AOTC was the worst SW movie for me. The romance was a joke, Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman had zero chemistry, and that was like half the movie. All the mystery stuff with Obi-Wan takes forever to get going. The stuff with the Jedi army at the end didn't interest me much, since I didn't know anything about those characters. I thought TPM was better than AOTC. While Jar Jar was silly and it feels too much like a prologue, TPM was actually an okay adventure and all the lightsaber battles were cool. Liam Neeson carries the entire movie.
The Phantom Menace was the worst, I thought. It just seemed like a bad remake of A New Hope. That, and that damn podrace scene that dragged on FOREVER. I still say that scene would have been better served by a conversation between Padme and Shimi. We would have gotten to know them, AND their conversation could have been used to illiustrate Anakin's Force powers. It's dialogue that makes a story, not action scenes and special effects. And, with occasional (brief) cuts back to the podrace, we could have seen Anakin in action, but keep to focus on the two women so they could add something to the story. Particularly since they were both dead two movies later.
AOTC gets my vote. Okay, TPM was horrible but maybe just maybe that was because of the unwise decision to start off the trilogy with Anakin as a kid. So this time, he's in his late teens, and that will solve everything!!! Or so I confidently told myself as I waited for the lights to go down. I still remember that awful sinking feeling in Hayden Christensen's first scene when I realized, Obi Wan Kenobi or no Obi wan Kenobi, there really was no hope...
Yes. Sith's problem is that it doesn't have the creative room to do anything original because it has to reach a known endpoint -- the fall of Anakin and the battle atop the lava. Sith is two and a half hours of waiting for something original, something surprising to happen, and it never does.
TPM. It has elements I quite like, and as a standalone movie it might be better than AotC. But as part of the Star Wars saga it is just a waste of time. The prequel trilogy is about Anakin Skywalker becoming Darth Vader. Yeah there is other stuff involved, but the through-line is Anakin's story. So what does TPM have to do with Anakin's journey? Nothing, he tags along on some adventures, he makes no hard decisions, his character is not particularly defined. Other than Anakin being strong in the Force and labeled as the "chosen one" nothing he does in TPM matters overall. Everything we needed to know about Anakin from TPM could have been slipped into AotC in a few lines of dialogue or even a flashback scene or something. And considering that the Anakin we meet in TPM and the Anakin we meet in AotC feel like very different characters it probably would have worked better from a consistency standpoint.
Each one improved on the last one. Phantom Menace is just boring to me now... AOTC is half good, half Anakin/Padme... I love ROTS I've always said TPM shouldn't even have been a movie. It should have just been a novel. It's just too disconnected from the main story. AOTC should have been Episode One, and Episode Two should have been the Clone Wars ending with the Battle of Coruscant.
I voted ROTS also. While it has some positive points, they are overwhelmed by Anakin's completely unconvincing turn to the dark side. George had 6 hours of film time to sell us the Anakin/Vader arc and he failed to do so in any kind of believable, compelling way. So despite containing plenty of action and fan service, ROTS is the worst prequel to me.
Pretty much agreed with this. The biggest problem with AOTC is the Hayden/Natalie romance; it just doesn't work. I never felt the love that's meant to exist between them, and that's a big problem for the movie, and also for the wider story arc. The start is good, the Obi-Wan detective stuff is pretty enjoyable, and the final battle is fun. But the movie lacked the emotional core of that love story working more effectively and not being so by-the-numbers. With a few years distance, TPM is probably my favourite of the PT. It has a great storyline that makes sense, some good action sequences, and even some pretty decent acting from our main Jedi. Sure, some of the Jar Jar stuff drags, but it's fairly easy to ride it out. ROTS is a proper rollercoaster of a movie, with a fun series of action set-pieces and an effective sense of impending doom hanging over the final third. It's probably the best constructed movie out of all three. But I enjoy TPM a bit more on rewatching, probably for the lighter tone it has.
Well, there is one thing, but since it's only hinted at as a possibility and never firmly established ( which remains the situation to this day ), your point stands.
For Anakin's awkward compare/contrast of skin & sand, and for Padme's unfathomable willingness to not only forgive Anakin for committing genocide but to be surprised one movie later when he does it again, Attack of the Clones is easily the worst PT film.
I lump them all together and say they all sucked. If someone were holding a light sabre to my neck I guess I'd pick "The Phantom Menace" as being slightly worse than the others. The interminably long pod race scene that someone above mentioned, annoying little "Ani" and a huge battle between 2 cgi armies are some reasons. The less said about Jar Jar the better.
I voted TPM, though it's hard to choose one in "pointless Anakin and lots of Jar-Jar" vs. "the romance"... talk about a Sophie's Choice Funny, the podrace was my favorite thing about the whole PT lol, and the main reason I saw it again in the theaters. In all honesty I only saw 2 and 3 once, in the theaters, and and have never felt any desire to see any of them again. I don't really recall anything about the plot details of them past a couple of scenes and how awfully the romance was written, and don't really care... which is what I'm still maddest at GL about. He made me not care about Star Wars, the puke.
What might that be? I'm genuinely curious. The only thing I can think of is that Obi-Wan, not Anakin, might be the actual father of Luke and Leia.
That's the handicap that the whole PT was laboring under - being a story where "we all know what happens," yet needing to be surprising and engaging regardless. But even so, there's no reason why the PT needed to be as horrendously bad as it was. The reasons why Anakin fell to the dark side could have been surprising and also have made sense, instead of being idiotic because the whole story hinges on the main character being a contemptable moron. (The Clone Wars is coming up with much better ideas in this regards.) And even for the Mustafar battle, Lucas could have played around with our expectations of what that battle was about. Other than it being Anakin vs Obi-Wan, and Anakin loses rather badly, what did we really know? Turn the story on its head so that it's ironic and unexpected. It could have happened before Anakin fell to the dark side. It could have been the reason Anakin fell. There could have been some other unexpected factor that changed the meaning of the battle - Obi-Wan was fleeing with the twins when Anakin forced him down onto the planet, and to Obi-Wan, the fight was about preventing their daddy from finding them and safeguarding the future of the galaxy in a very personal way - personal for him, personal for the audience. Those are just some random ideas to illustrate the point that for an ambitious, creative mind, the basic story of the PT was an opportunity, not a burden. The possibilities were endless. After all, it has a big advantage over most stories: an audience that is already interested in it. You don't have to convince people to care enough about the characters to go to the theater. What a massive wasted opportunity. Okay, one thing I can say for Lucas is that he had the good sense not to go there! (Even the scene where Anakin flips out and accuses Padme of having an affair with Obi-Wan made me cringe.)
There are two scenes that I can think of. Anakin and Padme have a conversation at one point early in the film, and he questions her about Obi-Wan in a menacing way. Then, on Mustafar, Anakin's rage with Obi-Wan makes more sense if it's fueled by jealousy at seeing his pregnant wife with a potential rival.