Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Review

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Review

Next month, the first Star Wars movie in seven years or 2,346 days, The Mandalorian & Grogu drops in theaters. That means I’m reviewing all of the Star Wars leading up to the film. Today I’m reviewing and talking about The Phantom Menace. Let’s get started!

The Good

The thing that stood out to me the most about this film is that it actually has a pretty nice three act structure to it. Where the first act of the film establishes the conflict, the Sith and Darth Maul and our heroes learning about it. The second act has the rising conflict with the stakes rising with Darth Maul getting close to our heroes, the negotiations failing leading in the third act where it’s all out war on multiple different fronts. I don’t wanna spoil my review too much but The Phantom Menace isn’t one of the stronger films. What makes that so frustrating is there’s a lot of good ideas with a good plot structure filled with an interesting plot for a Star Wars movie. George Lucas has a lot of faults as a director (we’ll talk about that later) but I think he’s good with the story and structure. There’s things in this movie that I would 100% change and remove, but he had a lot of good ideas that fit nicely into the three act structure. When you’re watching this movie you can see how there’s a good movie covered by all of this nonsense and junk that shouldn’t be in a Star Wars movie. 

From there one of the things that I think stands out about this movie and the prequels as a whole is they 100% feel like George Lucas’ vision. Now was his vision 100% great and does it work? Not really, there’s a lot of faults. But with every movie it feels like Lucas knew the story he wanted to tell and was able to tell it. In a lot of ways, I think the prequels are the most thought through Star Wars trilogy that we have. The original trilogy has a lot of ideas established in A New Hope that are paid off in Return of the Jedi. But there’s also a lot in there that feels like Lucas coming up with it on the fly. Famously, the "I am your father” plot twist wasn’t in the original script for Empire Strikes Back. That was a last minute decision that few people knew about until the premiere. The reveal in Return of the Jedi of Luke and Leia being siblings wasn’t planned, especially because Luke and Leia kissed in the previous film. Then of course in the sequels every film actively goes against what’s established in the previous film. The Last Jedi feels like the black sheep of the sequels because it does not progress the plot established in The Force Awakens that continues in The Rise of Skywalker. When you watch this movie and this trilogy it feels like George Lucas. It doesn't feel micromanaged by a committee that was reacting to negative reviews or bad decisions. Or better or for worse, George Lucas was given 100% creative control in this movie. Watching a big blockbuster like this in modern times is very refreshing because so many of them today feel so generic and like corporate products. For all of the faults of this film and its sequels, it feels like one vision and I like that. 

One of the things I sort of forgot about watching this movie was just how stacked the cast was for this movie. Of course our three main leads are Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, and Natalie Portman. All three of them have gone on to have great careers in their own right. All of them went into this film with various levels of success. Neeson is cast as the Jedi master, the one that’s teaching both Obi-Wan and Anakin throughout the film. It’s awesome to see Liam Neeson with a lightsaber battling bad guys in the film. He already did Schindler’s List, so he was this established actor. This was the film that propelled Ewan McGregor to the A-list. Everybody has known who Ewan McGregor is since Phantom Menace came out. His portrayal of Obi-Wan is on the Mount Rushmore of Star Wars casting. People fault the prequels and a lot of people don’t like them, but nobody blames him. Everybody loves him in the role no matter the quality of the project he’s in. Portman wasn’t fully established but she’d been in high profile films like Leon: The Professional and Heat, but she got Star Wars and now everybody knows who she is. All of them do a good job in their roles because they’re very talented people. I forgot that side roles are played by Kiera Knightly and Terrance Stamp. All around, it’s a stacked cast filled with solid actors. 

Finally, John Williams delivers another fantastic score here. The main one people talk about is of course “Duel of the Fates” which is fantastic and one of the best melodies from Star Wars. That whole final battle is filled with this great and epic music that swells the emotions. You feel this epicness oozing from the final battle because the music is so epic and fits this awesome lightsaber battle so well. But all throughout the film you get these great melodies that feel like classic Star Wars and provide a great soundtrack in a not so great film. As I was watching the movie I realized that most of the music was put in the LEGO Star Wars video games which brought back all sorts of nostalgia for me. 

