This is a polarizing topic, no matter how you look at it. Until The Last Jedi existed, this movie was the one that cut an entire fanbase in half. This is the movie that George Lucas used to start a witch hunt for any and every piece of lore in the Star Wars Extended Universe and stamp it out. This entire process would be repeated once again, but that is a story for another day. George Lucas has been seen as Star Wars's one and only creative entity that was involved in its formation. This is absolutely not true.
The Phantom Menace is the first film in the prequel trilogy, and it is the beginning of his unhinged writing as if everything in the Skywalker Saga was linked together like some very strange quilt that keeps repeating the same patches over and over again. This whole "It's like poetry, it rhymes" mentality he used with this trilogy that meant he needed to bring back every element he could from the original trilogy. No one was there to tell him no, these things were all he could think of. He needed nostalgia bait from the original trilogy in order to give it that original cred that honestly ended up hacking the story up into pieces. This trilogy is made of plotholes more than it is a story.
George Lucas didn't seem to notice that he disregarded the fans completely and destroyed an entire extended universe in the process. With all of this horrible writing going on with the prequels, even if they got somewhat better, there should have been some thought given to the stories that were written by more capable people. The story of Mara Jade marrying Luke Skywalker, the story of Grand Admiral Thrawn, Boba Fett's escape from the Sarlak Pit. All of these things could have been handled with some grace from the original creator and yet he decided to sweep it all aside. What we got as a result does not make up for what was lost in the process.
The problem was that it was aimed at a younger demographic, hince Jar Jar Binks and his childish demeanor. The fact that he is sidelined in later entries only goes to show that Lucas had no real plan to begin with, and he flat out announces that he wrote these scripts in a hurry. Somehow, Anakin Skywalker created C-3PO and had R2-D2 as a droid. Several times, the story proves that either Obi-Wan was flat out lying to Luke, or he was misremembering certain elements of his story.
That's not even going into the fact that R2-D2 would still remember the entirety of these events. Even if he couldn't tell them directly to many people, 3PO could easily translate him and he can translate himself through any other computer. Including all of these elements really strips the bounds of many worldbuilding elements present in the original trilogy. So many things are done differently, but so many things are kept the same. Sometimes it works and sometimes it really doesn't.
Episode 1 does one thing correctly, the lightsaber fighting. These are handled with some of the most amazing choreography ever put to screen and the ending fight scene between Qui Gon Jin, Obi-wan and Maul is harolded as one of the best scenes in general. That, however, is marred with scenes from both an entire other war, and a space battle similar to the Death Star and the Battle on Yavin, if they were piloted by mannequins. Sharing such enormous amounts of screentime between three entire climaxes happening at once was a death stroke for this film.
With the Gungans and their continuously annoying presence along with some very stilted acting all around, it seems like George was doing it in a bit of a rush. The speed pod race was there to create toys and video games, and it did just that. It was a cute scene and had some good special effects, even beating some of the movies today. It's still undermined by the acting, though. Anakin's very young actor, Jake Lloyd, apparently wasn't given all that great of direction. With Jingle All the Way, he didn't do terribly on the acting front. It's fairly safe to assume that Lucas was not very good with kids. The final space battle was also marred with his very slow and awkward dialogue.
Ewan McGregor and Liam Neeson are two saving graces for this film. They bring a quiet dignity that cannot be overlooked in the grand scheme of things. They took their roles very seriously and even brought about some of the cooler scenes with the lightsabers with or without their stunt doubles. It really was a shame that Neeson never returned for any of the other entries, as they were rather dumb for killing his character and Darth Maul. They obviously knew this was a mistake because they brought Maul back with a mechanical lower half.
There were so many things mishandled with this film, it's a little dizzying. It can be looked back on with nostalgia as a less serious, more cartoony look at Star Wars. The prequels got better in some regards, but George never seemed to lose that edge of nostalgia bating both through Yoda and Emperor Palpatine. There were so many more in the series, but those are the two that they really ground out along with Anakin and Obi-wan. The villains became disposable and the storylines became more and more nonsensical. That means nonsensical both in terms of their own storylines and the continuity with the original trilogy. The sad part is, this is not even as bad as Star Wars got, not even by a long shot. However, we are here to celebrate Star Wars for its merits more than stomp on it for its faults, so let's be grateful for how... "good" the prequels turned out. Virtua Midichlorians.
