There was nothing good about this movie, and I still consider it the worst big budget film ever made. (Yes, worse than Battlefield Earth and Heaven’s Gate.) And it was racist as hell.
TPM failed on every level. I hate it with a burning passion.
The “racist as hell” part was more of Lucas trying to recreate the serials of his youth.
The lack of a good villain was a major problem. Darth Maul looks neat and had a well-coreographed fight scene, but all we really see him do is turn up, send out some spybots, then arrive at the big final fight. We never see anything to make him looks especially scary, or evil, or even opposed to the heroes. Compare him with Darth Vader, who turns up storming a ship that the good guys are trying to escape from and starts intimidating and killing people for information right off the bat, then keeps opposing the protagonists throughout the movie. Vader is the kind of villain that you remember decades later, Darth Maul made a cool action figure.
The Trade Federation plot is just lame, and they don’t make good villains because of it. They’re not interesting or intimidating or hilariously incompetent, they’re just targets. The junkyard dealer guy isn’t even in the wrong - he owns a part and they don’t want to pay him a reasonable amount. Really, if you take off ‘good guy’ blinders the Jedi look like simple thugs trying to steal from an honest businessman.
What never made sense to me was this. The Trade Federation initiates an embargo against Naboo. Naboo appears to be a wealthy, agrarian planet. Are the Naboo so profligate that a trade embargo somehow causes people to start dying immediately? That seems to be the big panic. Of course they never actually show this. And when the battle droids do come down, they conveniently only attack an empty field with an awaiting team of Gungans. Hardy an act that is causing this supposed mass slaughter of citizens.
Periodic elections of child queens seems like an especially ineffective way to govern a planet.
Of course, I live in America in 2017, so who am I to judge. Random 14-year-old girl 2020, anyone?
The plot doesn’t make sense in about 100 different ways, this being one of them.
Actually, it fails just as cinema. “Show, don’t tell.” Throughout the prequels we’re told about how very bad things are happening; Naboo is suffering, we are told. But we never SEE that. Naboo appears to be one rich city, and it looks fine, though there don’t appear to be many people on it. When the Jedi get there there’s no columns of smoke, no refugees, nothing really happening at all.
In “Star Wars” you see bad things. Alderaan’s literally blown up. Imperial troops murder people.
Lucas actually talked about this at one point. The grander aesthetic of the prequels he said was based on 1930s Art Deco, and was to reflect how grand the Federation was, compared with how gray and utilitarian the Empire era was basically. Basically, the “used future” aesthetic of the original films was done to reflect how shitty things had become. If you do notice, by the time we get to III, the universe is beginning to look more like the one we find in ANH. I mean if you think about it, TPM is set around 40 years before the original film. Think about the gigantic leap in aesthetics and designs in our real world between say, 1937 and 1977 - it would feel like two different worlds as well. The Rebel era was basically the space 70s. Did you know Lucas intended for the Rebel Alliance to represent the Viet Cong, and for the Empire to be the United States? The Emperor was inspired by Richard Nixon. In the original film - if you take away the arc of Empire and Jedi - the Emperor was supposed to be a reclusive figurehead who gave orders through his subordinates, who were in real control of the Galaxy. People like Tarkin and Vader were the Haldeman and Ehlichman of the universe as Lucas saw it.
Exactly. There’s no weight to it because we don’t care about any of the characters - Maul is a heavy metal album cover, Qui-Gon is a desk calendar full of aphorisms. The only reason there is a lightsabre battle is because there’s supposed to be one at the end of a Star Wars movie. The slow motion duel between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan is much maligned for being arthritic, but it carries narrative weight because we know who these characters are and why we should care about the fight.
Tom Riddle wouldn’t work as a protagonist though. You’re supposed to root for the protagonist in these sorts of the films.
I don’t think Anakin had to be the main protagonist of the prequel series.
I’m sure you meant Irvin Kershner, who directed The Empire Strikes Back.
Yeah, I thought of that. The prequels are set among queens, emperors, and senators, and the originals are about a farm boy, a smuggler, and a band of rebels. It’s only natural that the environments of the movies should reflect that. But the prequels are still just so bloodless. It’s all like some royal ceremony with a three-volume manual of etiquette and everyone is afraid to even crack a smile.
If you want to make a swashbuckling adventure, guess which of those environments you choose.
The postpartum angle for TPM is not nothing, I guess, but it might’ve been best told via prologue or flash back. It certainly didn’t carry an entire movie. Kids sent off to summer camp pitch bigger histrionics. Did Anakin ever resent the Jedi for taking him away from his mom, I honestly don’t remember.
