Escape to the Movies: The Phantom Menace 13 Years Later

[TakerFoxx]

I'm...ambivalent about this review. While Bob does make many good points and I applaud him for not only standing up for the prequel but also giving excellent points as to why they're so hated despite their many good qualities (though I still hate them, but that's mostly thanks to reading the excellent novel adaptation of Revenge of the Sith which showed how the story might have turned out if put into the hands of the a competent writer), I couldn't help but shake one thought: aren't most of the arguments used by people to condemn the prequels at every turn also used by Bob to condemn the Bayformer movies at every turn?

 

[duchaked]

glad to know I haven't been on the path to the dark side
tho I suppose I did sort of let the whole "time to grow up and live my life" thing get in the way of my childhood Star Wars fandom
OH WELL

but I liked AotC more then Episode 1 sooo if you enjoy it then you win I suppose. don't like, forget it and move on. (helps with relationships and bad hot dogs too)

 

[Warforger]

So many 13 year olds on this website

and everyone here should read up on what a character arc is
there were no characters in this movie just zombies.

maybe I'm a "fanboy" but atleast I'm right

The original trilogy wasn't even that amazing to begin with, in fact what made it so popular was the special effects(it's even amazing seeing other movies like Tron being a joke in terms of today's special effects while Star Wars only shows a little age), the Phantom Menace wasn't that great in terms of special effects but it was fine and it added alot more to it giving more interesting fight scenes than plot driven stuff, Episode 2 had more of it and Episode 3 had a huge amount of it. It's partly why the animated Clone Wars were so entertaining and well better than the actual movies, because when I was kid I didn't give a shit about Padme or Anakin's struggle, I just cared about the action and that was all the CN Clone Wars was, just hours of straight action. It's why Star Wars video games were so successful and good, it's why the toys were so successful etc

 

[Juhn]

I've thought the Attack of the Clones was worse than the Phantom Menace since it first came out and I saw it in theatres. It still mystifies me that most people think TPM is the worst movie. TPM, while bad, at least had some good bits (Liam Neeson is good in anything even if Qui-Gon didn't really make any sense, Ewan MacGregor was pretty good as Obi-Wan even if he didn't do much, the three-way lightsaber fight was legitimately pretty cool, even if it didn't have any of the meaning of the OT fights because these two Jedi had no idea who this red horned guy WAS or have any baggage with him). Attack of the Clones, however, was built around one of the worst romance plots I've ever seen on screen, Anakin being a whiny useless asshole, much more focus on the tedious politics (which were a big point in the first film, but at least we were following people embroiled in the politics and them dealing with it rather than just the politics themselves), and a mystery plot with a pointless Boba Fett stand-in. And then, IIRC, Yoda hopping around like a gerbil on speed. The lightsaber fight at the end of TPM may have been pointless, but it at least looked nice, but Yoda fighting Dooku just looked ridiculous.

I do disagree with "the prequels' existence isn't hurting anybody", if only because the way it explained most of the things hinted at in the OT were incredibly stupid, but everything else written after that point has to treat the way the PT handled things as the highest form of canon.

 

[irishda]

Star Wars in general are pretty underwhelming films. They're really awesome when you're a kid because they're exactly like those saturday morning cartoons (unambiguously good or bad people, wooden acting, cool action, little complexity) drawn out to about an hour and a half/two hours. The third one and the fifth one are probably the best of them, and even those have pretty shitty acting.

It seems to be a strange phenomenon with sci-fi that so many movies or tv shows are placed on these pedestals as being so great, when they're really very poorly done from an outsider's perspective.

 

[Hiroshi Mishima]

I'll put it out there, I have a love/hate relationship with The Phantom Menace. When it first came out, I was in the middle of reading some awesome trilogy in the books (the Black Fleet Trilogy, I think?) and it talked about this girl Luke met who supposedly knew where his mother was or had gone.

...and then we get "Episode 1", which basically shatters anything that may have ever been written about his mother previously, and by the next book the author has had change the direction so now the girl was simply baiting him the whole time. It's entirely possible that this was intended from the start, and I don't mind that. But the notion that books being written suddenly had to be changed cause Lucas arbitrarily comes up with this hokey plot for Episode 1 and how little Anakin fell in love with some child-queen on a world we've never heard of..

Essentially, when I WATCHED the movie in theaters, I thought it was awesome and a lot of fun. Then I thought more about what I've seen, and the more I thought about it, the more upset and disgusted I felt. Except the notion of Medichlorians or whatever, I called that as bullshit the moment they brought it up. Lucas essentially diluted the wonderful mysticism surrounding the Force with Science and turned Anakan's mother into the Virgin Mary.

I'll be frank, I actually liked the characters of Padme, Quai-Gon, and even Jar-Jar. Heck, I really enjoyed a lot of the movie, especially the fights and the "Duel of Fates" track or whatever during the climax of the film. But as has been said, there's so much that the movie did wrong, or the script did wrong, or when the actors seemed to be phoning it it.

