The Original Trilogy was a product of its time. Hokey, tropey, live-action everything while doing its best to serve an audience with traditional thoughts on cinema.
The Prequel Trilogy was approaching a new millennia, a majority of which during a post-9/11 world. The audience had grown old, but they had to cater to new younger crowds with different expectations.
The Phantom Menace was able to incorporate some of the deepest themes in cinema and present them in the Star Wars aesthetic. Political assassination, hostages, slavery, the premature death of the "old guard", trade wars (still relevant today,) hunger, and war.
The Phantom Menace is one of the densest movies in cinema, no questions asked. It's just the matter of minor nitpickers not liking it for a lack of "character development", "not being like the originals", "needless politics", and so on.
Lucas knew what the fans wanted.
Lucas took chances adding minor scenes for Jar Jar so that they may be introduced to the series, but everyone greatly exaggerates it as being the end all of the film's quality. Brush back those few seconds of screen-time and you get one of the best Star Wars movies of all-time, and certainly one of the deepest considering the heavy/dark themes and its relevancy as it approached a new millennia.
Jesus Christ, no.
There is nothing daring, nor brave, nor deep about a movie starring two planks of wood, an annoying little boy, a monotone girl, and a cartoon rabbit with a head injury fighting to end a trade dispute that we have little explanation for and have zero investment in.
The story is shit. Qui-Gon Jinn (Obi Wan's master, which completely borks Obi's line in Empire about Yoda being his teacher) is sent with Kenobi to settle a trade dispute. But Palpatine is actually hoping for them to report back that the Trade Federation is up to no good so he can get a vote of no confidence in the Senate.
But then he opts to have the Jedi killed instead, which is asinine because it risks the investigation into their deaths turning up evidence of his own involvement (since the hooded figure ordering the murder of those two Jedi looks and sounds an awful lot like Chancellor Palpatine. And we know they have the ability to record and play back holograms, because it's done in Episode III).
But going back to the blockade: Why is it put in place? What did Naboo do? What does Naboo have that the Federation wants to gain from their blockade? It must be something massive to have the freaking massive Trade Federation come to block all access to your planet. Were they building their own Death Star? For a story this "deep," it's sure missing a lot of key elements.
Another thing it's missing is logic. Jinn and Kenobi hop on Federation ships that are invading Naboo in order to inform that people of Naboo that they're being invaded. What? That would be like tying a note to one of the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor that warns of the (currently underway) attack.
For their attack, the Trade Federation decides to land their ships on the other side of the planet and walk to the capital. Because why not? It's not as if war is already costly enough in terms of fuel and other necessary supplies. Just fuck it, we'll walk.
I could go on and on. Obviously a lot of this is covered in the Plinkett reviews, but these are glaring issues that I (and many others) have had with the film (and its sequels) since release.
The movie is trash tier. Better than AOTC, but just barely.
), and Queen Amidala all made it easier to not fret over the nonsense.
