In Defense of...THE PHANTOM MENACE
There are a fair number of movies that are awful for one reason or another. However, even among these not so great films, there are often gems that can be picked out and praised. I want to shed some light on some of these gems in this series of articles called In Defense of…
The first film that I will try to defend to some degree is Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. This is possibly the most hated Star Wars film. However, there are some saving graces that this film has to offer. The first of these graces are the visual effects. There was some amazing work put into the visual effects and you can even watch a video of some VFX artists talking about some of the awesome work, thanks to the internet.
The second saving grace of the film is podracing. This one might be a bit more controversial, but podracing is actually fun to watch and the video games that it spawned were also fun to play. Being unsure of how Anakin was going to make it with a broken pod got the blood pumping.
Finally, we have the crème de la crème, Darth Maul. A fan favorite character who was brought back to life in TV shows and future films, Maul is awesome. He has one line of dialogue in the entire movie, but his presence is so intimidating that you know Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are in for it. Of course, the best part of the entire film is the final duel between Maul and the two Jedi. The acrobatic approach to the fighting was drastically different to what we saw in the original trilogy and it is more entertaining.
Did I miss anything? Are there other redeeming qualities to The Phantom Menace?