Star Wars: All The Movies Ranked From Worst To Best
6. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Do you want to know the biggest lie in cinema? The Phantom Menace isn't that bad. Oh, it's not a great movie by any stretch, with some iffy performances rivalled in woodenness only by the dialogue the actors were given and some characters ill-conceived on a basic level (if Jar Jar really was "the key to all this", Lucas was majorly deluded), but it's an overall fun watch. What stands out so much about the movie is that, while it's so often crucified for being all about taxation and trade routes and other sleep-inducing nuggets of boredom, it's actually a fast-paced action-adventure with minimal time actually spent on all the politics. In fact, at the end of the film's second act Lucas even shows up bureaucracy as a boring blight on excitement; he himself is passing comment on the very thing fans blame the movie for. Not to get all defensive, but this is a movie that nowadays is more about context than content. People base their opinion of the film off the impressive-but-bias RedLetterMedia reviews over personal assessment of the movies themselves - there's many worse movies that people give a free pass just because nobody's done a high-profile feature-length rant on them. The Mr Plinkett analysis is the most important piece of film criticism of the 21st Century (and I say that without a hint of hyperbole), but as much as it has defined Episode I's reputation, it has also obscured what the movie really is. Sixteen years on, The Phantom Menace is less a cautionary tale about hype than it is a story of how fanboy disappointment can seep over into the popular consensus. When it was released in 1999, the film got broadly positive reviews; when it was rereleased in 3D in 2011, things were much more negative, pushing the film into rotten on RottenTomatoes and seemingly validating all the whining. And that's not really fair. The Phantom Menace is an average movie. Maybe that's a crime given what it followed, but that doesn't make it bad.