The Bad

This film is famous for having a lot of problems when it comes to the story and the characters. We’ll talk about the characters later on but first let’s talk about the story and the weird pacing. The film’s pacing drags the whole film down. The film starts off really fast paced with a lot of action and seeing Qui Qon and Obi-Wan destroy droids. Then we have this weird subplot with Jar Jar Binks and his creatures that feels so out of place with the rest of the film. The film goes from this fast paced sci-fi action to this slap stick comedy with Jar Jar. The film picks back up again and then we get a lot of scenes on Tatooine of senate negotiations and them trying to figure out how to win money. And then there’s long scenes of Qui Qon convincing people that Anakin is the closed one. Throughout the middle act of the film it keeps on going up and down with the entertainment, but the film is bookended with really exciting action that’s some of the best the film has to offer. So George Lucas should’ve found a way to add more action in the middle act of the film. They don’t need to be big action scenes but things throughout the film that keep up the entertainment value and cut them in between the negotiations and the slower moments of the film. 

To make the pacing better and shorten the film, the immediate thing to cut is Jar Jar Binks and the Gungans. I think these are two of the biggest mistakes that were made by George Lucas. Jar Jar Binks feels like something that was made and designed to sell toys. When brainstorming this film he wanted to sell more tickets and get the merchandise sales up. So they created Jar Jar Binks and the Gungans in hopes that kids would love it and they do. But once you get older, the more you realize that he’s just annoying. It’s not just that their bad and annoying character, it's that he’s taking screentime away from more interesting characters, specifically Darth Maul. I know that Star Wars: The Clone Wars brought back Maul and made him more interesting but he should’ve been more interesting in this movie. He only has 8 minutes of screentime and it should be at least double that. Jar Jar’s inclusion in general is just terrible and drags the whole movie down. I’m glad that George Lucas didn’t have Jar Jar as much to do in the next films. 

Another big issue here is how they treat and handle Anakin in this film. It’s sort of from all different angles in which I don’t think he works in this film. First up, I think the decision in making Anakin a child was a mistake. Where he’s not able to properly bond with Obi-Wan and especially Padame, the two dynamics that are the most important. By making Anakin closer to Padame’s age you can build that relationship between the two of them. Making Anakin so young in this movie means that this film feels pointless to Anakin’s growth in the prequels. Where famously there’s something called the Machete Order that provides a watch through of all of the Star Wars movies but, but it skips over The Phantom Menace. You watch the movie and it totally makes sense as to why you’d skip it. Nothing in this movie provides any content for Anakin’s growth into Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. By making him young it means that he can’t really be a hero. Qui-Qon is telling both the audience and the other characters that he’s the chosen one but we aren’t shown it. They try to give him some moments in the third act that help with that. But the way it’s done it comes across as a child doing all of this by mistakes. He’s accidentally doing all of this because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Second, the performance by Jake Lloyd isn’t very good. I hate to dunk on child performances, it’s cool that he was starring in a Star Wars movie at a young age. But his performance feels so out of place with the rest of the movie and he doesn’t bring the energy that Anakin Skywalker should have. All of these mistakes could easily have been fixed if Anakin was 10 years old. But for whatever reason George Lucas made him a kid. Why? I don’t know but it’s weird. 

Finally, the over abundance of CGI in this film can be pretty distracting. You watch interviews with Ewan McGregor and he talks about how there was mostly CGI and as the films went on there were less and less sets and more and more CGI. Despite this movie coming out the same year as The Matrix and James Cameron and Steven Spielberg perfecting CGI years earlier with T2 and Jurassic Park, George Lucas wasn’t able to do anything special with this film. The third act of the film when you have the fight the Gungans and the droids look terrible. I get that it’s a bunch of CGI characters, but the environment doesn’t need to look so fake. Lucas should’ve introduced the Clones into this movie and have the droids vs Clones happen in this movie. That way you can at least have some real people on a set battling whatever would be in place of the droids. 

Final Thoughts: Overall, The Phantom Menace is probably the most frustrating film on this list. There’s so much potential for this movie to be great, because it has a lot of good ideas, but the execution of the ideas aren’t great. What’s most frustrating about this movie’s mistakes is that they’re very fixable. You don’t need to come up with an entirely new movie or a plot. You can take the basic set up and sequences in here and reconstruct them to make a great Star Wars film. It’s interesting that one of the most anticipated movies of all time is also one of the most frustrating and disappointing blockbusters of all time. 

The Score: 7.8/10 (C+)