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Kevin Michael Vance
Writer - Portland, Oregon
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Title: Star Wars: Episode I- The Phantom Menace
Director: George Lucas
Year: 1999
Reviewed: July 15, 2003
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Rice Cake-Lowest Rating |
[Rating Definitions]
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"Star Wars: Episode I- The Phantom Menace"
At first, I was going to give this a BIRTH DAY CAKE rating, but then, just as I was questioning anything and everything I haplessly construe as what I loosely consider sanity, I came to my senses. This film is so outrageously bad it does not even deserve my hot derision, albeit this will not save it from an appropriate Kevin-influenced diatribe. So it is to this end, and hopefully for all the rest of us the great and inescapable end of George "I'm a big, fat, slovenly put together, mutant (not the cool kind) idiot, freak-boy" Lucas, that I give "Phantom" my worst rating: the dreaded RICE CAKE RATING.
There's so much wrong with this film it's hard to know whether to grab a hammer with which to destroy it, an axe to rend it asunder, or a scalpel to dissect it. I've got news for some of you "Warsian" losers, this movie is literally one of the worst films every stapled to celluloid. Just a few quick points: I've seen better acting by "child-stars" in television commercials, rat-tails, even on Jedi, ain't cool, the movies gotta be bad when even Ewan McGregor looks like a total goob.
One of the main differences between the first three films and these "prequels" is, quite simply, intelligence. In "Star Wars", "Empire", and "Return" the characters reacted to horrible situations in one of two ways: with their guts or with their brains. When they could not muscle or courageously muscle their way out of a battle or a chase scene, they thought. They used their ingenuity and wisdom to divine a better plan to the one that was falling to ribbons about them. It was a great model for hard work and bravery.
The characters in "Phantom" stumble and trip their way through the action like a gaggle of French clowns. Liam Neeson is about as animated as a bowl of Granola. Natalie Portman looks cute, granted, but she seems like a wan shadow next to Carrie Fisher's tough, yet feminine portrayal of Leia. All the blue, or green, screen environments looked… well, they looked like a bunch of Computer generated environments, so fake and perfunctory that all life and vibrancy was leeched off the screen. The actors reactions to these environments were just as vacuous as the environments themselves. By the end you've got a sniveling little brat (who could never, even if he was "Cloned", evolve into the greatest evil visage of the 20th century) "Oop'sing" and "Yahooing" his way to victory; even as the worst character ever created (say it loud and proud…JAR-JAR!!) flips and flops his CGI way through the movie in total masturbatory splendor. Until, finally, our pubescent hero and his retarded side-kick have single-handedly won the war; Jar-Jar spitting and slurring his words like the village-idiot all the way home.
I'm not even going to mention the script and the asinine manner in which Lucas utterly and forever destroyed the magic and wonder of the omnipotent power known only as the Force.
Do yourself a favor. Rent the first three. Avoid this one, and the next one, and the next one.
Oh… and Andy, a good, or even decent fight scene does not a movie make.
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