I have seen Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace several times in the past month.
I’ve listened to Griffin & David’s phantom podcast, I’ve watched the RedLetterMedia Mr. Plinkett reviews, I’ve listened to the Chapo commentary track. I’ve heard every criticism of the film said in many different ways by many different people, and I still can’t stop watching Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace.
I recently watched a staged live reading of the script with esteemed actors such as Tony Hale and Haley Joel Osment (highly recommend this one btw)
Surely by now I should be tired of everything to do with Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, but no. Every time I watch the film I’m every bit in awe as I was when I watched it in theaters at the age of 6.
Every choice confounds me, every scene surprises me anew with its sheer ineptitude, every frame oozes incompetence. I should know the film by heart, but I never have any idea what’s coming next, it’s as if my memory is erased every time a new terrible scene begins.
As a species we have just barely begun to scratch the surface of what’s wrong with this movie. I don’t think we will ever come close to fully unpacking what George Lucas has done here.
Please, Lord forgive me for what I’m about to do, which is press “play” on Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. This is the last time, I promise. I just need to get this out of my system and then I’ll be done forever. I can stop anytime…
oh god, oh fuck I’ve had the film playing on a loop for the past 48 hours. I can’t tear my eyes away, I haven’t eaten or slept, all I can do is watch Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, wallowing in my own filth until I inevitably die of exhaustion like in Infinite Jest. These are the last words I will ever hear:
Mesa caused mabbe one, two-y lettle bitty axadentes, huh? Yud-say boom da gassar, den crashin der boss’s heyblibber, den banished
— Jar Jar Binks
wait no, I’ve seen the light, I know how to break free, how to escape this endless nightmare. I’m going to watch Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones
i was like 19 when that came out and i worked in a theater for its summer run. i used to pop in the back a couple of times each shift for the darth maul fight scene, starting with the “we’ll handle this / we’ll take the long way” as the brass section pops off the Duel of the Fates, all the way up to the part where obi-wan pulls himself up and over to slice 'em in half.
i have watched that fight sequence literally hundreds of times. ray park crushed that very minimal role. i used to drive star wars dorks nuts by claiming that darth maul was more of a badass than vader and “could definitely kick his ass”. i would imitate vaders oafish lumbering movements and then pantomime mauls kicky kicks and spinning saber moves with my own mouth-formed sound effects.
fun fact: obi-wan and darth maul were both played by scots! they dubbed over ray park with some englishman, because too much scots-english overwhelmed test audiences with sexual desire.
Okay I will say this much about episode 1, that fight choreography was pretty good and I do have some nostalgia over the first movie and star wars galaxies the mmorpg taking place on naboo. Outside of that, idk I guess it had some good sets back before Lucas found out it was cheaper and easier to do everything in post with a green screen.
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also it was shot on film and looks a million times better than episode ii and iii will ever look
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This post is mostly a joke, but in all seriousness I’ve decided that Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace is an asbolute masterpiece.
(but not for the reasons why some racist dorks on Reddit think it is)
This film is a slap in the face to everyone who has ever enjoyed a Star Wars film, and by god do they deserve it. George knows exactly what he’s doing here. He has nothing but contempt for the hogs who have made him his fortune, and I find that genuinely admirable. Every shot of this film is Lucas saying:
"This is what you want, you fucking piggies? Here you go, fuckface. You’re gonna take your slop and you’re gonna hate every second of it, but you’re still gonna shovel that shit down every time, and you’re gonna pay me for it.
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace is George Lucas’ treatise on everything that’s wrong with the Hollywood system. It’s a man reckoning with the evil he has wrought on the world. It’s the most deeply cynical film of all time.
Kind of sucks these movies got rehabilitated through the memes and Disney fucking up early on in it’s reboot of the franchise that now SW dorks see the prequels as good.
what’s truly ridiculous is that they weren’t even that mad about The Force Awakens. the nerd-rage didn’t fully kick in until The Last Jedi, when someone finally tried to do something interesting in one of these fucking movies. I don’t think that movie is good per se but it probably could have been if they just let Rian Johnson go full freak mode and do whatever he felt like
but Rian Johnson RUINED my childhood!!!1. no you fucking nerd, George Lucas did that, on purpose and you thanked him for it. selling the franchise to Disney was all part of his master plan to piss off the most insufferable media-brained dorks on the planet and he’s laughing all the way to the bank
Luke, Kylo and Rey were the best part of the film. The nerd rage over Luke’s portrayal is
Luke is such a non-character in the original trilogy, he’s really just an avatar for the male nerd audience to project themselves onto, so they couldn’t handle Rian Johnson giving him any moral ambiguity or depth
the movie also came out around the start of MeToo and I think the response was basically “oh, so now we gotta cancel Luke Skywalker too?”
Nerd Mad Mad Mad at Rian Johnson: “Luke would never give up and fuck off to a planet to live like a hermit, a Jedi would never do that! Also, I’ve never heard of trauma!”
Force Ghost Obi-wan and Yoda: [kick at the dirt, look uncomfortable, avoid eye contact]
George Lucas: Meh.
