Perhaps the prequels are uniquely suited to appealing to kids, which is why they are getting more love these days from people who grew up with them, as well as kids today who are seeing them for the first time. If that’s true, then perhaps the only cohort who can’t widely appreciate them are those who were already too old when the films premiered.
Yeah, and if TPM was some standalone children’s movie, nobody would bother criticizing it.
But the tonal shift of TPM towards a more explicitly juvenile tone was really jarring I think to many OT fans. To quote from an early 1999 review of TPM from Eli Roth:
“There are so many other glaring problems with [Phantom Menace] that I don’t even know where to begin. You should understand when you go to see it that this is truly a movie for kids. I remember suffering through Hook thinking, ‘Man, Spielberg’s really lost it. He had kids, and it completely fucked him up. He’s afraid to kill anybody–bad guys included.’ I think Lucas is going through something similar right now, having kids of his own.”
I think this was a really alienating experience for OT fans. It was for me, at least. Of course, in retrospect, the juvenile tone of Phantom Menace was barely even the biggest problem, and some people even argue that TPM has aged the best among all the Prequels, since it’s the only Prequel with the narrative structure of a “normal movie” and it predates the switch to 100% digital film-making.
Regardless, even in 1999 when TPM was released, before I had any ability to judge it in a wider context, I already had this subconscious realization that this new version of Star Wars just wasn’t made for me.