Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review (Part 1 of 7)
What I did with my afternoon: watch this 70-minute takedown of The Phantom Menace, compare it with Nick Davis’s review (a startlingly solid B- if you can believe that), youtube other Star Wars documentaries, marvel in the brilliance of the original trilogy, and wish I could analyze movies and their making like the pros.
Normally I wouldn’t share or recommend a video like the review above, because the creator deems it necessary to mix in a lot of tasteless and triggering “gags” that position the narrator as an abusive, misogynistic sociopath, which a) does nothing to help the ever-beleagured public image of people who like Star Wars/Sci-Fi* as socially-inept jerks, and b) is the most tired strategy for producing an easy chuckle outside of the Poop Joke.
But the fact that the review melds dramatic criticism of plot and character, meticulous cinematographic analysis, and careful research of the process and reception of the film with a shtick-y narrator and cheap editing tricks to produce a biting, compelling, and often genuinely funny attack on the film makes me willing to hold my feminist objections at bay for a hot second and tell you to watch the thing.
This post continues at my long-form blog. I encourage you to click through, if only because that dangling, unexplained asterisk up there is resolved in the long version. That kind of thing is like an unclosed parenthesis, it’d drive me crazy. CLICK.
I started watching this a week ago. And loved it. And almost posted it. But the crazy narrator ruined it for me. When the woman was chained up in his basement I just stopped. It was so good too, that it was a shame he tried to interject that. I couldn’t get past it. It skeeved me out.
