So in preparation for seeing Attack of the Clones tonight at midnight (Van Ness, analog, for reasons I may explain later), I unwrapped my Christmas copy of The Phantom Menace DVD and watched it on Sunday.

When I saw that Star Wars, three years ago, again at a midnight premiere, I realized it had to be great to be able to live up to the Star Wars saga, and that it fell short of the Star Wars standard.

What didn't hit me until I saw it on Sunday (for the first time in nearly three years) is that The Phantom Menace wasn't a bad Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace was a bad movie. Period.

The fact that it was a Star Wars movie was the only thing saving it, and the only reason it garnered $400M on US screens. Of course, we all remember that Jar-jar was out of place, but the underlying racial caricatures, both exemplified by Jar-jar's Jamacian bumbling and the 'Trade Federation' leaders bad Chinese Chop-Fooey dubbed accents, are particularly offensive.

Anakin's first 'Yippee!' should have got him shot. His second should have got the guns trained on the editors. New Star Wars truism: Where there's a rampart, a Jedi's gonna die.

The film was stupid, and insulted our intelligence. A 'planetary blockade' consists of about 20 ships in close proxiity, without any explnation of how they would prevent a ship that chose to leave through the planet's back door? A robot army of thousands that still have humanoid shapes and limitations, use human weapons, talk to each other out loud yet are all apparently thin clients, shut down when a single 'droid command ship' is destroyed?

Why did the trade federation want to take over the backwater planet of Naboo anyhow? If it's a set-up for II and III, fine, but unless the other characters are in on the secret, they shouldn't go around like it makes perfect sense.

Village Voice reviewer Michael Atkinson put my frustrations into cogent prose best when he wrote:

There is an odd cognitive dissonance at work between the obvious ingenuity dedicated to the film's visual details -- alien anatomies, industrial machinery, technological minutiae -- and the retarded intelligence quotient evident in its content.

The only problem is that this was from Atkinson's review of Episode II. Arg.

Okay, venting done. If Episode I was just setting up dominos, then II should be good if for no other reason than to excuse some of the stupidity of I.

Now that so much of Star Wars takes place in the political realm, Lucas should really bring on Sorkin as a co-writer.