The Phantom Menace

Star Wars®: The Audience Strikes Back

When the words, “Long ago in a galaxy far,far away” first appeared on a big screen, there was, for all intents and purposes , no Internet.

After we watched episodes four, five and six we had only magazines or newspapers to tell us what we thought. The big name TV reviewers told us what they thought, but that was it.

Now, nearly a decade after Return of the Jedi, we need only log online to see what we, the public ,think of George Lucas’s latest offering, The Phantom Menace. I checked the message boards, not only here at MovieForum.com but on other sites as well, to see what others thought of the film. What I found was fascinating and a little disturbing.

There are as many differing opinions about this movie as there are different species of alien in it. If you haven’t seen the movie, that’s a lot of opinions. In fact, many of those opinions happen to be about George’s aliens. People think that there were too many aliens, that the some of the aliens had a saccharine factor that goes off the Gooey scale, and that it’s an insult to our intelligence to have a cutesy factor in the film.

Speaking of cutesy, a large majority of fans, who have seen The Phantom Menace, want the character of Jar Jar Binks to die in some interestingly gruesome ways. Already there are sites devoted to the annihilation of the unfortunate Mr. Binks. Mr Showbiz has found Jar Jar a number of career choices he can make if Phantom doesn't work out.

There is another element of Jar Jar Binks that angers and disturbs some movie fans. Charges of racism have been levelled at Lucas and the clashing views on the subject have sent emotional temperatures skyrocketing on many message boards, including our own. [More]

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