When you put it that way, I can maybe see what George Lucas thought; which isn’t to say I think he got it right, but that he clearly had two choices:
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Show him as flawed in I, and worse in II, and doomed in III; or
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Show him as a wholesome little ‘yippee’ kid in I, who traumatically sees his mom die in II, and then has nightmares about his wife dying in III: really driving home that, no, this isn’t the story of a guy who was messed up from ‘go’; instead, here’s a whole film just showing a blandly nice boy-scout type with magic powers, and here’s why he then fell from grace anyway, like anybody could. You know how Luke grew up as a farmboy with a loving family, and then he didn’t give in to the temptations of the dark side? Yeah, that – could’ve gone the other way.
Ah, c’mon you guys. Two mentions and not a link between them? Go stand in the corner and think about what you’ve done.
It’s never really made super clear in the original films why Luke would be tempted to go to the Dark Side. Luke Skywalker seems uninterested in anything Vader or the Emperor are selling, and goes into the final confrontation quite convinced, in the absence of any evidence at all, that he can turn his father back to the light. If I can offer a criticism of the original movies (and I think most people would agree ROTJ is a weaker film than it predecessors) there’s very little dramatic tension in Luke’s decision not to turn to the dark side. There’s never, to be honest, any point when you even suspect he might. Luke never displays a tragic flaw or a personal investment in anything with which he can be tempted; his only ambition is to be a Jedi and all along he wants to be a good Jedi. When he beats the hell out of Vader he’s immediately horrified at his own anger, and this is a guy who we’ve seen kill thousands of people and just keep smiling as he fights for the light.
That’s something the prequels could have had going for them; the potential for a tragic hero. They just blow it big time through nonsensical plots, endlessly boring expositional scenes, and shit that doesn’t make any sense, but the potential was there.
Recreating history, in my opinion it was clearly an error to introduce Anakin Skywalker as a child. Insofar as you keep any of the original movies, the events should have started well after the conclusion of “The Phantom Menace,” which is self-evidently not necessary at all, and shortly before the events of “Attack of the Clones,” a story I would mostly throw right out the window but some of the basic elements - Anakin as a talented young apprentice and Obi-Wan as his mentor - you have to keep because they’re already a part of the story. By introducing Anakin as a young man you can quickly establish his character (and his tragic flaw) in a way you can’t with a small child.
This doesn’t really work - a good portion of the action in Phantom Menace takes place on the same desert planet as the first and third of the originals, in areas that aren’t made for queens, emperors, and senators. I mean, is a junk shop or slave housing really supposed to be that high-end of an environment?
Thank you!! 
I had never seen this.
Re Anakin’s birth: when I saw TPM and Shmi said “there was no father” I assumed she meant the Father ran off and wanted nothing to do with his son. She was a slave after all so that didn’t seem like it would be uncommon. It didn’t even occur to me to take it literally until later when the internet seemed to (and, it seems, was indeed what she meant which is dumb).
I think Anakin was too young and the movie would have been better had he been a young teen or maybe a little older. Interactions with Amidala would have fit a little better since they were destined by storyline to be together. If he’s a teen, he could be a hotshot young pilot who’s not a slave but an indentured servant to Watto (A slave in all but name would add a little depth and gray area to the goings-on at Tatooine). Anakin’s job is to fly parts or junk or droids or whatever up to a space station so he gets a glimpse of space but never gets farther. He can still have a podrace but then as a teen it’s more like the hot rods that are a part of Lucas’ youth (like that movie he made about them…). I’m also not sure why podracing is so dangerous that few humans can do it.
Anakin making C3PO himself seems like a stretch and unnecessary other than to get the droid into the movie. If they’re clearer about him making it from spare droid parts then maybe that would make more sense.
There really wasn’t a POV character either. Not necessarily a Han Solo type, not that it has to be a world-weary, scoundrel who’s skeptical of the Force, but who are we supposed to associate with? Anakin? the Jedi? Jar Jar? A queen?
Jar Jar was a clear misstep and not much more can be said of that.
I thought the ships were not very well thought out either. The Naboo Starfighters seemed goofy and Amidala’s ship was a shiny SR-71 with the cockpit shoved to the back.
All that being said, that lightsaber fight and the accompanying soundtrack were pretty damn fine, as mentioned earlier.
I liked Sebulba and enjoyed him being a minor antagonist. The fact that he used arms for legs and legs for arms was an interesting twist on an alien creature.