This is without question the biggest letdown as far as movies are concerned that I ever experienced in my entire life.
I remember when I first saw the trailer for this film. I was at the cinema watching something else with a nerdy sci-fi fan friend of mine so perhaps it was the Matrix or something like that and the trailer came on. I don't think we really knew that this film was even happening because the internet wasn't everything everywhere all at once in our lives at that point.
The trailer had no words, it was just Darth Vader breathing and some desert scenes of young Anakin walking around doing kid stuff. They probably showed some CGI scenes, but there was no audio other than the slow breathing of Darth. It was a very good trailer and my friend said "I think I just came in my pants." This is a gross thing to say but that pretty much sums up the level of enthusiasm that Star Wars fans had when this was announced. We had spent our entire lives loving Star Wars and we didn't really think there would ever be any more films and we were just stuck with our favorites from the late 70's and early 80's.
Little did we know that we probably would have been better off if they had not made the prequel films or for that matter, almost all of the other films and series that they have made out of the Star Wars universe.
For the first time in my adult life I saw massive lines to get tickets and they were limiting the ticket sales to the ones on that day. I wanted to be in on the first day so me and my friend got tickets by taking turns waiting in line for a long time, and then waiting in another long line to get in. This movie was so highly anticipated and in such crazy demand that of the 12 theaters in the complex, 11 of them were showing this film all day long.
We got in, got some pretty decent seats in the "sweet spot" about halfway back, and settled in for what we hoped was going to be one of the greatest cinematic experience of our lifetime.
If you saw this in theaters or saw it at all, you are probably aware of what came next.
It's not easy for me to point at exactly what I hated about this movie the most but the above is certainly a bit part of it. I don't know for certain, but I think the reaction to Jar-Jar was so bad that they cut back his screentime in the next 2 episodes even though that likely wasn't the original plan. I don't know what they were going for with him, but it fell seriously flat.
It probably didn't help much that Jake Lloyd was not very good in the lead role but to be fair to him, I don't think that anyone would have been accepted in this role. According to some sources, there were 3000 kids being considered for the role and it took 2 years for George Lucas to finally choose Jake.
I think that for a lot of us, we wanted Anakin to have some tinges of a dark side streak in him, regardless of whether or not that was part of the lore (is it?) and instead he was just a genius kid and well, I didn't like that and nobody else that I knew did either.
Another really bad aspect of this film was that the CGI was actually really bad in a lot of it. I think we would have found this acceptable in other films but we expected Star Wars to have the best of the best. When you consider that this was a while after Jurassic Park, it really doesn't make a lot of sense that it would be as bad as it was. It's not like money was an issue or anything. The overall budget of the films was $115 million and that was probably a lot for the time period but not so much by today's standards. I think they should have either spent more on the CGI or just instead had practical effects like they did in the original trilogy. They went all in on the CGI and I don't know who told them this was a good idea but I think they were wrong and so did most people who watched this.
I recall at times that there were people in our sold out cinema that were booing the movie as it was going on. Me? Well I was just getting sleepy and I couldn't believe that this was the case when I had been waiting for this movie for so long.
There are some seriously talented actors in this movie. Three of the people in the above picture are some of my favorite actors of all time and some of the best of our current days. But it doesn't really matter how good an actor you are if you are given a horrible script and the dialogue in this film is just really horrible. I don't know if it is George Lucas arrogance thing or what, but there are so many cringe moments in this movie.
One thing that only real nerds will remember is how they explain too much what the force is, and why some people are more tuned into it than others. I would have preferred if it just remained some sort of magical thing that people don't really understand. Some sort of magic that only certain people get, but instead, Lucas introduced "Midichlorians" as the reason why some people are good with the force. This was swept under the rug just like Jar-Jar when the fans took serious issue with it. There were a ton of justified questions such as "why wouldn't the baddies simply clone a bunch of people with high midichlorian count since as is shown in the episode, that is something that people can do now. It doesn't make sense man and George really screwed the pooch on that.
Next up we have another major problem and that is the battle droids. I guess these were put in so that they could have some sort of comic relief, but these damn things were just useless. If you thought Stormtroopers were a waste of space these guys took it to the next level. They can't hit anything, they can barely move, they seem to have the survival skills of a Roomba, and are dumb as a box of rocks. It makes zero sense that any military would use them in any capacity.
Me and my buddies has planned on going to see this film multiple times but after seeing the first screening that was sold out, I never wanted to see this movie again. This is a very odd sensation for me because I have seen Episodes 4,5, and 6 hundreds of times and went to the cinematic re-release for all of them.
I would later go back to watch Episode 1 many years later hoping that time would heal all the wounds but that hasn't been the case. This movie is still awful and if anything it has just become more awful in my mind as time has gone by.
This film ended up making a billion dollars in cinemas globally despite the fact that many critics were actually being honest in stating that it isn't very good.
src
these two were absolutely terrible too
Episodes 2 and 3 did get better, but honestly, not by a great deal. For something that I had waited over 15 years to get to see, this is without question the biggest letdown of a film of my entire life.
What did you think of it when it was released? did you like it? I would really like to hear from you if that was the case because I have never met anyone that genuinely thought this was a good movie.