I just watched over the original TPM opening and goddamn it just plods and plods. It saps all of your energy away. The Neimoidian ship stuff is fairly poor, but the Otoh Gunga content in particular just stops the story in its tracks.
I’m certain that Otoh Gunga has to go. And that’s feasibly fixable via Jar Jar dialogue.
What’s lost in doing that though, is the context about the Gungans and Naboo land-dwellers not getting along, so you lose some of the context that’s paid off later when Boss Nass reappears and is won over by Padmé.
I was thinking about this a little more, and wondering what could be done. Potentially, we could allude to it a little plus explain the Jedi starting in the swamp if they’re on the planet (and near the swamps) to broker peace between the Gungans and Naboo. This would demonstrate their role as diplomats, and be a plotline that’s paid off later.
Challenge there would be that you could only carry that information in the crawl.
Which then got me thinking - what if the entire movie is framed as the story of Naboo? In many ways it is - it begins and ends there, and the Tattooine and Coruscant sections are about Padmé trying (albeit failing) to get help back to the planet.
If the entire story was centered on Naboo, that’d be quite easy to grasp - the jeopardy is to the citizens, and our main characters are ultimately working towards saving it from the Trade Federation (and shadowy benefactor). The audience would need less politics up front, but through the lens of Naboo the plot would slowly (in this movie and beyond) expand to a more galactic scope - which I think is fitting for the movie which comes chronologically first.
Perhaps then the crawl could be almost entirely Naboo focused, something like:
The planet Naboo is in danger.
The Jedi Order, mystical wielders
of THE FORCE and defenders of the
Galactic Republic, have foreseen
a crisis.
As tensions mount, Jedi Knight
Qui-Gon Jinn and his apprentice
have been dispatched to the
planet’s swamps in an attempt
to broker peace between the
people of Naboo and the native
Gungans.
As Naboo’s Queen Amidala, champion
of the people, waits, the greedy
TRADE FEDERATION have massed a
deadly fleet around the remote
world, the Republic’s Supreme
Chancellor has sent a small team
of ambassadors to defuse the
situation…