Got my Star Wars Blu-Ray sets in (20 bucks a piece on Amazon was a nice deal), so I'm giving the whole series a rewatch. Since I didn't rewatch the Prequels before Episode 7 last time, I thought I'd start with them and I'm going through Episode 7 and Rogue One as I haven't rewatched them since the theater.
Of course I'm gonna say this movie sucks. It's a bad movie. Unless my opinion on Episode 2 changes when I watch that next, this is gonna be the worst one. Seems like every time I try to rewatch these movies, I feel like maybe Jar Jar wasn't as bad as I remember, but then I watch it, and he's as bad if not worse. He's a miserably unfunny character that never once makes a scene work and actively works to make scenes worse. You can cut him out of the movie and nothing changes structurally. Visually this movie is still getting worse with age. Some stuff works, but there's so much that doesn't.
My previous opinion was that this movie only had two good scenes. Basically Pod Racing and the fight with Darth Maul. On this current watch, it has 1.5 good scenes. Pod Racing, outside of a few parts, is still great, it just makes me want to play the Pod Racing game again lol It's a really awesome idea and it looks surprisingly good most of the time. Sadly the Darth Maul fight suffers due to its ending. I didn't realize how weak it is when Darth Maul is killed. He's standing there, staring at a helpless Obi Wan, watching him the whole time, but he just lets Obi Wan fly up, over him, and just get sliced in half? It's so anti-climatic. It's good up till that point, which sucks.
Otherwise this movie is badly written (Why do they take Anakin to Naboo? They are going to an active warzone, it makes no sense to bring him, other than for badly written reasons to get him to do the stupid space battle scene), badly directed, and mostly boring. It actually frustrates me how poor this movie is, because there's something good in here, but it's not remotely realized in any way. I thought by now, after nearly 18 years from release, I'd feel less annoyed by the movie, but I think I enjoyment for good scifi is too strong to let this go.
Eh, at least we got some good games out of this mess of a movie.