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Star Wars - Episode I, The Phantom Menace (Widescreen Edition) Customer Reviews (106 - 108 of 166 Reviews)

I've got a bad feeling about this...
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace opens the prequel trilogy which chronicles Anakin Skywalker's fall to the Dark Side of the Force. I grew up with the classic Star Wars trilogy, and loved how George Lucas combined what were then state of the art special effects with great storytelling. The prequel trilogy has turned out to be a mixed bag for me. With the prequels, Lucas has improved the effects to advance the medium, but has sacrificed the storytelling element in the process. Episode I does give us one of the coolest film villains in recent memory in Darth Maul, but we also get one of the most annoying characters ever in Jar Jar Binks. Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor and Ian McDiarmid are all trememdous actors, but none of them really gets to shine in this movie. McGregor and McDiarmid will fianlly get to have their big moments in this trilogy in Episode III. Episode I: The Phantom Menace is without a doubt, the weakest film in the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
I remember seeing this movie in 1999 in theaters as a twelve-year-old. At that time I thought it was an awesome movie. It had great special effects and lots of action sequences. Everything else I virtually ignored.

Now I look back on the movie and realize how God-awful some parts actually are. My first complaint with the movie is all those idiotic little gags they pulled (that guy whose pod flew apart in the podrace scene, the droid that was sucked into an engine). My second problem with the movie was the actor who played Anakin Skywalker. I don't care how young he was at the time, he did a horrible job in this movie. My third problem with this movie is the presence of Gungans. Not just Jar Jar...ALL the Gungans, Jar Jar was just the most irritating of them. The movie would've been better if they weren't in it for comic relief because even as a sixth-grader I was a little cheesed out by lines like "Yousa in big doo-doo now!" and Jar Jar's constant screw-ups. I was also really annoyed by the fact that Darth Maul's face was splattered everywhere, but he was barely in the movie (and barely had any lines when he WAS on camera). His big scene was obviously the lightsaber battle between him and Qui Gon and Obi Wan, which brings me to the point that I personally felt that both Darth Maul and Qui Gon were just killed off poorly. What I mean is that their deaths felt a little rushed and not thought out well, kind of like the writers just got lazy so they killed them both off instead of figuring some other way to work them into the trilogy's plot, which I'm almost sure is what happened.

There were a lot of things I did like about the movie: the aforemention special effects are one thing, and the well coreographed fight scenes were another. The fight scenes in particular overshadow those of the original trilogy. They look a lot more authentic. And I also think that a lot of really good music was written for this movie as well. The music was definitely one of my favorite things about this movie. I liked Darth Maul and thought he showed a lot of promise, but the writers didn't do nearly enough with him, so he ended up as an almost totally wasted character.

The rest of this movie was ok. There were parts where acting wasn't really that good...mostly because of Jake Lloyd, but not always. There were a few characters who could've been better or featured more prominently, but other than that it was just ok.

Basically, this movie is pretty bland in some parts and awesome in others which evens it out to be pretty mediocre.

best movie i have ever seen
Watch this movie and you'll see what i mean.

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