You know, if it weren't a Star Wars film, I'd have to say that TPM is a damn imaginative and sincerely made childrens fantasy thats utterly unique and quite fun for most of its duration. I enjoyed it on that level when it came out, and I still do. Its a very fun film if you can sort of disassociate it from its place as the first episode of the Star Wars saga, which it does a terrible and disrespectable job of existing as.

But theres some soul in the film in its genuine conviction to entertain as a kids adventure fantasy; I still don't think its a very good film even as this, the writing and acting is not superb and the storyline gets bogged down a lot, but its certainly worth watching, and more than once. In a lot of ways thats what it seems like Lucas was really interested in, and its shows--he was more interested in creating a unique children's fantasy adventure from scratch, which he mostly did, but he didn't have the guts to actually make one from scratch so he had to build it within the confines of the Star Wars franchise, and I think because of that its a failure because it gets weighted down by its obligations to said franchise in terms of storyline and characters. I think being couped up for 20 years without being able to tell a story and then having the ability to portray all the crazy things he had seen in his imagination, Lucas let his Star Wars prequel turn into a sort of personal pet project--its no surprise that the film is basically the plot of Hidden Fortress mixed with Dinotopia, but with references to and characters of the Star Wars series amongst the storyline. He basically made it as divorced from the world of Star Wars as he could get away with.

10 years later it still stinks as a Star Wars prequel and as a serious movie, yet I can't help but feel like theres too much imagination in it to write it off completely. It has a very strange identity.