The Definitive Evisceration of The Phantom Menace *NSFW*

cowmix writes "When TPM came out ten years ago, its utter crappiness shocked me to the core and wounded a entire generation of geeks. My inner child had been abused and betrayed. I moped around, talking to no one, for almost two weeks. I couldn't bring myself to see #2 or #3, whatever they were called. Now, a decade later, comes Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review, the ultimate, seven-part, seventy minute analysis of this mother of all train wrecks. Not only does it nail how the film blows, but tells us why. Time, apparently, does not heal all wounds." Or, if you prefer all 7 parts embedded in one page, you can check out slashfilm's aggregation.

Comments

Re:Demo Reel

[MightyMartian]

The real problem is that George Lucas wrote it. As a generic sort of idea man, Lucas is great, but the more involved he is in the film, the worse it gets. The reason The Empire Strikes Back is probably the best of the bunch is because Lucas was at his most distant from the whole process.

Frankly, the prequels were a letdown. Episode III is clearly the best, but that's pretty relative. It still sucks a lot more than even the most dismal of the original trilogy; Episode VI, but compared to TPM and Attack of the Clones (I mean, that really is a retarded name), it's a brilliant film.

Lucas seems to have a hard time building any kind of dramatic tension. In place of a decent script and dialogue, he puts in ever more insanely huge spectacles. In Episode III, for instance, instead of a battle between Anakin and Obiwan around a lava crater (as was originally expounded in the book for Episode IV, Lucas, who seems incapable of writing the kind of chilling dialogue that would go on between a former master and pupil and friend, replaces it with a WHOLE MOLTEN PLANET. I mean, it's eyecandy to be sure, but every time I watch those scenes, I feel like I was robbed of what could have been an extraordinarily dramatic moment.

TPM lacks any kind of useful dramatic device. It holds the worst aspects of Lucas's filmmaking, with little or nothing of some of the better aspects of the franchise.