Critics Of "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace"
David Edelstein
Slate
November 16, 2015
Look, I wanted to love The Phantom Menace, too. I was an adolescent boy and would enjoy being one again for a couple of hours. But the movie has a way of deflating all but the most delusional of hopes.
'The Phantom Menace' is definitely the major reason most fans, even prequel apologists like myself, don't watch the Star Wars saga in chronological order.
What I can't comprehend is why the political details had to be so tedious and abstract. Will the kids of our nation and the world truly be titillated by trade wars and the spectacle of a do-nothing Senate?
The movie is fun, for the most part, and several scenes are as good or better than anything Lucas created in the original films. The human characters, however, are not nearly as interesting as those in the earlier episodes.