I hate the rehabilitation bullshit. If you want to enjoy them ironically or rewatch the handful of decent action sequences then that’s fine, but the whole “actually, the sequels weren’t as bad as people said” thing is infuriating. They aren’t good. They’re bad. They were bad when they came out, and they’re still bad now. They haven’t “aged well” or “found a place in the current media landscape” or whatever. They suck, we spent two decades analyzing precisely how and why they suck, and the issue is closed.
I don’t know if this comment is serious or not, I don’t realy think George was that competent and able to “metagame” like that. He probably just wanted to appeal to kids because he knew the OG fans were too old and likely poor and if SW is to survive in the long term it would need a bigger multimedia platform and a much younger audience. He just failed for many reasons.
But in case this is serious, this also isn’t entirely wrong, perhaps it is true because sadly this is exactly the same attitude from CBS wrt Star Trek. It is known at every opportunity that despite JJ/Kurtzman paying modest lipservice to the old Trek the fact is the writing room and producers all absolutely hate and loathed old Trek and the old fans.
They constantly pat themselves on the back for being the science show, the rainbow inclusiveness hope BS show etc. All while completely ignoring that old Trek did that 30-50 years ago and they demand you praise them for it. “Oh no people don’t like nuTrek? Must be MAGA chuds!”. Basicaly r/startrek is how the producers see themselves.
So yeah, maybe George did have that sort of contempt for old fans, I don’t doubt it.
Yeah it’s probably not actually true, but I’ve convinced myself it is because I can’t cope with the fact that a man would make some of those choices thinking he was making a good movie, my brain won’t accept it
especially when you consider the special editions, it’s hard to believe that man is motivated by anything other than spite
I would love to be a fly on the wall during the conversations Dave Filloni and George Lucas had during the production of the Clone Wars animated show. Filloni being a die hard fanboy of the series and Lucas just being kinda tired of the whole thing, making suggestions to put weird ass things in for shits and giggles.
making suggestions to put weird ass things in for shits and giggles.
In fairness to Lucas, that habit predated his apathy.
Auteur theory, but it’s all the people around the auteur reigning in the extraordinarily stupid ideas (Marcia Lucas in this case) that make the great media.
It was much the same with Star Trek. When Gene Roddenberry stayed in his producer lane in TOS and don’t have the personal fame and influence that came later, he was able to gather an amazing group of people to make some great high-concept sci-fi. There’s a reason that the venn diagram of “worst TOS episodes” and “Gene Roddenberry decided to try writing” is almost a circle.
But his personal fame grew, he had less and less people around him to rein in his worst ideas, and the result was TNG seasons 1 and 2. It wasn’t until he was too ill to micromanage that TNG found its feet instead of being TOS with find-and-replace’d names in the scripts.
Nah attack of the clones is funnier (if you skip “romance” scenes). The plot, the wipe outs, the actors floating through green screens
Attack of the Clones is absolutely my favorite of the prequels, it’s objectively the worst but that’s what makes it the best. it always kills me how Natalie Portman’s skintight outfit gets torn just to reveal her perfect abs
the Geonosis execution scene is unironically good though and you gotta love all the yonic symbols in that arena
yeah the romance between Anakin and Padme is hard to watch but it’s also a brilliant metaphor for how easily liberal democracy is courted by fascism
lol I just saw that pop up in my recommendations after making this post sigh
people will say 12 hours is way too long to spend talking about The Phantom Menace but they are wrong. you could spend 12 hours on each frame of the film and still not run out of things to criticize
Straight into my veins
I was that age when a new hope was first released in theaters and for the rest of my life I would watch that movie any chance I could. It was the greatest theatrical joy I could experience pretty far into adulthood for me.
When the phantom menace was released my friends and I couldn’t wait to see it… And we didn’t really care for it that much and some of my friends thought it was absolutely terrible. But that’s because it wasn’t made for “us” and our age group. It was made for you and your’s. Lucas new exactly what he wanted to do with episode one and he did it.
You should love that movie as much as you want and never apologize for it. Watch it every chance you get so you can remember what that six year old felt the first time they saw it.
I want to sincerely love the movie but it’s honestly just really boring lol, I find it impossible to care about a single thing the characters are saying and I kinda zone out every time. The battle of Naboo sucks too, who wants to see a bunch of frogs fight a bunch of droids? It’s a mess. At this point I just enjoy breaking down what went wrong with all the terrible choices Lucas made. And to be clear I’m not hate-watching it or enjoying it “ironically”, I find it genuinely fascinating from a filmmaking perspective, to study how not to make a movie.
I do unashamedly enjoy Attack of the Clones though, even though it has all the same problems as the first one, at least the action scenes are fun in that one, and Natalie Portman wears some pretty dresses. I’m certainly not gonna go around claiming it’s a good movie though.
staged live reading of the script with esteemed actors such as Tony Hale and Haley Joel Osment
holy shit dawg this is so good
yeah it’s great, every single performance is better than those in the actual film, across the board. and half of these actors have clearly never seen a Star Wars movie
I love how Qui-Gon (Tony Hale) and Obi-Wan (Vic Michaelis) start out playing it completely straight and just get progressively sillier as the script goes on
VIC IS IN IT?!? fuck yeah, I know what I’m watching tomorrow night
literally same thought, i see vehicular i click
a dogshit movie
In the words of Jar Jar Binks, “Dissen berry berry bad. Oh! Ick icky goo!”
