What is your favourite Star Wars movie?

I don't like Hadyn Christenson but to be fair, if you watch Mr. Plinkett's review of the Star Wars movies on Red Letter Media (do not watch with minors in earshot), he pretty much proves that the directing and writing is so bad that the greatest actor in the world would not have been able to make Anakin look good.

 

I disagree. I will not doubt that the prequels would have been improved by Jar-Jar's absence, but that's not what was wrong with the prequels.

See, Jar-Jar was something that didn't belong. But where George Lucas dropped the ball was not what he included, but what he didn't include. Phantom Menace lacked a protagonist.

Luke Skywalker was a scrappy underdog the audience would cheer for. He was a backwards country boy so he got to learn about the galaxy at the same time the new Star Wars audience was able to learn about the Star Wars galaxy. His actions drove the plot. There is no one like that in Phantom Menace.

It's not Qui-Gon, he's the stuff seasoned veteran. We can't identify with him

It's not Amidala, she was remote royalty. It is possible to have a high level politician be a relateable protagonist but you did not really see her difficult decisions or struggles. For most of the movie she was pretending to be someone else.

It's not Anakin. It is not a problem that he was a little kid (though I'd prefer a young adult or teenager), but it is a problem he didn't show up till halfway through the movie and he was dragged along by events rather than directing them


The only possible protagonist would have been Obi Wan. BUT he sat out of the whole Tatoonine bit. He spent the Naboo portion following Qui Gon's orders. His personality was difficult to separate from Qui-Gon but Obi Wan was the responsible one. He did not want to trapeze through a desert planet with a bumbling semi-aquatic cartoon rabbit. He did not want to take a vulnerable young woman into a city of thieves. He didn't want to drag a little kid to a warzone and he didn't want to bet their future on said kid's ability to win a dangerous race.

Now imagine Obi Wan was the wacky one, and why not give him emotions too. His stern surrogate father reigns in his excesses and we see the mentor-student bond. Then when Darth Maul kills Qui-Gon it means something. We can watch Obi Wan loss force him to mature fast. Obi Wan would be sympathetic and have interesting character growth. Then we could mirror the same social dynamic he had with Qui-Gon with Anakin.who Obi Wan picked up, not Qui Gon establishing their relationship which is what New Hope deal with.

But it didn't work out that way. Without a human character to relate to and cheer for, our brains felt like disappointed. We didn't know why because you can't process a lack of a protagonist until after the fact so our disappointed brains looked for a scape goat. In fact with all the mono-tone emotionless characters, the ONLY character in Phantom Menace that had emotions was Jar-Jar so he stood out like a sore thumb attracting our subconscious ire.



the rest of the flaws are details.

-Why would the Trade Federation restrict trade. A Trade Federation would either be selling their own goods or charging taxes on trade. Either way they are losing money on the blockade before you factor in the expense of maintaining a big space blockade. Do you know how hard it is to surround a giant sphere? To surround someone in two dimensions you need about ten times as many soldiers. You would need at least 100 times that to blockade a sphere.

-Naboo is the nicest, most fertile planet we have ever seen in Star Wars. Why would people start dying after being denied three days of space trade? Were the Trade Federation blocking medicinal shipments to fight space plague? I mean that would have been a far cooler story.

-Why land the droid army on the other side of the planet from the capital?

-What was the deal with the Senate needing proof of the invasion? They had a whole ship full of eye witnesses. Two witnesses were JEDI. They had recordings of their ship being fired on.

-Why did the Jedi dress like New Hope Obi Wan. Brown robes were practical wear on a desert planet andLuke Uncle who was not a Jedi wore something similar. If the brown robes constitute a Jedi uniform why would Obi Wan be wearing it while trying to stay incognito? George Lucas (GL) feared we are so thick we wouldn't recognize a younger Obi Wan if he wasn't dressed the same.

-Why make Anakin from Tattooine, was GL afraid we wouldn't recognize Star Wars if we didn't have a repeat setting. Obi Wan logically would not have hidden Luke on Darth Vader's home planet with his only living relatives and keeping his last name.

-There was no reason to bring in Threepio and Artoo. GL feared we woudn't realize it was a Star Wars movie without repeat characters. The only repeat character we really needed was Yoda. He is the only character who would have realistically been involved in events AND look the same. On another level, the two droids are plucky comic relief which was made redundant with Jar Jar. If GL didn't try to shoehorn them together I'm guessing Jar Jar would have gotten less fan spite.

