Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace

In terms of craft, it scores off the chart. Dazzling to look at, its an all-you-can-eat buffet of special effects. But if you're hungering for creativity, all you'll find is a light snack.

So this is a bizarre, Janus-like creature, looking both backward and forward, setting the scene for a story that it never quite gets around to telling. Still, thats Star Wars for you. An ongoing story, a narrative jigsaw, a phenomenon in portions.

Liam Neeson has manfully carried the action on his shoulders throughout (the subsequent prequels desperately miss him) and his final words...provide the movie with its only real weight.

...while matters such as plot and performance might be sorely lacking...the movie successfully raises the bar in terms of digital animation, merchandise-friendly characters and stay-tuned franchise loyalty.

...there are the breathtaking sets, creatures, robots and spacecraft, as well as the fascination of meeting the ancestors of the characters we know so well a generation earlier.

Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound...have so transfigured moviegoing into a digital, larger-than-life, realer-than-real experience blurring the natural and the processed that the humanity of the resulting product ceases to exist.

What The Phantom Menace lacks in compelling dialogue (and it's a lot) and character development, it makes up for in Industrial Light and Magic's technical wizardry as our heroes undergo a series of alternately humorous and hair-raising adventures.

...it delivers enough blissed-out thrills to please the easily pleased, but seems less like a satisfying story than a sketchy prologue to Episodes II and III...

A good movie touches you, and Phantom Menace - cocooned in cold, computer-generated images and dull, unsympathetic characters - couldn't poke a single finger out of its hard drive shell.

It's big, goofy fun. That's all. Consider it a visual narcotic, so rich and crammed with imaginative frills and evocative images and dizzying designs that your eyes become drunk just watching it.