Hacker Cinema
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
1999 · Film · 136 min
Part of Star Wars Collection
Directed by George Lucas
AdventureActionScience Fiction
Anakin Skywalker, a young slave strong with the Force, is discovered on Tatooine. Meanwhile, the evil Sith have returned, enacting their plot for revenge against the Jedi.
3 positive10 negative1 mixed13 neutralfrom 27 commenters
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29 comments on Hacker News
Disney can do whatever it wants if it restores and releases a 4K version of the theatrical cuts of the original trilogy, something the fan base has wanted for decades at this point. I won't hold my breath.
Very large companies are generally very bad at consistently producing original content because everything in a corporat eenvironment skews towards not taking any risks. Big companies want a repeatable formula. It's why we get to many sequels and reboots with depressingly few new properties. HBO has been the exception to the rule. I would've also said Apple TV tends to corporatize content into being inoffensive. Modern Family (even though it wasn't an Apple production) is kind of like the perfect Apple TV content. But we have things like Severance and Silo so maybe there's hope.
Anyway, the retconning and corporatization around Star Wars has been depressing to watch. The whole "Han shot first" was a line in the sand more than 30 years old that seemed to stem from George Lucas's desire for a lighter classification for the films. The Phantom Menace of course was very much aimed at a younger audience even though the plot revolved around a tax treaty dispute of all things.
The sequel trilogy was for me, as an original Star Wars fan, deeply depressing. I honestly haven't even watched the last one where Carrie Fisher did her best Mary Poppins. And honestly the whole prmise of midichlorians (from the original trilogy) and inheritance of Force ability was really offensive and against the original spirit of Star Wars. I mean as anyone example of corporatization the name "Rey" was chosen to be easily pronounceable in many languages.
Look where we started. The inspiration for Star Wars was the Viet Cong resisting American imperialism in Vietnam (direct from George Lucas) [1].
Disney produced beloved classics like The Jungle Book, Aladdin and Snow White. In the 2000s, they seemed unable to continue this creativity and it became an amalgam of Pixar and the MCU (and later Lucasfilm). Pixar was a culturally antiestablishmment company started by Steve Jobs (yes, yes, he bought a London computer graphics division). The MCU took decades of creativity in the superhero space and basically turned into 2000s era patriotic films. You can guess why the timing.
Oh it's worth adding the Star Wars originally had an expanded universe that was kinda managed by Lucasfilm. Disney abandoned this on purchasing Lucasfilm and some fans were very upset. This included Chewbacca having a wife and family back home. It was all fan fiction, basically.
Disney could very much use the Star Wars milieu to tell stories relevant to our times. The 2025 Superman movie did this for example. and it made some people very upset. But Disney absolutely will not do that. So I really don't think it matters what they try and do.
[1]: https://screenrant.com/star-wars-george-lucas-vietnam-war-inspiration-explainer/
I love seeing art like this. Using things that are forgotten, obscure, unused, insignificant, or otherwise inconsequential is an ethos unto its own. Obsolete technologies are becoming exponentially rare; I unfortunately passed up an auction for an Osbourne 1 just this week and I'm regretting it more every second since.
I desperatey search thrift stores for anything I can find that isn't the generic consumer garbage that plagues the US; smart tvs, ISP-issued modem/routers, terrible dvd players, "media centers", other smart garbage. Really, any kind of digital circuit that isnt a dumb interface to media is sacrilige in my search. This has become all but a moot point because things like CRTs and other obscure electronics are all picked off at the donation point and then sold online because they've been indentified as valuable or "retro", or outright thrown away because theyre considered too old for anyone to ever give a shit about.
There is a disturbing situation regarding old technology right now where only a very, very specific subset of technologies are considered valuable to a very small, specific subset of consumers; this means that things like CRTs are shipped off to warehouses to be catalogued and sold on online auctions, and their accompanying hardware is being thrown into dumpsters because theres no immediately correlated market for this hardware. For the first time in about 10 years I saw two VCRs at a thrift store (a Quasar VHQ-40M and some lesser generic garbage). This was the first time I had seen a VCR for sale IRL since going to a pawn shop that has since been demolished; the man running the store said I could keep it for free because the person who pawned it was a crackhead and he didn't even know if it worked, but if it did, he wanted me to come back and pay him $10 for it. Lo and behold it worked perfectly, so I went back and did.
I've noticed just this week that both of the thrift store companies I frequent have stopped stocking VHS tapes; I don't know if this is because they have decided they're to be thrown out, sold online, or refused as donations. The last VHS tapes I've bought were Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Austin Powers in Goldmember.
