Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace

Dir: George Lucas

1999

**

After many years of hype and excitement, I don't think it was ever going to be possible to live up to the ridiculously high expectations of the hardcore fans but they (George Lucas) really could have done better than this. The weird beard had already upset many a fan with unnecessary tinkering of the first films and it seems valuable lessons were not learned, despite the large amount of feedback. The first episode of three that would eventually link the trilogies is really tenuous, not to mention tedious. George Lucas spent too much time on the effects and not enough time on the story. I remember people got excited over the pod-race towards the beginning of the film, personally I always thought it was odd, a bit pointless and not very good. Not very Star Wars like. Golden haired brat Jake Lloyd was a horribly Disney-like choice of Darth junior, before Disney even owned the franchise. Elements of the film are just recycled ideas from the first two films and many a poor sci-fi film that has come since (and mostly all were poor Star Wars imitations to begin with). The droid army look stupid and cartoonist compared to an army of Stormtroopers, even if they do shoot more accurately. The biggest gripe most people had was from a character called Jar Jar Binks who is a little bit like Sgt. Jones from Police Academy with a fish/duck face. The story tries and succeeds in some respect in being clever. There is a lot of political talk, democracy, dictatorship, unionism etc but when it's followed by inane action it doesn't really have the desired effect. It does get a few things right though, I liked Liam Neeson's character, Ewan McGregor was great as a young Alec Guinness (which was more important than being a convincing young Obi-Wan Kenobi), Ray Park was great as the original kick-ass Sith Darth (although he does look like a pissed off ladybird) and Samuel L. Jackson is cool at everything he does. Fan favorites from the first trilogy include Darth Sidious, C3PO, R2D2 and master Yoda. Brian Blessed, Terence Stamp and Hugh Quarshie make notable appearances. The problem is that it doesn't quite work like the first film did. It's filmed with an awful blue-screen CGI background and looks cheap throughout. CGI Yoda is not cool and enough with the trade embargo talk. Lucus should have remembered why he chose other people to direct the originals, money had at this point pecked at his creative mojo. It wasn't exactly worth the wait.