The Definitive Evisceration of The Phantom Menace *NSFW*

cowmix writes "When TPM came out ten years ago, its utter crappiness shocked me to the core and wounded a entire generation of geeks. My inner child had been abused and betrayed. I moped around, talking to no one, for almost two weeks. I couldn't bring myself to see #2 or #3, whatever they were called. Now, a decade later, comes Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review, the ultimate, seven-part, seventy minute analysis of this mother of all train wrecks. Not only does it nail how the film blows, but tells us why. Time, apparently, does not heal all wounds." Or, if you prefer all 7 parts embedded in one page, you can check out slashfilm's aggregation.

It was impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

To listen to this review for more than two minutes.

I was hoping that the monotonous and almost comically distorted voice-over was somehow a parody, but then it kept going on and on and on...

My advice is to take the hot potato out of your mouth on the next film.

Re:Good Material But Lengthy and Bad Delivery

[Jethro]

Yeah, that's what I came here to say. Guy makes some good points (that, face it, aren't new) but tries way too hard to be funny. That 'voice' was way too annoying.

Re:It's actually a pity ...

[jlmale0]

Funny, but you really needed the link: http://xkcd.com/566/ [xkcd.com]

Agreed...

[schon]

I was hoping that the monotonous and almost comically distorted voice-over was somehow a parody, but then it kept going on and on and on...

I'd like to hear what he had to say, but I just couldn't stand listening to that voice.. it sounded like he was trying to do an impression of Joe Lieberman doing an impression of Jar Jar's leader.

Re:Why a decade later

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's old, old news by now, but if you haven't already check out The Phantom Edit [wikipedia.org]. It made some great headway in making TPM watchable, boosting it from unwatchably atrocious to plain old Vanilla Bad. It doesn't address all of your issues, but did a great job in rectifying the biggies.

Re:Good Material But Lengthy and Bad Delivery

[badboy_tw2002]

You devoted more time to the review by replying.

That said, the major point was that you _couldn't_ do anything with editing to fix the film. Its broken in so many ways that you'd need to completely rewrite it and reshoot it, without the kid, without Jar Jar, without the gungans, without the trade federation, and probably with a different, older (teenager?) Anakin. And no Qui-gon, which the review also does a good point of showing is useless. Center it around Anakin, or center it around Obi-wan. Make the movie about someone we give a shit about instead of a bland menagerie of characters that are "starwarsy" but not really all that interesting.

Good reviews of Star Trek too.

[biglig2]

His reviews of Generations and Insurrection are good too: besides the obvious flaws in the plots of both, he knows the TV series well enough to find the non-obvious continuity flaws. Intercutting the plot of Insurrection with footage of Picard chewing Wesley a new one for doing exactly (and I mean EXACTLY) the things that Picard does in the film is exquisite.

Re:Why a decade later

[Domint]

I believe any hopes for a Spaceballs sequel died with John Candy, unfortunately.

Re:Why a decade later

[jitterman]

Its disappointing that Lucas, after all these years, still doesn't understand the basic movie making concept that story is most important.

It's actually incredibly disappointing that, after all these years, Lucas NO LONGER understands these things. Watch "THX1138," "American Graffiti," and to an extent Episode 6. In his early years he used to say emphatically that the effects were absolutely secondary to a good story, and that without the story you couldn't do much worth a darn. He went so far as to point out that in "ANH," the fact that the Empire had significant advantages in technology but lacked a soul and were defeated was an analogy for this concept.

Re:Why a decade later

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the problems with Star wars is that this is not established, yet Luke magically knows how to fly a fighter.

I haven't seen ANH in ages, but I clearly remember Luke talking about how he can fly when haggling with Han, and later during the Rebel briefing there's the semi-famous line about blasting womprats in Beggar's Canyon. You may not *see* Luke piloting anything but the landspeeder, but it's not like he jumped in an X-Wing without the slightest bit of experience. The lines are there.

Re:Why a decade later

[bckrispi]

A little perspective, please...

The marriage between films and merchandising didn't exist before Star Wars came out. Star Wars invented the movie tie-in.

Re:Why a decade later

[gnick]

Can you name *one* video game featuring young Anakin or Jar Jar that was a success? I can't, but I can think of several original games that were both commercial successes *and* generally regarded as good games.

Here. [wikipedia.org] Now it wasn't the best game in the world, but it sold like mad - A nice parallel to the movie. The original (Ep 4) movie, I don't believe factored marketing in much, although that certainly changed by Jedi. The difference between those movies and Ep 1 are that they lost sight of ANY obligation to put out a decent product and focused solely on marketing. Thus, we get a crappy movie, long-time fans are pissed, and Target moves a gazillion Jar-Jars. By Ep 2, I think that they realized that their approach was flawed.

I howled when Colbert told Lucas that he owned every Star Wars movie and asked him if he did too. Lucas replied, "All except episode 1".

Re:Why a decade later

[rsborg]

I don't know about you, but for me the star of the original trilogy was Han Solo. I'm not sure who the star of the prequel trilogy was, but there was not a single Han Solo-esque character in it.

Wasn't that supposed to be Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan? ... Maybe that's because Harrison Ford told Lucas to stuff his lines [spout.com] "George, you can write this shit but you can't make me say it."

Re:midichlorians

[bckrispi]

I think even Lucas realized this mis-step, which is precisely why the midi-whatsits were ignored in the other films.

You weren't paying attention... In RotS, Palpatine tells Anakin that Darth Plagious was so powerful that he could "manipulate the midi-chlorians to create life". This was perhaps the biggest revelation in all six films.

Re:Why a decade later

[Anonymous Coward]

Planet of the Apes. Look it up. That was the real start of toys/movies love-fest.

Re:Why a decade later

[bckrispi]

There was also the cut scene that was reinserted into the Special Edition where, prior to the Battle of Yavin, Red Leader expresses concern about Luke's ability to fly in combat. Biggs comes to Luke's defense telling Red Leader that Luke is the "best pilot in the outer rim".

Re:Why a decade later

[dwye]

Please. Pod raing? George Lucas has had an extraordinary career paying homage to everyone else. This time, it was movies like Gran Prix and Le Mans.

It was to the Chariot Race scene in Ben Hur, damn it. It's frigging OBVIOUS. (in the idiom of the review)

Re:Demo Reel

[TheRaven64]

Ignoring Linux was not a problem for SGI, but ignoring commodity hardware was. When a few of their engineers said 'we could make something almost as good as our high-end stuff, sell it for a tenth of the price to everyone with a PC' they said no. Those engineers went on to found nVidia. Even if they hadn't, someone else (ATi, Intel, Matrox, 3dfx, S3, whoever) would have done. They could have been the company that owned the consumer 3D market. They didn't want to create that market because they thought it would demolish their high-end market. They didn't seem to realise that it would whether they were in the new market or not. It's a lesson that lots of businesses miss. The record labels could have owned a vastly profitable download market if they'd started offering it back in the early '90s before most people had enough bandwidth or disk space for it to be useful. Instead, they decided that downloads would hurt CD sales (which they do) and thought that not offering them would prevent this (it didn't).

Star Trek Generations movie review too!

[antdude]

See here: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=48519614 [myspace.com] (29 minutes video) or http://www.videosift.com/video/Why-Star-Trek-Generations-is-the-Stupidest-Movie-Ever-Made [videosift.com] (three parts embedded YouTube video). I wonder if he has any more movie reviews.