I'm big into DnD podcasts, so Dragon Friends (Australian comedians doing DnD), The Adventure Zone (McElroy boys & dad doing DnD), Not Another DnD Podcast, etc.
Matt Levine's Money Stuff has a podcast with his friend and reporter Katie Greifeld, which is a lot of fun chatting about Money Stuff in an informative way.
I go through cycles of being obsessed with Blank Check (which goes through director's filmographies), and often more specifically, The Phantom Podcast (and sequels) where they watched The Phantom Menace over and over again under the guise of it being the only Star Wars movie.
For me the nadir was the prequel series although I also think The Phantom Menace poisoned the well for the other two which weren't terrible. The more recent films have been a mixed bag with them generally being better the further they are from the original story arc.
For me at least, there's also a certain fatigue factor. While I like The Mandalorian and Rogue One, I'm pretty much done with the franchise. See also Star Trek and MCU. That said, I know that there are a lot of fans who will take pretty much anything you throw out even if they like to belly-ache about it.
I'm not sure if those still count as fans or former fans suffering from nostalgia. Consider Call of Duty. I really liked 3 and 4. After that, not so much, and I have not even bothered with recent ones. They could've stopped there, as far as I'm concerned. I also did not really like The Phantom Menace either, but I get the appeal for _others_ (and I liked the next one a lot more). Do I include that in my review? If it is a personal review, no. If it were a professional review for a magazine or website (i.e. critic)? Sure. I believe (cannot prove) the main reason the latest Star Wars movies gets a lot of flak is Star Wars = Disney, and Disney is too 'woke' for some people. They don't like a female POC lead.
TLJ is better than episode 2 by a massive margin. That film is absolute garbage. The only decent part is the battle of Geonosis. To place that ahead of it absurd lol.
I’d say it’s better than ep 3 too. Phantom Menace is the only respectable film in the prequels - and that’s if we can forgive the gungan nonsense.
Right now I've been watching this 12 hour analysis of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace [1] , I'm not a huge Star Wars fan in fact I haven't seen them pretty much since I was a kid, however this video is so entertaining and goes so much in depth over interesting stuff that not only I'm close to finishing it but also I'm compelled to watch all the films now.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPlzbfIRRqI
I learned the name "Akamai" when I saw it in the URL for the ~~first~~ second trailer for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace in 1998.
edit: it was actually the second trailer in '99
> My personal impression from watching The Force Awakens was the opposite
Totally fair, it really is a remake of A New Hope. I think the same could be said of The Phantom Menace, for better and worse, but there is precedent in how to start a trilogy ;)
Episodes 8 and 9 do a lot more to stuff new ideas. Episode 8 still felt obliged to repeat the major plot points of 5 and 6 (I'll ding it for that), but once those were out of the way, the plot could really do its own thing.
> But sure, let's skip all that and fast-forward to a point where the good guys somehow ended up again as the scrappy underdogs, fighting against an overwhelming enemy. Nevermind even explaining what went wrong.
It's not the reading I came away with. The good guys won, set up the New Republic, became a bit too complacent. Despite Leia and others warning about the First Order faction springing up out of the ashes of the Empire, they weren't taken seriously. These are the resistance the films focus on.
The First Order showed that it was serious business by blowing up Coruscant, capital of the New Republic (as well as the Old Republic and the Galactic Empire).
And Indiana Jones was basically updated adventure serials. The ideas of both were not that original, but the execution was ground breaking. I was also just thinking about how pretty much every blockbuster these days is made as the Phantom Menace was: greensceen, digital backgrounds, digital characters, episodic. The guy basically crafted the blueprint for 50 years of hollywood blockbuster films, especially if you consider his effects work contributions. And he's been mocked and reviled on the internet now for what 20 years?
We're still in the first innings of this stuff. Zero-shot/CLiP work will extend to audio, music, music videos and perhaps full movies. I would love to see: "The Phantom Menace with Jar Jar Binks replaced by leonardo dicaprio using the voice of James Earl Jones"
Consider that many fans watch things they routinely disparage online. For example, many Star Wars fans routinely disparage "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace," and yet it's still one of the most-watched, highest-grossing movies in the history of cinema.
Also, keep in mind there are people who are really fanatical about LOTR. At the end of the spectrum, some of them enjoy this stuff so much that they regularly attend LOTR conventions dressed up as wizards, knights, hobbits, orcs, etc. Those people will watch the new series even if it's only to criticize all the things it got wrong!
Agreed, but to be fair, the comparison is also with high profile "modern" movies.
"The Thing" to most people today is not "one of the greatest movies" but a horror classic and -- visual quality wise -- on par with "Phantom Menace" or "Jurassic Park", if not worse.
