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  Matt
  
Willis
Star Wars Ep.1: The Phantom Menace
USA, 1999
[George Lucas]
Ewen McGregor, Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd, Ian McDiarmid
Action / Sci-Fi / Adventure
  
Easily the most awaited and hyped film of all time, The Phantom Menace became during it's long and highly succesful run at the box office, a byword for disappointment. There was much criticism directed towards it mostly from critics but also from many fans who disagreed or disliked various parts of the plot, casting etc. While I disagree with the statement that The Phantom Menace was a bad film I have to agree that there was much in it that could, or indeed should, have been better.

First off I'm going to lay into it before I end with the explanation that all in all it's not that bad a film, and indeed if it wasn't part of the
Star Wars franchise, and therefore subjected to intense scrutiny, I'm sure that it would have been considered an excellent sci-fi space flick.

In a nutshell
The Phantom Menace fails to adequately live up to the Holy Trilogy due to three major flaws:

1) George Lucas's direction: While the man is without a doubt a genius due to his creation of two of the greatest film series ever (
Star Wars and Indy Jones) his work as a director is sketchy at best. The brilliance of Star Wars lay in it's strength as a well crafted, highly original film with an excellent retro plot and superb action sequences. However, the acting, editing and so on were quite poor in comparison and these kinds of problems, rectified to a certain extent in the two sequels, were always to put a dampener on things.

2) The acting: With the exception of Ian McDiarmid and Liam Neeson the standard of acting was appalling! Natalie Portman is stilted and amateurish, Ewan McGregor appears to be struggling to keep his accent under control and Jake Lloyd sets the cause of good child actors back decades.

3) The Special Effects: Whilst excellently conceived and executed,
The Phantom Menace has an unnecessary and dangerous emphasis on SFX, with the most obvious case of it being a disadvantage Jar Jar Binks. Almost every location is blue screen CGI, and while this allows the designers imaginations to run riot it just seemed to me to be disadvantageous to the believability of the story line and the characters, a worrying amount of which are also CGI.

I think all of us 'Star Warsiars' (or whatever the hell you call the fans) were disappointed to a certain extent. Where was the dashing rogue? The space battles (the one at the end was crap)?The giant wedge shaped Star Destroyers? All the things that made
Star Wars special seemed absent to a greater or lesser degree, and while you could still feel the old magic from time to time it wasn't as spectacular as you hoped it would be.

All in all though the film is still a great bit of storytelling, Lucas's trademark, and where he fails in his execution he makes up for it with his ability to craft on to the Holy Trilogy a useful and question-answering opening episode. Now we can at last see how the Emperor rose in the senate, who Darth Vader was, and the true power and range of the Jedi Council. With the release of
Episode II and Episode III scheduled within the next four years I'm sure that the regard with which The Phantom Menace is held will rise as it is seen not as a single film but as the beginning of the greatest movie series of all time. And it only took 16 years to appear.
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