe, TSWCS, which I’ve seen, is far, far, far worse. It is so bad that if the Vogons see it, they will destroy the earth to suppress it alone, never mind the intergalactic thoroughfare.

I own a bootleg copy of TSWCS. I’ve never been able to watch it all the way through in one sitting. I can’t say that about any other bad film.

I showed it a couple of years ago at the last Bad Film Festival I had, and the only way to make it palatable was to run it at 2X or 4X speed. And even then we didn’t make it all the way through.

[terentii]

@Gerald_II

It’s only at the third film that he’s a Jedi, but he’s still far from being cool or a bad ass.

Being a Jedi is about as important as being a good surfer.

[garygnu]

@bucketybuck

Its like poetry, it rhymes.

That phrase is just so nauseating.

[Magniankh]

There was a post on reddit a while back where a user argued that Lucas’ wife, an accomplished Hollywood patron in her own right, made crucial edits to both American Graffiti and the original Star Wars. When they divorced he didn’t have a helping hand to craft the prequels, and now out of spite/wanting to forget the whole thing, has decided to sell the franchise to Disney.

There’s an article here arguing this as well.

[Magniankh]

@Magniankh

There was a post on reddit a while back where a user argued that Lucas’ wife, an accomplished Hollywood patron in her own right, made crucial edits to both American Graffiti and the original Star Wars. When they divorced he didn’t have a helping hand to craft the prequels, and now out of spite/wanting to forget the whole thing, has decided to sell the franchise to Disney.

There’s an article here arguing this as well.

Er, I can’t edit after 5 minutes. So, the article that I mentioned isn’t that great, and their link to an external source seems to be down. But I found the reddit comment, which is wonderful. Anyone interested in why the prequels fell flat should give it a look.
http://np.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/2unxg8/nicholas_cage_praises_hayden_christensons_acting/coa3zfe

[grude]

If anyone hasn’t check out The Clone Wars TV show if you can, I found it far superior to the prequels.

Anakin is aged up and no longer annoying, he has a great brotherly relationship with Obiwan, the show feels more like classic SW than the prequels at times.

It is an anthology show, meaning episodes are mostly standalone. So I’d find a list of stand out episodes and give it a try.