Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out twenty years ago. It was... well, I’ll let Pablo Hidalgo talk positively about what it was, from his Twitter which erases tweets after a month or so:
20 years of The Phantom Menace. Crazy. I saw it a few days early, because I was the "local angle" guy for newspapers in Winnipeg, and I traded an interview for a press screening. Randall King, who was at the Sun at the time, got me to see it early, and then he did the interview.
Aside from that screening, everyone at the VFX house I worked at the time (Frantic Films) ended up seeing it opening day, because we sent the most junior person to go buy tickets. I think it was something like 17 tickets. Must've been the midnight show.
Then, if memory serves, that "local angle" thing, I did an interview with CJOB the next morning on my impressions of it. I dug it, but was cognizant to know every beat that wouldn't land with fans as they hit. I think it was years of following Young Indy that keyed me into that.
Then, in a pre-Twitter Twitter tradition, people would seek me out to tell me what they didn't like about it. That day in the Artspace office, a filmmaker came in to make sure I knew what problems he had with it.
But anyway, back to that Young Indy comment. I loved that show. *because* it varied so radically in tone from week to week. It was a perfect reflection of a very idiosyncratic filmmaker and his eclectic interests. A lot of people had a hard time with that about the show.
One week was a grueling World War I trench drama. Another would be a screwball comedy. Another would be a pulp adventure. Another would be a wide-eyed coming of age story. It was a rollercoaster. Now, take that week-by-week rollercoaster and condense it all to a single movie.
And that was Phantom Menace. As crystal clear a look into George Lucas and his influences and interests. Keystone Kops one second, historical drama the next, Samurai movie the next. I appreciated it because no one else could have done something so crazy.
So I like the weird stuff that would otherwise have been sanded off a major franchise film for mass appeal. My favorite Star Wars is always the oddball stuff, and TPM has plenty. And as a guy who spends a lot of time looking in the margins of SW, TPM offers tons there too.
I never hated Phantom Menace like other people did, but a while ago we did a watch-through of the first few films and realized that Episode 1 was the most watchable of the prequels. It wasn't that the other ones were bad as such, but they were in desperate need of a judicious cutting. Episode 3 in particular should have been cut by 20-25% at least. Episode 1 had silly moments, but it worked much better, even with those big unnecessary set pieces. It felt more like an adventure serial from the 30s.
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