About Jar Jar . . . I'll admit that I can stand him. Even though slapstick humor and fart jokes don't work in Star Wars, at all, I can still find myself laughing at them a little bit as a guilty pleasure. For me, I get amusement from the idea of someone "failing upwards," like Rick McCullum or some other foolish person. Again, there's nothing particularly good about him, but I can tolerate him in my amusement I guess I could say. Also, I was always sort of impressed in a technical way at how they could make a digital character look almost decent next to everybody and on real movie sets (most notably after seeing how horrible the digital Jabba looked in those scenes with Han Solo in the special edition of Star Wars).
Originally posted by: lord3vil
Save for a few pieces of music, I also find John Williams score for the PT to be rather uninspiring. I don't think he is as creative today as he was in his earlier years, but what he was given to work with for these films didn't make things easier for him of course. The fantastic score of the OT is an integral part of the films that contributes immensly toward keeping the viewers emotionally attached and some of the pieces stand well even on its own, without the movie to support them. As far as sound effects go, the OT gave us the on/off, hum and clash of the lightsabers, the blazing lasers, the shrieking TIE-fighters, Vader's breathing and voice and the list goes on.
That right there is why I like episode one the most I'm guessing. The music was far more gripping and moving, even if nothing on the screen deserved it. I think John Williams started figuring out that Star Wars had become a joke by episode two and stopped trying as hard.
Oh yeah, another reason I liked episode one was the larger nature of everything. You had small scale troops fighting alongside the jedi or flying to defend their planet. They were sort of put in as token elements, yet at least they were present. In the two later movies it was all about the main characters and if they could make enough meaningless clones to fight the aready mindless robots or not. Everything fet so small by comparison.