UPDATED: Concerning that 70 minute “review” of Phantom Menace

I’ve been getting sent links to this video for the last week, so I figure it must be of some interest to people, so I’ll put it up here, but there’s something I’d like to say about it first.

I tried to watch it.

I tried to watch it, hoping that I’d be able to rebut each of his arguments (which isn’t hard to do when his point is to say something as great as Star Wars sucks), but he does it in the most obnoxious way that I simply couldn’t get through the video.

I would have listened to his rant about the prequels, but his disdain for Star Wars, the people who made it, and fans who like it was so great in the first few minutes, I simply couldn’t get through it.  It angered me and got my blood boiling.  If you want to convince people of something, insulting them for their opinion is not the way to do it.  If someone wants to go through and boil some of his arguments down into a form that’s less condescending to those of us who can actually give tangible reasons for liking the movie and why it’s great, I can properly refute them.

Until then, I won’t be watching this video nor giving it any more attention because of the lack of respect it shows for those of us who DO like Star Wars and aren’t searching desperately for reasons to dislike it.

What I will do, however, is write some articles about why, from a storytelling standpoint, Phantom Menace is a tremendous motion picture and deserves a lot more respect than it gets.  It might even be the prequel I watch the most.

I’ve already written a few pieces about it, and I think they’re worth revisiting.

In Defense of the Star Wars Prequels at Huffington Post and

In Defense of Jar Jar Binks at Den of Geek

I also defended them quite well in a debate on the Geek Show Podcast.  You can hear that episode here. (It’s the second half of the show.)

UPDATE: It seems as though I’m going to have to watch this travesty and do a point by point rebuttal.  Look for it sometime after the holiday.

So, for those of you interested, here’s part 1 of his 7 part rant.