Review of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) by Evan G — 29 Dec 2016

I won't lie, this film isn't quite as bad as everyone says, but it's certainly not good. A lot of people say the worst part is Jar-Jar, Anakin, the dialogue, the CGI, but for me the worst part is the pacing.

Episode 4 felt like it had PERFECT pacing for a fun adventure film, but this film draaaaaged oooooon! The WORST was when they got to Tatooine. It felt like at least 1/2 of the film is spent on Tatooine, if not more.

They could've cut SO much stuff from the Tatooine scenes, but they didn't and it shows! Even the pod-racing scene dragged on! At first it was like "Oh cool! ... Okay, yeah, racing... Yeah, uh.

.. racing... been going on for like 7 minutes now... Okay you can cut it out now!... STOP!... CUT TO SOMETHING ELSE!" and my second biggest problem is the amount (or lack of) screen time Obi-Wan is given! What the hell, he was SUCH a major character in the original trilogy, why is friggin Qui-Gon the star of the show? Where did he even come from? He felt shoe-horned into the film! The villain looks cool, but he doesn't do anything interesting until the end of the film, but even then he gets killed off at the very end (Him coming back to life wasn't in Lucas's mind when making the film, so I'm not considering The Clone Wars in this review) aside from that, Jar-Jar is useless, the actor for Anakin isn't very good, and the only decent parts are the beginning and the end.

And, as everyone points out, there's too much focus on the politics of Star Wars. I didn't know nor did I care what was going on in this film as a kid, now that I'm older, I know what's going on, but I still don't care.