Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace

I have forgotten all that happened in Episode I.

George Lucas got too big and powerful to say no to. And for all his genius as a movie producer, Lucas is a competent director at best, and he is unfortunately not a good writer at all. Yet no-one was brave enough to stand up to his excesses. And his excesses are legion. There's the show-not-tell issues, to be sure, and Jar Jar Binks, but I think at the core of the problem with the prequels is Lucas was unsuccessful at capturing the tone of the original trilogy. It's like he didn't understand why his own movies worked in the first place. Somehow we went from the campy but spirited mashup of old adventure serials that made the original films, to a hot mess of dull characters making dull speeches past each other, fart jokes, and racial stereotyping. George Lucas thought they were the same thing. No-one else did.

He believed he knew what people wanted, which was a cute kid, Midichlorians, and 1 ethnic stereotype = 1 alien.

Thanks for the reminders. But what else does everyone even remember about it?

Noizchild said:

Thanks for the reminders. But what else does everyone even remember about it?

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It SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED. Seriously. On a monumental level. It seriously SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED. I mean serious galactic moose. It truly and deeply SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED.

I remember that they flipped through a couple of kid's natural history books instead of using their imaginations to create some of the creatures. The plot was heavy on giant angler fish and Diplocaulus. Or maybe that was one of the other films in the I-III trilogy. I've tried to wipe it all from my memory.

Great lightsaber fights. DUEL OF THE FATES. Qui-Gon turning into Darth Maul to break black bricks.

... oh wait, that was Lego Star Wars...

i liked the Pod race.

Darth Maul did not blossom to full, commercial maturity.

TBH, I don't think it was nearly as bad as Ep. 2. And I liked it as a teen because I felt I was supposed to. I remember liking Qui-Gon Jinn a lot a lot, though I think that was the moment Liam Neeson stopped saying yes to every movie where he gets to be a badass with a sword. Also, Ewan McGregor has mad action star chops, though I don't think they were utilized properly.

I don't think I actually hate Phantom Menace so much as it was the moment SW stopped mattering to me. I dunno, the most off-putting part of it to me was the odd fetishization of childhood surrounding young Anakin, say what you will about Hayden Christianson and his dislike of sand, at least he was moderately convincing as a troubled young man who's willingness to believe what he needs to send him down a dark path. Jake Lloyd (though no fault of his own, and srsly, poor kid) ends up sucking all the air out of the film with his perfect beautiful pureness, and I always find depictions like that to be blinkered, if not vaguely troubling. Plus, he seemed very confused about what pod-racing is.

I remember liking the Trade Federation robots, mainly because of how dim and incompetent they were. Not their fault they were caught in a war that made no lick of sense.

Dath Maul was just one note.

Midichlorians.

Midi--freakin'--chlorians.

Probably inspired by mitochondria, but they'll always be Jedi Wolbachia to me.

Re: Jake Lloyd's character, I think he was written with a misconception that kids relate to characters younger than themselves. Personally, as a child I only ever wanted to read about/watch characters who were at least a couple of years older than me. Something with a 9 year old protagonist (thanks Wookiepedia) would have seemed childish to me past the age of about seven. And that's the whole thing with the tone of the prequels, particularly TPM. It's childish. Not as in 'something kids of all ages can enjoy', childish as in 'I can't believe I paid to watch 2 hrs of animals farting and precocious little kids shouting 'yippee' while they blow enemy troops to shreds'.

Doesn't Jake Lloyd hate acting and Star Wars now?

Noizchild said:

Doesn't Jake Lloyd hate acting and Star Wars now?

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He's had a really tough life after ep.1, it's kind of heartbreaking.

In retrospect, I would have been happy with a movie about Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi having cool, heroic adventures, and skipping the kid entirely.

frimble3 said:

In retrospect, I would have been happy with a movie about Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi having cool, heroic adventures, and skipping the kid entirely.

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obi-wan is getting his own movie.

When TPM opened in Seattle, a friend and I went to see it at the Cinerama downtown, which projected movies on a long, curved screen -- a unique moviegoing experience. It was a lark, neither she nor I was much into it, but we just wanted to do something interesting. I got itchy butt about 15 minutes in. During the marine sequence, where big fish get eaten by even bigger fish as they're chasing the sub of the good guys... I started checking my watch. Every ten minutes from then on, I checked my watch. "Is this OVER? Is this OVER?"

So many things wrong with it.

I have tried so so hard to erase this atrocity from my memory, and now you go an resurrect it. I need to call my therapist again.

caw