The Phantom Menace Review

This ninety-minute review of the disaster that was The Phantom Menace carries more entertainment value than all three of the soulless, joyless prequels combined. I watched The Phantom Menace once and that was more than enough. I've come back to watch this review about once a year since it was released. Hilarious every time, dead-on accurate every time, exposing George Lucas for the bloated ego-sotted tub of cloistered hackery he has become every time. The "Plinkett is a serial killer" angle of the reviews started to wear thin with the sequels, but it's not overdone in this one and adds some good, if tasteless humor, on top of the criticism.

The only way it could be better is if it came with a deluded fanboy that you could force to watch it.

Mr. Plinkett is a film-fluent yet socially-ignorant critic whose obsession with cinema is totally contrasted by his take on reality and his hilariously out-of-touch perspective on society and respect; it's made funnier when we see how his knowledge on stories and beats gives him certain wisdom that he willingly ignores in life. He picks this infamous film apart: right to the bone, everything ranging from the story to the characters and development over the movie's run-time are analyzed and dissected to the nth degree.

I love this review: it holds a single film up for judgement against modern cinema itself and clearly shows how The Phantom Menace simply doesn't hold up to its cinematic predecessors, Star Wars or otherwise. While I enjoyed the movie when it came out, even I can admit and willingly point out things wrong with the movie. That's the fun of criticism; you can still be critical regardless of whether the targeted work is good or not and still say something meaningful in the end. This review is one of the most entertaining, sincere and outright hilarious things I've ever seen. It's a masterpiece not just of internet culture and fandom itself, but also film criticism and how self-awareness, and awareness of other's mistakes, leads to learning stuff you never knew you wanted to know at all: in this case, how a fictional serial killer knows more about story structure than late-90s Lucas did when he made the prequels.

I LOVE this review and the series which follows is equally brilliant. It's fantastic filmmaking, criticism and a thorough analysis of cinema that even Roger Ebert (a man who rated The Phantom Menace 3.5/4 stars) praised for its open-ended dissection of 'The Hero's Journey'.

Although there is a lot of humor, which can often been extremely dark, you can tell very clearly that the main goal of the review isn't to make you laugh, it's to inform you. The humor serves as an effective way of keeping you interested and engaged for 70 minutes.

Stoklasa clearly has a great knowledge of film and he displays it here by thoroughly breaking down every element of the film to convey why he believes it was so awful.

It's entertaining and informative.

What we have here is an amateurish, purile, biased, incompetent, bordering on parody with a bad voice-over and interspersed with horrid "sketches" video posing as an in-depth analysis of an actual professional film by a bunch of wannabe filmmakers who could never write, direct or act in anything remotely praiseworthy.

The video is full of lies, be it clips taken out of context and edited to suit the narrative, interviews with their best friends acting as "random fans" to support the false narrative, and genuine ineptitude to properly analyse films that are beyond their artistic means. The critiques are pure drivel from a bunch of cinematically illiterate YouTuber reviewers, and NOT real film critics.

The coward "acting" in the role of "Mr. Plinkett" is also a Star Trek fanboy and not a Star Wars fan, so keep that in mind. And the whole premise of these Prequel-bashing videos are totally invalidated by watching the behind-the-scenes featurettes, not to mention the blatant praise given to the cashgrab, artistically bankrupt, retro reboots that makes up the Sequel Trilogy that "Mr. Plinkett" loves.

How do I describe this piece of brilliant lunacy. I remember seeing Star Wars I with all the hoopla on the evening it opened. Excitement was in the air, hundreds of people dressed up like characters of the movie and afterwards, most of the audience left with.... a WTF look on their faces. This film skewers The Phantom Menace in hilarious fashion. What's scary is how accurate most of the points are and how difficult it must have been to make a movie this illogical, sloppy and lazy.

This is like MSTK3000 but using an analytical approach to the entire movie, including some hilarious sideshow bits from time to time. Clearly a great deal of time was spent preparing this lampooning of a very poor movie. While you might think it would get boring quickly... it doesn't. The jokes mostly hit and there is a remarkable amount of hilariously bad material in this film to easily fit into 100 minutes but this film is only about 70 something in total.

It's no fluke the other reviewers gave this film such a high grade. There is no commercial motive. It's just damn hilarious.