Yes.

The teaser trailer was okay.

I've only seen it once, so I can recall all that much.

I've seen it three times. It was a decent kid's movie, but that whole podrace sequence went on for much too long, and bogged down the whole movie.

No.

No.

I had this inexplicable urge to watch the prequels again for the first time since they came out in theaters. I made it about half an hour into The Phantom Menace before giving up.

I hated it, and it made me hate the whole Star Wars universe.

One of the Pod-Racer announcers' two heads referenced Wayne's World (a movie that would not come for a long long time in a galaxy far far away) by saying "Exsqueeze me!"

Why are we even having this conversation?

It had McGreggor, Jackson, and Blessed in it... how could it possibly suck?



Oh, yeah, nevermind.

It's high praise indeed when Lego Star Wars managed to make the plot of The Phantom Menace kind of fun.

I reasoned that it wasn't too bad, since I was six when I saw the first Star Wars movie, which I fell in love with. If I'd been six when I'd seen TPM, I'd have loved it for sure.

The only thing (apart from the podrace) that I really disliked was the idea of some kind of genetic reason for Jedi being Jedi. That seemed like a bad idea to me. The idea of certain people who had "the force with them" was explanation enough for me - I didn't want nitty-gritty details. Especially not ones that kind of had this weird stink of eugenics about them or something.

worse, than you can possibly imagine

Can we not bring up this movie? I'm trying to deny that I ever watched it.

I loved Episode I. It still baffles me how, a dozen years later, I now seem to be the only person on the planet who did--makes me wonder if the backlash isn't just trendy internet nihilism. Some movies just seem to invite wanna-be Roger Eberts to post snarky online reviews--Burton's "Planet Of The Apes," "The Godfather Part III"--by conveniently having another, more popular movie for said unoriginal reviewer to repeatedly invoke. But I'm old enough to remember how, before "Phantom Menace," "Return Of The Jedi" was the Star Wars film that Star Wars fans loved to bash.

I never bashed Jedi. Always liked it.

The only redeeming thing about Phantom Menace is Liam Neeson's character. I would love to reedit Episode II and use Qui-Gonn in a pre-credit or flashback sequence way. All you'd have to do is eliminate a love scene (or all of them, really) from Episode II -- because Lucas can't write or direct a love scene to save his life -- and Attack Of The Clones would be a better movie.

I know people have done fan edits, but I bet someone could mash together all 3 eps, remove the excess, and make an excellent 2 hour movie.

I dunno if Jay is being serious - usually if he is sweeping and vitriolic, he isn't. But I am.

This. It was completely -unrelentingly- uninvolving, torpid, ridiculous, and above all BORING beyond belief. Not beyond belief that anything could be so boring, but that this eagerly awaited, mouth wateringly anticipated, pants-tighteningly etc etc could be so dull.

I was dead serious.

There are several touchstone movies that taught me, as I became a full-blown adult, that a movie ( or novel, or any piece of art or entertainment) can have "all the trappings" and still be terrible. That there is something mystical or magical about a piece of work that we enjoy. That the sum of the parts is added up in the right combination to where that "magic" happens. I learned that I don't like a certain "type" of movie or a certain "type" of story.

Once this light goes on (whether it's at age 8 or 38), life opens up and gets a whole light better. Because life becomes a journey to find that next bit of "magic," to continue the journey to find "what was it? What was it that so captivated me? Is it me, is the work, is it both?"

When I was young, Star Wars taught me that I liked movies with space ships, and aliens, and fighting, and heroes doing daring deeds. The Phantom Menace disabused me of that notion.

And so the research goes on -- why was Star Wars good and Phantom Menace bad? (I could write you books on that topic, but I won't. But the point is that the trappings don't make the meal).

This.

I remember being so excited when it came out. The trailer had everybody all pumped and ready, and then I saw it opening day, and walked out the group I was with so disappointed. The bad writing, the acting (well, the kid mostly, everybody else did wonderfully) and of course Jar-Jar, absolutely ruined what could have been something a million times more spectacular.

Even the kids, who were supposedly who Lucas made this for, were grousing about how dumb a lot of it was.

For me, the Phantom Menace failed for the following reasons:

1. A villain with an unclear plan. Trade guilds and politics and... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

2. Darth Maul looked cool, but turned out to be nothing more than a fighting machine with no voice. Literally.

3. Other than Jar Jar Binks, the cast had no personalities as we saw in the previous movies. It was like watching Vulcan theater.

4. God, I hated the kid who played Anakin skywalker. I just could not buy that the kid who spoke like a romper room reject was also a genius at building robots and piloting.

5. The introduction of midi-chlorians sucked all of the spiritual elements right out of the Star Wars franchise. It lost its magic.

Every trilogy has to have it's Boba Fett!