Liam Neeson Praises The Phantom Menace and Castmate Ahmed Best

Much love and respect for him! Now even more than before

 

The Phantom Menace certainly receives too much hate. It's not a great film, but in hindsight is stands up better than Attack of the Clones. The pod race is great and the dual at the end was fantastic. There are elements that just needed to be reigned in... specifically I think back to the magnificent scene where the flags are displayed before the pod race and then the next shot is some potty humor with Jar Jar. If that was cut from the film no one would miss it. Jar Jar didn't bother me as much as some people, but overall it was just too much from that character. I love that Lucas was willing to take big risks. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

 

Unpopular opinion: TPM is a pretty good movie, the best of the PT films. To me, personally, the pod race segment is way, WAY too long, Jar Jar a bit distracting*, Darth Maul criminally underused**, and Jake Lloyd pitifully misdirected***. That said, the movie is solid and it burst open the SW franchise to a whole new side to Star Wars (i.e. it's not all about good para-military guerrillas fighting evil state-military armies and armadas); great stuff!

*As far as I can remember, I thankfully never hated the character, even back then. Jar Jar annoyed me at times, in the same way that C3PO sometime does in the OT, but even as a young adult, I understood that the character was not written for me. Also, Ahmed Best is criminally underappreciated!
**It annoys me that Darth Maul wasn't put to some evil use in acts 1 and 2, robbing him of tension-buildup for the climax. All he does is stand/walk around being mysterious, looking ominously through his micro-binoculars, and show up to fight Jinn when the gang is leaving Tatooine. Rather than having Kenobi & Jinn & the Jedi Council sit around discussing how scary this dark figure is (i.e. story-"telling"), we could've had scenes where Maul was actually scary (i.e. story-"showing"). By comparison, Darth Vader is introduces as a proactive and dangerous opponent right from the start in ANH, leading troops in battle, kidnapping a democratically elected politician, personally murdering crew aboard the diplomatic ship, force-strangling an Imperial officer, and engages in (off-screen but explicit) torture before ever igniting his lightsaber and face off against Old Ben; that is how you build up a villain!
***Poor Jake. Imagine what young Anakin, the linchpin character of the entire franchise, could have been had he received proper direction. Imagine Jake receiving direction on par with the kids in GoT or Stranger Things or... you know... virtually any Spielberg film in the 80s! Instead, Lucas infamous "good enough - we've got the story points across" attitude to directing (which Ford, Hamill, Fisher and others actually had to fight during filming of ANH) definitely hurt Jake's performance; the other, senior actors manages to push through using their own experience in acting, but young Lloyd had no such luxuries to fall back upon.

But yeah, kudos to Neeson for standing up for TPM. Despite it's directorial issues, it's a fine movie, and one I'm looking forward to soon be watching again