Why is Star Wars: Episode I Looked Upon With Despise?

[Caurus]

(feel free to correct my spelling but I don't care)

You forget that it was long awaited and long built up. The quality and originality of the old films is worlds apart from the new ones.

However!!! I agree with you. I liked phantom menace the plot was well developed the characters introduced were interesting and yes when I was 11 I liked Jaja Binks - now he is annoying but he was put in for the kids and kids like him so job done.
Obi was awesome, Darth Maul was fantastic. I still hear people occasionally shout "hey Sebulba!"
I thought the racing was pretty cool too.

I dont think you need Darth Vader to be in the films, technically he was in all of them and at the end of the day new characters are never a bad thing they just have to be well written and well structured to suit the plot. Darth Vader doesn't make star wars (He is awesome) he is just an icon from it.

The 2nd and 3rd were abysmal; the 2nd was the worst. It was pretty much just plot filler between the 1st and 3rd and there wasn't much plot to cover so they added A LOT of boring stuff and dull conversations. I can't remember one thing I liked about the film...which has never happened before.
It seemed they told their writers to adopt the writing style of a soap opera and then copy/paste generic manly stuff and space jargon in at random. It was so cliché, cheesy and boring I nearly left the cinema in a mildly grumpy arms akimbo manner...not good :|

 

[Korten12]

I liked all the movies, 3rd one was really good imo.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

See here

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/6.183149-Its-Time-To-Forgive-George-Lucas?page=6

 

[SomeBoredGuy]

One word: midichlorians. Taking away the mystique of how the Force worked made many of the fans hate this one.

But you can always skip over that, pretend it doesn't exist. Or better yet, say the midichlorians are like a medium. The Force is still big and mysterious, so much so that you need the help of near-supernatural microscopic entities to help you communicate with it.

Also, BRIANBLESSED as Boss Nass made up for all the problems in that movie.

Brian Blessed was in it? Good God, that film has just gone up 80 points in my book.

 

[Kagim]

I just didn't like the back story they inevitably gave Vadar. They made him into a whiny little *****. I can ignore Jar Jar, I'm okay of midochlorians. I just wish they gave him more of a back bone. Instead of being a whiny pansy why not just confident and strong, truly following the force until the whole part with his mother shatters his resolve. I would like a character like that about a hundred times more.

Most annoyingly is how they tried to make the first three movies somehow connect to the new three.

While I was okay with the first and third movies the second one is what pissed me off. It was 2h15m long. Almost an hour of that was romance crap. I'm a big boy, I can handle romance, but god was it ever jammed down our throats. It was thick and fake and irritating.

Then there was the fact Jango, a freaking Mandalorian, gets killed so damn easily. I can see him being defeated and not able to stop a jedi master. But the fight scene was roughly half a freaking minute. As well despite being a popular and highly anticipated character he gets maybe 20 minutes of screen time, because ya know, what we came to see is a romance story about Padame and Annakin.

The first movie was kinda bad, not because of the script but because child actors tend to suck. I rarely see a good one. The kid who played annakin was horrible I'm sorry. I know I am expecting a lot out of a kid but i have seen better child acting in "Unaccompanied Minors" and that was a low budget kids comedy. Hell "Cheaper By the Dozen" had better acting.

I want to blame the green screen but 300 basically shoots that excuse in the crotch about a hundred times over.

Rant over.... Excuse my nerdity....

 

[Caurus]

oh and to add to what I said qui-gon jinn is the best!!!!

Liam Neason is awesome. Got to love Fallout 3 for not killing him off in the first 30 seconds like oblivion did with Patrick Stuart.

 

[SomeBritishDude]

Because it's not only is it the worst Star Wars movie. It's one of the worst movies ever made.

 

[irishman16]

Compared to Episode II, this movie kicks ass. I still hate the how they ruined the Force with the whole midichlorians thing. And the kid who played Anakin sucked! Hard to respect a badass who at one point was a whinny pain like that. The best thing the movie had going for it was Darth Maul. Best Sith ever imo. They should have added more of him and removed the creepy 14 year old hitting on a 9 year old scenes. -cringe-

 

[Gentleman_Reptile]

It's as Yahtzee said. Nothing a sequel or remake can do will ever appease the diehard fans.

