The Single Biggest Mistake Each Star Wars Movie Has Made

12. The Phantom Menace - The Horrendous Script

While not a terrible film, The Phantom Menace is still the worst out of the Skywalker Saga and although flat direction and mostly terrible acting certainly didn't help, it was George Lucas' ghastly screenplay that really torpedoed the entire thing.

Lucas has many talents but writing dialogue is not among them (he's been endearingly honest about this over the years), so it's a shame he didn't just write the story and let someone else handle the script.

Thanks to the awful writing, The Phantom Menace is a wooden, charmless story that's as robotic as a Trade Federation battle droid and is positively drowning in endless exposition, laughable dialogue, plot holes a-plenty and terrible attempts at comic relief (looking at you, Jar Jar). It's twenty years old, but the film is not getting better with age.

What also undermines it is the story's lack of importance in the rest of the franchise. The only significance this has is Anakin meeting the Jedi and since that meeting is incredibly contrived (seriously, how the hell was a convoluted bet involving a kid in a pod-race the only way to get the money to escape from Tatooine?) the film's story feels rather pointless.