I apologize for saying the phantom menace was bad for half my life
So, growing up when I didn’t have a critical eye I enjoyed every movie I saw for the most part. I liked the phantom menace but found it boring in certain parts.
When I became a teenager I saw the massive hate for the prequels from the internet in the 2000s and 2010s and let it influence my opinion. I’m sure this is a common thing for zoomers. I now thought the phantom menace was bad and clearly George Lucas didn’t understand his own creation any longer.
Well just a couple hours ago I rewatched it for the first time in many years. I went in fully expecting to at best ironically enjoy the movie and at worst say it sucked. I’m pleasantly surprised to say it’s just a straight up good movie.
90% of the criticisms I expected to have… I just didn’t.
The acting is by no means ground breaking or award winning but not at all bad. It’s perfectly fine acting and I don’t get why people slam the acting. (I’m aware attack of the clones gets most of the hate in this regard but this is about episode 1.)
The plot is actually really easy to understand and follow, even for me, a tik tok addicted zoomer. I was able to understand the plot, it’s not hard to follow or messy. Hell it’s not even boring, this is very basic political drama, in addition to a simple plot about freeing anakin and how will he be trained.
The meme criticism I always hear is “there’s no main character.” I expected to at best wave the criticism away by saying it’s an ensemble. But… the criticism is just flatly untrue. It’s pretty clearly Qui Gonn. He has the most screen time, it’s who we follow from beginning to end. We are following the story of a man just trying to do his job and help a kid out. Sure it’s not a massive sweeping arc, but it’s grounded and real.
Also I’ll say it, child anakin is great. Child actors in general are rarely as good as their adult counterparts but honestly Anakin felt pretty real. His actor is so overhated and undeserving of criticism. He did a good job for any child actor and I honestly think he for the most part brought Anakin to life.
Jar jar. He’s there. I expected to hate him and find him annoying but honestly I don’t have too much of an opinion. He has some eye roll worthy moments I won’t lie, but he also had some oddly endearing ones. I’m pretty neutral on him and that is much better than what I thought I was going to say.
Also the lightsaber fights are really good, not nearly as over the top or illogical as I recall, I don’t have a problem with over the top fights either but phantom menace light saber fights felt relatively grounded and I never felt like anyone did anything that didn’t make sense in context. They are just really fast.
The movie is cheesy, but I like that. It’s full of heart and it’s just a good movie. A worthy addition to the canon and I’m sorry for blindly assuming otherwise.