And now we
start with the prequels, Starwars the Phantom Menace. For those who are just
catching up Im currently doing a quick movie review of all the Starwars movies
before I go watch the Last Jedi. Im doing this by chronological order. Ive
already done the review of the original trilogy and some of you might want to
go check that out first.
photo from: imdb.com
Starwars the Phantom Menace is the first in the Starwars prequel
trilogy and stars Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman , Jake Lloyd, Ian McDiarmid, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Ahmed Best, Pernilla August, Brian Blessed, Ray Park, and Frank Oz. It was released back
in 1999 and was written and directed by George Lucas.
Lets get this off the bat, Phantom Menace isnt a bad film...it just isnt
a very good one either. Despite the advancement of cgi since Return of the Jedi
release in theaters the movie Phantom Menace appears to rely on it too much on
cgi that theres little to none practically effects being used and it shows. Too
many creatures and landscape although at times seems mysterious and majestic
easily looks dull.
The plot often times is just unnecessary and sometimes a bit forced.
Starwars at its core is about an epic space adventure and story of good versus
evil. Phantom menace is most of the time just about politics, backstabbing and
trade disputes. Sure we get the lightsaber battle and the Jedi rescuing the
weak and saving the day but its mostly against an army of robots that you dont
really feel the threat. Even the pod race scene seem to be just there so that
they can sell a Starwars racing game.
Speaking of unnecessary I feel a certain annoying gungan character was
not needed in this movie. I feel the story would be better if the Jedi just
found another way to this gungan city without that certain someone to guide
them. Much of the dialogue dont actually fit the movie that you can probably
take them out and the movie will still be good. In fact I found the PS1 game
that was based on this movie was more exciting at least it had more action.
Theres also young Anakin who is seriously badly cast for this film Im not even
going to bother enumerating why.
The only redeeming factor to this is probably the big fight at the end
of the movie which by then folks are probably begging for something to happen
after all the dialogue and political stuff. Im a fan of intrigue and
politically charged movies but this is Starwars. You dont watch Starwars to watch characters talk about
politics, you watch it for the grand adventure. But we did get Battle
The final
verdict for the Phantom menace is that its a big movie trying to expand the
grandness that is Starwars but in the end failing in a lot of aspects that made
Starwars great and enjoyable for a lot of its fans. The acting was bad, the cgi
feels too much and the story feels out of place. The only good part in this is probably the lightsaber fight and the new musical score. You can tell the movie is bad when its only good part is a lightsaber fight at the end and a movie theme song. This movie could seriously have gotten a much lower score for me. As much as I like Starwars
this is probably the weakest of all Starwars movies for me.
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