 

[chaos order]

it was jar jar for me my god if i ever hear "weesa gonna die!" and his annoying scream itll be too soon

 

[SavingPrincess]

It seemed they told their writers to adopt the writing style of a soap opera and then copy/paste generic manly stuff and space jargon in at random. It was so cliché, cheesy and boring I nearly left the cinema in a mildly grumpy arms akimbo manner...not good :|

You hit on exactly why I didn't like the newer movies. If you go back and watch the originals, the dialogue had a sense of "casualness" to it. The banter between Han and Leia, the humor of Old "Ben" Kenobi... so much of it felt as though it was real. It felt like normal people talking... that feeling is totally lost in the new movies, with Episode I quite possibly being the worst offender. Every word uttered in that film sounded contrived, forced, stuffy and constantly smacks of fake-ness.

That is the problem I had with the new films. If you watch the opening scenes to Episode III, they attempt to go back to this, but can't quite pull it off due to the stodginess of Christensen's, er... em... "acting."

 

[Caurus]

...

Most annoyingly is how they tried to make the first three movies somehow connect to the new three.

...

The WHOLE POINT of making those films was to give us Vader's history pre crazy-attack on his moral compass and connect/explain it all and make them all into a saga...which is original and awesome.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

The WHOLE POINT of making those films was to give us Vader's history pre crazy-attack on his moral compass and connect/explain it all and make them all into a saga...which is original and awesome.

At which it failed dismally, and actually hurt the sequels in the process. Which is why it's hated so much. As separate trilogies, they could have been ignored.

 

[Raithnor]

Everyone slams the midichlorians. The biggest mistake was to link them to a Biological Process, however they did that in the first movie and the EU-novels.

The whole Skywalker-clan was awash in the force. Anakin, Luke, Leia, plus the Organa-Solo Children and Ben Skywalker. The only pre-requisite seemed to be bloodlines.

Here's where it all seems to break down: When they decided that midichlorian counts wasn't a factor of bloodline, except when it was. Yes the force was an energy field also, but for someone to use it required some innate ability.

That's why I hated the stories about "Baby-stealing Jedis" and how they were effectively "dead" to their families. If force ability was a matter of bloodline, why not just take genetic material from power jedis and either create test-tube babies or clones. If the Jedi found that an abhorrent practice why didn't the Sith decide to do something similar. Even with Darth Bane's "Rule of Two" a Sith Master could essentially have created their own apprentice and raised him/her according to the warped Sith philosophy.

The rest of the issues can be broken down thusly:

Aliens with Ethnic accents instead of actual language.
The ending was a muddled mess with four different subplots happening at the same time.
Stiff writing for some good actors
Some really questionable casting choices
Too many characters: They should have lost the Queen's entorage and all of the baggage with it. Have the movie be: JUST Obi-Wan, Qui-gon, Padme, Anakin, and R2 trying to get from Naboo to Coruscant and back. If you had to split them up only work with two groups at most, more than that it becomes a ROTJ-mess.

The movie only works as setting the backdroup for the "Pre-Empire SW universe" and just barely at that.

 

[Mechanix]

It wasn't terrible, it was decent. But it couldn't match the epicness of the previous 3.

If you feel like watching his entire review, this guy explains why the new 3 movies suck.

http://confusedmatthew.com/The-Star-Wars-Prequels.php

 

[Pink_Pirate]

uhm... your joking right? this is a late april's fool prank...right? RIGHT?!?
because you just outlined everything that wrong with the movie in the opening statement... so your beign sarcastic right?
well you left out midichlorans. The child actors were crap. The script was crap. JarJar was annoyingly not funny to anyone above the age of 10... i could go on... but i wont...

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

I would really like to know precisely how old the OP was when he saw this film the first time. I was 17 - it was freaking awful. Not in a "why the hell did I even watch this?!" sense, but more in a "what the hell were they thinking?!" fashion. Where to even begin?

Plot: Convoluted enough that I had to explain what the hell just happened to my parents later. Also midiclorians, hsss!

Acting: Oh boy was that ever bad. The Trade Federation, for every single second that they were on the screen, felt like a bad racial stereotype (and the bit where none of their dialog matched the movements of their lips was a wonderful touch). The 'human' actors? You have a cast of people I know can freaking act performing like robots devoid of all emotion, and the only cast member who isn't a deadpan robot is the freaking annoying little kid I wanted to strangle the instant he started talking and oh great he's a main character now.

