10 Hated Movie Moments That Aren't As Bad As You Think

10. The Senate - Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

The Hated Scene: There may be Jar Jar and a yippee-ing Darth Vader, but what people seem to really hate about The Phantom Menace is the politics. From the opening crawl the whole plot is mired in trade route taxation and political debate getting in the way of actual wars among the stars. This is personified when the gang of Jedi, Naboo escapists and Tatooine slaves arrive at Coruscant, the capital of the Republic, and we get treated to a lengthy debate mired by bureaucracy made sci-fi by floating pods. Why It's Not So Bad: On a simple level all that political stuff was necessary for the Star Wars prequels to actually work as prequels. If you're going to show the formation of the Empire then there needs to be some explanation of either how the Emperor became corrupted or how an evil guy gained power in the first place. If Lucas had skipped over it in vaguer terms it'd have felt flat. What makes this particular scene work is that even though it seems totally innocuous, focusing on the Trade Federation Naboo invasion, it's actually the first step of Palpatine's plan; the whole thing has happened to push the Senator for Naboo into the spotlight and get the current Chancellor ousted. Watching it in retrospect it's chilling.