I think the criticism is valid: that the physicality of classic SFX is still mostly unmatched by CGI, and the eye and mind notice this.
Remember: Your focus determines your reality. — Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
I agree Glassdoor is in an unusually difficult niche, but rating systems are all over the place.
Steam reviews are interesting because I have started watching someone’s YouTube lets play instead. Even bad ones are mildly interesting and they quickly tell you a lot more about the game than what I get from random reviews.
The best online review system for me is Rotten Tomatoes which shows both what the general public thinks and what the critics do. Looking at say https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_rise_of_skywalker I appreciate many of the viewers liked it, but it’s the critics that I find actually agree with. Yep, worse than the prequels, but not quite walk out of the movie theater bad. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_episode_i_the_phantom_menace, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_episode_ii_attack_of_the_clones, or https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_episode_iii_revenge_of_the_sith
It was a loss leader to lure subscribers and that was during the wild overvaluation of properties. I'd bet the money I do have, that it made back a fraction of that (without using creative accounting). How many people do you think were influenced to use AOL (as it mentioned in the moviephone recordings "brought to you by AOL") because of moviephone? It's surely 0. Do you think the studios EVER paid for anything moviephone offered? That's a no. Moviephone's online portion (where you could actually order things) was acquired about 2 years after the AOL purchase. It was a dog the whole way, which you can tell by the synopsis on wikipedia (or having lived during the heyday). By 2000, something like yahoo movies was a superior way to get information and order tickets. Maybe they made a bit on The Phantom Menace, but they would often be oversaturated and you would get a busy signal during that time.
Why did you exclude the highest grossing film that year from the list? It seems you just selected the movies you thought helped you point.
Movies among the top ten grossing which you left out of the list:
- Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
- Tarzan
- Big Daddy
- The Mummy
- Runaway Bride
- The World Is Not Enough
- The Blair Witch Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1999_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States#cite_note-2
I do agree Hollywood is different today, but rehashing ideas is nothing new.
The Godfather was a book. Twelve Angry Men was a play. Ben Hur (1956) was remake of Ben Hur (1925). All the songs in Singing in the Rain was recycled from previous movies. The Lion King was the first Disney animated movie with an original story (and even then people say it was plagiarized from Kimba).
As for TV shows and made-for-streaming, do you exclude this from Hollywood? It is increasingly the same talent writing producing and acting, so it is more a question of format and distribution.
I went to cinema with two friends tonight. The completion was something like we saw The Phantom Menace on TV, and Sully the time before.
Definitely this model doesn't understand the world. I wonder if multiple layers of neural networks will do. Maybe that's how our brain works, not with a single model, no matter how large.
The Phantom menace failed to achieve many basic elements of film. This 7 part review will explain it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI
or just watch this bit here. Which highlights the soap opera style blocking.. goto 1:20:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABcXyZn9xjg&index=1&list=PLJ_TJFLc25JTwinvdLo4PP2rTFfTd9Uhz
I don't want to weigh in on the discussion about The Phantom Menace, but I do want to address the sentiment that in order to have a valid opinion about some craft, you have to be proficient at that craft.
When you practice something, you usually don't practice it in order to impress others who practice the same thing. Unfortunately, this ends up happening in many cases (usually with abstract things such as pure mathematics or classical music, where appreciation is difficult without context). But in most cases, you produce things that can be appreciated by others, regardless of their interest in the process. If you knit your friend or loved one a cool scarf, they don't necessarily need to be interested in knitting to enjoy wearing it. And if you're a great baker, someone doesn't need to know anything about baking to enjoy your creations.
All the same, ordinary people can have valid negative opinions of things that they aren't proficient in. When a scarf has numerous dropped stitches or a pie doesn't taste quite right, many people can make observations and express their distaste. Just because they aren't knitters or bakers doesn't mean that their critique doesn't "count for anything." They might not be able to pinpoint the part of the process where something went wrong, but that still doesn't invalidate their opinion.
In this case, the intended audience of The Phantom Menace was not film makers, it was ordinary people (in contrast to say Birdman, which may be easier to appreciate if you have some insight into the dramatic world). Maybe it was meant to appeal to a younger crowd (I enjoyed it when I first saw it). Maybe it was meant to appeal to fans of the original trilogy. But the fact remains that aaronbrethorst is entitled to his opinion and his opinion is perfectly valid.
P.S. I also don't like The Phantom Menace, but that doesn't really matter.
The Phantom Menace is objectively a bad film. You want a good film that teaches this to seven year olds? Try Finding Nemo.
