Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Star Wars is a brand that everyone in the United States have at least heard about, or even made it a religious practice, and know about how much success it has made. Although I bet that if you asked every fan of the Star Wars franchise what the worst movie in the series was, their response would be the beginning of the prequels, Star Wars: Episode I-The Phantom Menace. I would also bet that every fan of the franchise that has seen The Phantom Menace could easily give you multiple reasons on why the movie was flat out awful, and so will I. The title of the movie isn’t a good one and makes absolutely no sense at all. It wasn’t even originally supposed to be named The Phantom Menace, but was originally called The Disturbance in the Force, which
is only slightly better of a title. At least with the other movies the tile made sense, even with the other prequels. The plot of the movie is extremely boring. The Trade Federation (I know, terrifying name right?) has blocked the trade routes to the planet of Naboo and is attempting to take over the peaceful Planet. The Trade Federation doesn’t even have a good reason to take over the planet, they just wanted to for fun. In the attack, the queen of the planet escapes by dressing as one of her bodyguards, and with a small crew consisting of two Jedi’s and a few ship hands, are able to steal a ship from a hangar that has hundreds of enemy droids in it, escapes to space and just cruises on by past a fleet of the Trade Federation’s ships. Unless the director of the movie is trying to pull a Jedi mind trick on the audience, there’s no way to get past the ridiculousness of what events have occurred. The whole sequence of events is just lethargic and idiotic. The ship did at least get damaged some while trying to escape, but even that doesn’t make sense. The ship’s light speed drive was too damaged to work, which doesn’t sound too ridiculous until you realize that the light speed drive is inside the ship. So the movie is trying to get us to believe that the outside of the ship, from the wings to the engines and no hull breaches, is completely fine, but the light speed drive, even though it’s inside the ship , is so irreparably damaged that they are forced to land on a nearby desert planet to find it? I’m not buying it George Lucas, not one bit. The next part of the story, we come to meet a young Anakin Skywalker.
Every fan of the series knows already that eventually this small, polite boy will become the infamous Darth Vader. To be completely honest, if I was made out to be the hero of such an awful movie like The Phantom Menace, I would want to go to the dark side too. We also see in the movie Qui-Gon Jinn perform what looks remarkably like a blood sugar test that diabetics take only to find that he has something called “midi-chlorians.” The whole concept of midi-chlorians is in my opinion, a failed attempt from George Lucas at trying to integrate something new in the series. I mean seriously, you’re trying to tell me the force isn’t just something supernatural, but something determined biologically? It’s an illogical concept that should have never been
introduced. The worst part of the movie hands down was the overuse of CGI, or computer generated imagery.
It took away from the realistic feel that the sequels had and felt less genuine. The creators of the movie didn’t even attempt at making costumes and using great make up skills like the original movies. The whole movie just felt faked and as if there wasn’t any heart and soul put into the movie. It disconnected the audience from the atmosphere of the movie and just made it awkward. All in all, while The Phantom Menace was terrible in many different ways, there were still some highlights. The concept of Darth Maul was great and he had an awesome looking light saber. The duel at the end of the movie is one of the best of the franchise, for it seemed like the only part of the movie George Lucas wanted to look good. The movie also set up success for the next two prequels; for it let fans think that it can’t get any worse than
this.