Can it really be that there are Star Wars fans who see George Lucas’s Episode I – The Phantom Menace, once considered the emblem of everything that went wrong with the long-running space saga, as a bona fide classic ripe for rehabilitation 25 years on? As the much-derided 1999 film returns to cinemas this weekend, there are rumblings in the ether that millennials, and perhaps those even younger, are completely unaware of just how much of a disaster it was. Then again, perhaps those of us who remember its debut in cinemas should be prepared to listen to voices from a new generation. Was it really so bad after all?
Part of the problem is that where it was once a rare blot on the galactic landscape, a Star Wars movie that failed to live up to the glories of the original trilogy, these days it’s far, far away from being the only rubbish film in the canon. In fact, it could be argued that when considering movies such as the execrable The Rise of Skywalker, the middling Solo: A Star Wars Story and the two painful prequel follow-ups, The Phantom Menace is closer to the mean average for the saga than it is to the bottom of the Dagobah swamp.
Where once we were shocked that something so tonally misguided, blithely racist and prosaically bloodless could be tagged with the famous title, we now have the Star Wars Holiday Special to remind us that it can get worse. Back at the turn of the century, few of us were aware that 70s and 80s misfires like this even existed – see also Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor – it being the pre YouTube era when all but the most studious of geeks were blissfully ignorant of them.
It all just comes down to which ones you watched first. I, like others here, watched the prequels first so I love them. All the old heads here can bitch and moan all they want about how the prequels are horrible or how they kickstarted the dark path that is now Disney Star Wars, but I'll tell them to shut their mouths. The prequels are fine, yes they're full of cheese, but they're also full of heart and world building. You can still enjoy something while acknowledging that it has flaws.
Take the old argument of Star Trek vs. Star Wars, I prefer Star Wars even with its flaws and shortcomings.