Review of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) by Victor Hugo S — 27 Jul 2014

This film arrived to unbearable hype. Of course it doesn't live up to the hype, but even without the disappointment of not living up to the hype this is a very poor film. I was not expecting very much from this film but I was almost sickened by just how bad this film was. I am a Star Wars fan and this film made my childhood die a partial death.

The plot manages to be both thin and incomprehensible at the same time. Most acting in Star Wars films isn't the best but most of the time the characters just seem plain bored. Portman's Padme has a 'high speak' - her character has a droll monotone that kills the performance. Ewan McGregor plays Obi Wan like he's sedated throughout. No passion, no enjoyment, no fun. Darth Maul is completely pointless. He says about 5 lines in the whole film and so his character is very poorly developed. When Darth Vader said "I find your lack of faith distirbing" we COWERED. When Darth Maul appears he actually looks funny! He seems to be a token bad guy thown in just for the sake of having an evil chracter. Jake Loyd is an annoying brat who delivers his lines very poorly. And it has been will documented that Jar Jar Binks is very irritating indeed. Trouble is he's in nearly every scene. Anything meaningful or important is instantly ruined by Jar Jar belching lines like "Yousa thinken yousa people gonna die?". I felt no empathly or interest for any of the characters in this film. Even Samual L Jackson - a great great actor, falls flat when he arrives in this film.

A lot of the appeal of Star Wars is that there is hidden depths to the films. You can get into them more and more on mulitiple viewings. Trouble is in this film everything is so obvious and is rammed into our faces. Here are the droids C3P0 and R2D2 just meeting! Here's Jabba the Hutt! Here's some Jawas! It's all very unsubtle and obvious. There's nothing to notice on multiple viewings. Add to this some blatent mistakes and you have some very annoyed Star Wars fans. Why doesn't Obi Wan remember all these adventures he had with the droids when he meets R2D2 in eposide 4? Where are all these new digitally created aliens in episode 4? Do they become extinct? I will not accept that Anakin built C3P0. It's too perfect. I also thought that the Virgin birth idea of Anakin was very very dodgy indeed. Add some very unfunny toilet jokes like Jar Jar stepping in Bantha Dung and you begin to have an idea of how bad this film is.

Could the pod race be any longer? People kept saying how awesome the pod race was going to be and how much it "kicked ***". I found it rather boring. During the entire pod race sequence I am never fully convinced that Anakin is in a pod, rather I am reminded of the poorly done car sequences from the movies of the thirties and forties. It goes on for far too long. It sums up the film very well. It looks great but is poorly planned, and badly acted and turns out to be quite dull overall.

Yes this film looks amazing. We all know that. However this film has none of that magic of the other Star Wars movies. We get a feeling of lurching from one well-designed and great-looking set to another with no real purpose or direction. It should be an epic Space opera. It is actually very BORING.

The extras on the DVD are very good. We get very well presented documantaries, outlakes and bonus features. It's a feast for any Star Wars fan. This DVD is worth getting just for the extras alone. It's just a shame about the film. It's very fortunate that episode 2 was a vast improvement on this. Such a shame.