-Phantom Menace was BEFORE the big war. Why not come back to Naboo with twenty Jedi? They were just sitting around. First Sith citing in millennium? He beat you both on Tattoonine. Well, okay, I'm sure you guys will do better on a separate encounter.

-The big multi-pronged attack with the Gungans versus the droid army, the big ship battle, and the attempt to catch the leaders. Poor planning. if you take the central control ship all the droids stop. Nute Gunray would have been captured super easy and the Gungans wouldn't even have to fight. Lots of people died for no reason.

-About three seconds after Artoo fixed the ships shields, they entered hyperspace. That means the shield wasn't really necessary, the engines were. the lasers kept hitting droids but missing the ship. Anyone else think that's weird. What about the fact that the blockade formed a ring like Saturn around the planet, they could have flown the ship around the blockade. Why did the skilled pilot evade the blockade by flying in a straight line?

-Why didn't Amidala (or any of the good guys) fly back to Tatoonine and buy Shmi Skywalkers freedom. It's the least they could do for Anakin. In fact, Naboo could probably afford to buy the freedom of every slave on Tatoonine.

-Making Anakin nine was a miscalculation on GL's part. Kids like to pretend to be Luke or Han Solo. A kid's imagination does not require them to identify with a child. This problem continued in subsequent movies. There was no reason to have a crew of kids clumsily holding training lightsabers. There was no reason to include a twelve year old Boba Fett.

-Jar Jar was endemic of the problem that GL tried to appeal to every demographic in a ham fisted way.

JJ was an attempt to appeal to 3-6 year olds but he annoyed everyone else. Samuel L. Jackson was an attempt to appeal to Black audience but his awesome acting style was muzzled with GL's insistence that every actor be a mono-tone emotionless robot. All the kids was an attempt to appeal to the 7-12 year old bracket but it seemed tacky and cheap to older Star Wars fans and cheaped both Darth Vader's and Boba Fett's mystique. Padme's exotic costume change was intended to distract female viewers who didn't care for action but it didn't hide her flat acting (not Natalie Portman's fault, other movies prove she CAN act, GL didn't let her). Padme's more revealing costumes were an attempt to provide fan service to older male viewers but got in the way of the exotic fashionistas who were distracted. The political plot was a bone thrown to the Star Wars expanded universe fans but the dry political debates turned off younger viewers.

By trying to tentpole the movie to every possible group, everyone left mildly disappointed.

-The pod race and the space battle had so much going on, our brains shut down. It just kept increasing in intensity. By the third prequel we were so inured to over the top action, the audience stopped actually fearing for the safety of the characters. I mean Empire Strikes Back had an exciting fight over the snow tying up the legs of the AT-ATs. Attack of the Clones had Anakin and Obi Wan jumping from flying car to flying car with no vehicle thousands of stories up dodging hundreds of tightly packed fast moving vehicles. After that I never took a vehicle or space fight seriously again.


Oh yeah, Jar Jar ruined the movie...

You can probably diagnose most of the above to no one wanting to correct George Lucas. You can see a lot of force smiles with the crew in behind the scenes footage. When he made episodes 4-6 he was establishing himself so he still had to take advice from those around him. It's also theorized that the divorce hurt his movies and that his exwife used to reign him in, but I doubt she was on the set much.

Since so few people correctly diagnosed what was really wrong with the prequels. I am not even going to bother watching Episode 7. When I was 10-16 there was no bigger Star Wars fan than me.

 

That reminded me of another thing I thought of when I first watched the movie. Anakin's pod was the only pod left intact after the race. In the gambling a racing pod was seen as decent collateral for a slave (though implied that Anakin was worth more). Qi Gon pretended it was his pod. After it was literally the only racing pod left, the price should have increased. They could have sold the pod and used that money to buy Shmi right then.

My point is the droids made Jar Jar more annoying by comparison. If you left them out that would reduce Jar Jar's annoyance by at least 10%. I thought Threepio was annoying in the sequels. He makes me wonder why they kept dragging him around. The comic interlude of Threepio's head winding up on a battle droid completely destroyed all tension and drama in the battle. That's a problem that episode 2 and 3 had that episode 1 managed to avoid (Lucas had to save that problem in reserve so each prequel could be worse than the last). Mixing lowest common denominator slapstick comedy into the most climatic battles removed all the drama.

See reply about each new one being worse than the last.