Confused Matthew said it best with "they tried to convince us that Anakin was all these things, but he never came off as any one of them" or something to that effect. If I hated anyone in the first movie, it was probably the kid.. and Darth Maul, cause wtf was up with his design? Hell, I just watch CM's Prequel reviews and laugh my ass off when I'm feeling depressed over it all.


Was the Phantom Menace as bad as everyone thought it was? I think it was the strongest of the three prequels, but it set in motion a lot of the crap we'd have to swallow to enjoy the later films. It retconned the hell out of the original trilogy which many, including myself, grew up on and greatly enjoyed. It replaced all the awesome puppetry and animatronics from the previous films with crappy CGI, removing a lot of the life and presence various characters had. It was certainly the least convincing Yoda I'd ever seen, and while I certainly laughed at the Droids I never got the feeling they were actually there in the room with everyone.

That said, Phantom Menace also gave us a few good things. I hated the Pod-Racing sequence in the movie, but I really loved playing the N64 game for some reason. Also, thanks to it we'd eventually get those awesome Genndy Tartokovsky shorts. Still, I generally like to think that the prequel films didn't really happen. It also slowly killed off my desire to read the novels, too.


EDIT: Looking at some other responses, I should point out that I do, actually, think a lot of films and shows from the 70's and 80's were better than what we have today. Maybe that's cause I grew up with a lot of the stuff, or maybe it's due to my disliking of the hip-hop genre (and how it slowly permeated into a lot of 90's and 2000's films), or perhaps I don't care so much for CGI cause I feel it lacks the presence of someone in a suit, puppetry, and animatronics. Jurassic Park has, in my opinion, the best mixing of CGI with actual effects. If TPM had been closer to that insofar as how they handled their special effects, I think the prequel films might've had a better presence and believability to them.

But that's just me.

 

[hallow eyes]

What? what if we where young enough to be the target audience and still hated the movie. look I didn't grow up with star wars or anything but I did watch them as a kid, in fact in preparation for the phantom menace coming out I watched the original trilogy for the first time and I really enjoyed them. But when I saw episode 1 I though there had been some mistake. The Dialogue was so awful and the story so frustrating in all three of the prequels that I couldn't bring myself to enjoy them and I was a stupid little kid. The special effects I felt fell really short compared to the originals, there was no believability in them. I don't hate them as Star wars movies but I feel like I have every right to hate them as movies.

 

[Orion Magus]

Not sure what you mean that a new star wars movie couldn?t come out that would bring me back the thrill of the original series. The knights of the old republic games (1, 2, and the mmo) were all amazing from a story perspective. Loved that they got me excited about star wars again. If a movie had been made about any of these games that would rock my socks off.

Episode 4-6 are just extremely meh, each more meh than the last. Yea on their own merits they aren?t terrible just sort of so so si-fi stuff. The thing is they aren?t on their own, they are star wars. That list of other so so movies Bob mentioned are also on my hate list. In particular star trek and Eragon. Again taken on their own merits they are ok movies, heck I even like the star trek movie when I can forget that it is supposed to be star trek.

Just think on that for a minute. I liked the space action movie when I could forget the theme, story, and major IP it is supposed to be representing? Why even tie it into the star trek franchise then, that?s just fail in my book.

Yet for all my nerd rage phantom menace is still coming out in 3d. Oh well, I?ll vote with my dollar and not go see it. At this point that?s all I can really do. Well? that and give in to the dark side.

 

[Tim Chuma]

Meh, I even ended up with the Phantom Menance on VHS. I haven't re-watched any of them that much.

I did enjoy the original Clone Wars cartoon series so something good did come out of it.

Also I booked a ticket for this show (NSFW)
http://vimeo.com/25947106

Darth Vader makes me feel funny.

 

[FFHAuthor]

The Phantom Menace 13 Years Later

The Phantom Menace isn't nearly as bad as you think it is.

Watch Video

I'm really glad you made this video, and I'll tell you why. The main point of your video seems to be that you should take this movie on its own merits, rather than holding it up to the other movies for comparison because it was never going to live up to our starry-eyed memories or our expectations, and trying to say it's a bad movie because of that is unfair. Exactly the same thing happened when Duke Nukem Forever finally came out: after over a decade of waiting, everyone looked at it expecting it to be the best game ever, and collectively said "...is that it?"

The problem is that the advice you give to us in this video is exactly the advice that you need to start taking yourself. You hold on far too strongly to source material.

Spoiler: For starters, take a look at your review of Star Trek. I spoilered it to avoid taking up space for those who don't want to read about Star Trek in this thread.

For starters, take a look at your review of Star Trek. You went on and on about how it did the fans a disservice by discarding all source material and attempting to change things in a fundamental way, but if you take your own advice and ignore the pre-existing Star Trek Universe, the reboot is an absolutely fantastic movie: the script is solid, it's visually exciting, it has a unique style, the cinematography is great, the characters are interesting and are all played well by their actors (including Karl Urban practically putting on DeForest Kelly as a suit when he says "Unbelievable"), the score is great... everything about this movie screams "I am a fantastic movie that is well made." But because it doesn't live up to your expectations of what a Star Trek movie should be, you say it was insulting.

