zombie84 said:
You can call it something else, but you'd be wrong--or at least, that the majorly held opinion and wide public census is that its "poor" to one degree or another
Poor to whom? On what basis do you claim the wide public census? Of course, nobody can claim the entire public says this or that, but to the questioned audience, they said otherwise.
The film received mediocre reviews and was slaughtered by the major press.
Many fans hated it,
And many loved it, and many liked it.
I don't know where there is perception amongst a small group of people that believe it isn't infamous; were you guys around in 1999? The entire non-PT-fan world didn't just get amnesia and forget all the bad press it received.
I'm not saying it hadn't bad press, it just wasn't the majority of it. Just like TESB or RotJ.
There are a swath of editorials on it, many of them still online for you to view yourself. According to Rotten Tomatoes, it has a moldy 39% meter from actual critics, and a 5.2 rating, which metacritic basically corroborates. Not exactly great. In fact, pretty poor. At IMDB, it rates better, but only 6.5 or something like that, still rather mediocre. It swept the razzies, routinely appears on "disappointing movies" list and the like, and just in terms of general experience gets mentioned in connection with mediocre films. Personally, I don't think it's totally terrible, but I will agree with the public concensus that it's not very good.
Again, public concensus is not made of film critics, or a couple of lists made by a couple of people. It's the audience, the general public. There was a survey about this back in '99 that I'm almost sure is still online. I'll try to find it and post it here.
This may have come from George Lucas, who claimed it had positive reviews, or they may also be remembering a RT article from 2005 that is fundamentally flawed, or perhaps simply repeating statements heard from other prequel fans, who I have noticed try to convince people of a theoretical positive reception. The simply truth is that they are incorrect.
I don't recall those GL claims. But even if true, I wouldn't call them entirely incorrect.
The film received positive notices, sure, in fact quite a few, but it received a lot of awful, terrible reviews as well; most reviews were so-so, and even in the positive ones there is often a tinge of disappointment that the film wasn't as good as the others. That being said, there is this perception that critics ravaged the film, and that it is universally hated--and that's where the misperception comes in. According to reviews, it is disappointing overall, sub-par--but not the worst film in history.
While I agree about the general misperception, I have a slightly more positive view of the film's reception (still based on the info that came out at the time, and over the years). Anyway, since none of us have the universal survey, truth, whatever, I guess we have to leave it at that.
I've studied the critical reception of the film in two separate studies if you would like to look at the reviews at least.
Yes, I've read those before. I respect your opinion and research, even though I still disagree with some points.