Review of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) by Mark A — 13 Jan 2018

I'm with Paul C, and a lot of other people on this; The Last Jedi was disgraceful, so I decided to revisit The Phantom Menace, which I didn't really like much when it was released. However, after watching TPM tonight, the storytelling is so much better than The 'awful' Last Jedi.

TPM has decent story telling, with some good ideas-a great cast, which can be under used at times. The saber battle scenes are great, as are the space scenes. The problems lay with using the Jar Jar character for comedy value-it's still annoying.

The other problem is that there's the over reliance of CGI; The balance between costume, make-up, location sets, studio sets, against CGI, is all wrong. CGI should be used as an enhancement, and not complete substance, and that's where the movie partly fails; it just doesn't feel organic.

And, Lucas isn't the best with dialogue, here. Aside from these glaring flaws, and a few more not mentioned, it's a reasonably enjoying movie.