The Phantom Menace features offensive racial stereotypes, terrible dialog, A poorly-executed subplot about a trade dispute, and characters that I personally could not and cannot identify with.
Is it fair to speculate that you were born in 1992, making you the 7 year old you refer to above? Search your feelings, zappo2938, you know this is a bad movie!
You see the same problems in students going to film school because they like to see themselves as a director. You see the same problems in big studios making blockbusters for money.
To be Primer, you have to have a specific, burning idea. To be Fassbinder, you need to have something to say (and be a genius).
Else, you can only aspire to be Cars 2 or The Phantom Menace.
Yes, a film reviewer establishes the merit of a film based on his own subjective opinion (though he did review relatively, taking the movie's intended audience into account). What, do you think review isn't subjective? He enjoyed the film and found it deserving of merit, in his opinion. His biases showed on rare occasion, but on the whole his opinion was a fairly trustworthy bellwether.
Your continued thwapping on his score of the film that you oh-so-despise betrays your obvious fault in that you only cared about his reviews when they weren't to your liking, because anybody who's read Ebert for any length of time knows that he hated the scoring and added it against his will. All of his scores must be taken in the context of the review, and he always said (nay, demanded) as much. In the context of the review, you know, the words he wrote describing his experience, we find this:
[...] the characters in "The Phantom Menace" inhabit a plot that is little more complex than the stories I grew up on in science-fiction magazines. The whole series sometimes feel like a cover from Thrilling Wonder Stories, come to life. The dialogue is pretty flat and straightforward, although seasoned with a little quasi-classical formality, as if the characters had read but not retained "Julius Caesar." I wish the "Star Wars" characters spoke with more elegance and wit (as Gore Vidal's Greeks and Romans do), but dialogue isn't the point, anyway: These movies are about new things to look at.
It's almost as if he understands the film's flaws or something! It's a completely different perspective when you consume his opinion as it's meant to be consumed. He spoke out very strongly, all his life, against people like you who walked away with the score as a conclusion (for good reason, obviously).
I originally said all that and replaced it with "Your comment sucks.", because I knew you'd fight with me on this, even though it's entirely pointless. I am aware this is Hacker News, but thank you for the patronizing reminder. Your comment still sucks. Your followup sucks, too, particularly the "go back to Reddit" tone (the irony of a person describing Roger Ebert as "useless" on Hacker News, then pulling the Hacker News card to criticize my comment is not lost on me).
> What can you say about a film reviewer that gives Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3.5 out of 4 stars?
That he enjoyed it and you didn't? Some people really love that film, but I'm perfectly willing to accept that you don't. You should be just as willing to accept that others do.
Your comment sucks.
What can you say about a film reviewer that gives Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3.5 out of 4 stars?
Useless.
I don't get all this praise I'm reading here. Despite being witty, a national treasure, and whatever, he had one core job to do, and he was terrible at it.
> more like an "Oh hey, this was done by John Williams" than something that best fits the film
Really? I would be tempted to argue the opposite. The theme for Jaws, for example, is instantly recognizable and well known precisely because it fit the movie so well. Star Wars is near-impossible to separate from its music - from the main theme, to the imperial march - and his use of choral music in Phantom Menace had a big impact in the years that followed, much the way the "Inception sound" has been showing up all over the place in the last few years.
And citing the bigger action-adventure movies doesn't really make a good point. Williams has done a wide variety of music for movies, all of which is very good (Hook, Schindler's List, ET, etc.)
I do think music has changed over time in how it's used in film, and that Zimmer has a more "modern" style, where the soundtrack ties more closely to the emotional ups and downs than Williams does. (Nothing wrong with that, I like them both.)
Apparently:
> I think the 'pain' comes when there are issues with the c > library that lxml binds to.
Scores 80.99/100
I think that the algorithm needs more work....
Also:
> I count 8: > Avatar (2009) - Yep > Titanic (1997) - Yep > The Dark Knight (2008) - Yep > Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - Yep > Shrek 2 (2004) - Nope > E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - Nope > Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - Yep > Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - Yep > Spider-Man (2002) - Yep > Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Yep
Scored 74.45/100
I count 8:
Avatar (2009) - Yep Titanic (1997) - Yep The Dark Knight (2008) - Yep Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - Yep Shrek 2 (2004) - Nope E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - Nope Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - Yep Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - Yep Spider-Man (2002) - Yep Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Yep
Let's look at the top 10 (I will use US sales): Avatar (2009) - Yep, Titanic (1997)- Yep, The Dark Knight (2008) - Yep, Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) - Yep, Shrek 2 (2004) - Nope, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - Nope, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - Yep, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - Yep, Spider-Man (2002) - Yep, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) - Yep
So 9 for 10