Action: A mixed bag. The effects, as always, were excellent, but half of what they were rendering was silly. The Trade Federation species is not in any way menacing, and their battle droids are even harder to take seriously. Imagine if all the stormtroopers from the original trilogy were constantly mugging for the camera and telling bad jokes, and every time they were shot there was comical overacting. It would have been terrible, right? The big bad army in a sci-fi/fantasy epic shouldn't be low-brow comic relief, especially when the film itself is not in any way a comedy, right?

Yeah, well apparently Lucas thought otherwise. The result is my brain saying "Ooh, lightsabers! Ooh, deflecting blaster shots and smashing things! Ooh... smashing... really stupid looking bipedal robots... that are simultaneously ridiculous and the big bad threat? The hell?". Scenes like the pod-race are in the same boat - the effects themselves are cool but then there's stuff like the absolutely stupid two-headed announcer, and the bit where the kid I hate is a participant and frankly none of it makes much sense. The space battles are also ruined by the presence of the annoying child who doesn't know what the hell he is doing yet manages to win the battle completely by accident, turning what could have been "Ooh, a neat space battle!" into "Ooh, a space battle... where I don't really know or care about any of the participants except for the one I can't stand... and he's just turned it into one big farce. Thanks a bunch Star Wars."

Don't even get me started on the Gungans.

The only decent action sequences that Lucas didn't find a way to ruin were the lightsaber duels, and astute observers will note there was never any dialog during those. The only reason I don't loathe Episode 1 utterly with every fiber of my being is for the saber duels, as it gave the folks behind the awesome Jedi Knight series inspiration.
[hr]
The end result is a film with amazing effects and some kickass saber duels that spends most of it's running time being it's own self-parody. People make jokes about Star Wars all the time, but Episode 1 tells those jokes all throughout the film. You know things are bad when CG characters are practically shouting at you "Look at me! I'm in a terrible movie, har har har!". Every single member of the cast turned in what was perhaps the worst performance of their career, and it's clear that's how George wanted them to act those scenes. The only ones emoting are the voice actors making all his precious dancing CGI puppets speak (George has actually gone on record to state that he'd rather work with puppets than actors and it shows), and they're all dramatically overacting even though it's not a freaking comedy.

The worst part is you can see the skeleton of what could have been a good film underneath all the terrible crap. As a fan of Star Wars, the only reasonable reaction upon watching Episode 1 is to wonder why the hell anyone would do something that horrible to the legacy of Star Wars - you half expect that sort of thing when the original creator is dead and Hollywood decides to bastardize their franchise to suit the whims of the marketing department, but this is something the original creator specifically set out to make. It's clear from Star Wars prequels (and his constant revisions of the originals) that Lucas never actually understood why people liked the original Star Wars movies.

I can only imagine what those films would have been like if George had somebody else direct them. With the effects being used in moderation, rather than every single second of the running time while still (metaphorically) shouting "look at me, I'm a special effect!", some decent acting (the cast was certainly capable of doing that, even though they didn't), and wholesale dumping of the various stupid ideas Lucas went with because nobody else was able to wisely overrule his decision to include them, they could have been modern classics, or at the very least, decent films that didn't prompt an entire generation of Star Wars fans to go into histrionics about Lucas "raping their childhood".

Instead, we got Jar Jar Binks and Midiclorians. Thanks a bunch Episode 1.

 

[clankwise]

I guess people who saw the first starwar episodes(4-6)saw 1 as a disappointment like if halo reach got a 7 and was a ok game halo fans would demonize it and say its horrible. BTW i like 1 and episode 3 but 4 and 6 are better.

 

[Caurus]

The WHOLE POINT of making those films was to give us Vader's history pre crazy-attack on his moral compass and connect/explain it all and make them all into a saga...which is original and awesome.

At which it failed dismally, and actually hurt the sequels in the process. Which is why it's hated so much. As separate trilogies, they could have been ignored.

I agree they sort of ruined the first 3 but I fail to see how a prequel can be septate from the original.

Essentially I think you actually mean they should have just made films that had nothing to do with any of the characters in the original films...
But in that case they may have actually have made good films - we will never know because they didn't do that.

 

[Treblaine]

How old are you? My guess is too young to know any better.


and while we are at it, you can see why the sequel is shit as well


Now go and think about what you have done.