Is there any way to fix Phantom Menace’s sense of momentum? It feels like the film is split into ‘The Opening Part’, ‘The Tatooine Part’, ‘The Coruscant Part’, and ‘The End Part’ without a real sense of progression or reason why they need to be in that order.
A New Hope has events naturally build into each-other. The Death Star part doesn’t feel like ‘The Death Star Part’ if that makes any sense.
Are there any structural changes that would fix all of this? Add a sense of urgency to the whole thing? Or is this problem so fundamental to the script that any editing decision would be useless?