Let's look at that, shall we? What are the things they could have done with this movie? They couldn't bring back Shatner, because his Kirk is dead and all the actors involved are way too old to to put those particular shoes on again. The Next Gen movies all ran their course, with Nemesis representing a complete breakdown in scriptwriting and cinematic integrity, so they can't bring that crew back. And after the show Enterprise was a colossal failure as anything remotely representing the Star Trek Universe - especially the slap in the face that was the unnecessary series finale - if they'd tried to stick Archer behind the helm there wouldn't have been an audience. And they certainly couldn't introduce a new crew for, say, the Enterprise E, because you can't do that in the Star Trek franchise without having a series first.

All of that means that the only way they could have made a new Star Trek movie and had it be accepted by the fans is to do what they did: use an in-canon event to reset the Universe in a fundamental way, and show how that event changed the development of the characters in the original Star Trek series. So not only was your review of that movie unfair because it was holding up the new movie to the old ones for comparison, it was also unfair because it criticized the movie for being the only thing it could be and still be accepted by the audience.

It's not just that though: movies based on comic books tend to have a hard time staying loyal to canon because some things just don't translate well from a print media to an actively visual media. Same with books - especially The Road. And even when updating from one movie to another, what literally made audiences jump out of their seats and cheer 20 years ago usually doesn't have any effect on them any more at all, because society has changed, and movies have to keep up with it in order to stay relevant.

Just look at the original House on Haunted Hill - in its day, it was terrifying, but today it's comical. The 1999 Geoffrey Rush remake bore almost no resemblance to the original at all, but for the average movie-goer the year it came out, it was a much better movie (having Famke Janssen and Ali Larter didn't hurt things either). Another remake in today's society would have to be drastically different again in order to keep up with the times. Would that make it a bad "House on Haunted Hill" movie? Absolutely not. Because it doesn't matter whether it holds to the source material, all that matters is that it stands tall on its own two feet.

You are absolutely right that Phantom Menace has to be taken on its own merits. But you also need to start applying those same standards to other movies as you review them.

If I could give you an internet medal for that post, I would, you just managed to summarize every one of my reservations about Movie Bob's reviews and commentary perfectly. All I can say is I salute you sir, well said.

 

[Draconalis]

I stumbled upon my reply

Also I booked a ticket for this show (NSFW)
http://vimeo.com/25947106

More than anything... I'm impressed with "Bobo Fetts" athletic prowess...

 

[jpoon]

Bleh, fuck no, Episode I is by far the worst of ALL the Star Wars movies to me. Even considering how bad Episode II was (and it was shit) Episode I just blew dirty donkey balls.

Give me any of the old ones, I could care which, I would happily watch any of the originals opposed to any of the new turds.

 

[Jyggalag]

Had to type this out, here's a link. (100 people probably did this before me, but oh well)

http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/star-wars-episode-1-the-phantom-menace/

 

[Mcupobob]

I think starwars just sucks in general and was never really a fan, so I wasn't really crushed by the phantom Menace as some people apparently were.

One thing that has shocked me though is that its been 13 years since that movie came out? I'm starting to feel old all of the sudden.

 

[Fappy]

Right, well, I guess we can wait for this exact same point to be rehashed in The Big Picture next week, then, I'm guessing the backlash in this thread will be enough for Bob to have to try to clarify himself, again, in his other show.

Shame, because during this movie review I was hoping for an actual, y'know, review. Yes, we've all seen the movie but that just means you don't have to put up any spoiler warnings, shouldn't you kind of list what's good and bad about this movie as a stand-alone piece instead of glossing over those point briefly just to do what you could've done in The Big Picture. I'm not complaining, I get what you mean by this, but surely this review could've covered something else. Why waste it on something that you have more than ample room to say in your other show?

That's my two-cents on the matter, anyway, I'm just kind of confused as to what this is doing here and not in The Big Picture or in an article where it obviously belongs.

I agree completely. Most people watch these reviews because they want a current film reviewed by a nerdy and knowledgeable critic. If they want to hear/read Bob's opinions on Star Wars fanboys they know where to look. I was expecting a review. Not a lecture.

 

[AssOnFire]

Yeah man, you're right. Phantom Menace isn't nearly as bad as the Star Wars Special Edition.

 

[TomLikesGuitar]

You should call this show The Devil's Advocate or something... jeez.

Are you even serious with that ridiculous over-analysis of the fans' respective psyches? To even allude to the idea that the fans were disappointed because they were avoiding adulthood is really rude and honestly, immature even. It's almost the same as using the fail-safe "Grow up, kid." when arguing. It's just a cheap baseless insinuation that only hurts your argument.

Also, you contradict yourself. You say that Attack of the Clones is altered to pander to the fans of the original movies (which it did a horrible job of), but then you say that complaining didn't change Lucas' mind.

I personally think the reason Episode III wasn't horrible is because of fan feedback. That movie recaptured a lot of the intensity and passion that the originals had and that the first two episodes lacked immensely.

I also personally think that the fact that you suddenly decide to switch sides and start insulting the side you were JUST ON discredits you as a journalist, and shows that you just want to argue about something.

Good day, sir.