Star Wars - Episode I: The Ridiculous Menace

January 1, 2012

Original review:

I’m very sorry to say but I really didn’t enjoy this one (but I really really really wanted to). It felt way too long and the majority of the humor didn’t make me laugh. There were some great parts in it, without a doubt, but on the whole it fell flat. The editing was very choppy a lot of the time. And while I understand that it wasn’t intended to be a masterpiece of editing, all the harsh audio cuts ended up taking me out of the edit too often.

But, the parts that did make me laugh were great. Specifically “The Distance”, the lines from “Airplane”, a lot of the subtitle jokes and Bender’s dialog made me LOL, ROFL, PSML and ROFLcopter (respectively).

Expanded Review:

A/V QUALITY. It's fine. 9/10

VIDEO EDITING. Twas good. 10/10

AUDIO EDITING. In almost every scene new dialog is created for the characters, more so for Qui-Gonn and Obi-Wan. Frink lifted bits and pieces of dialog from a lot of different sources and to me it got to be quite annoying pretty quick. I understand that this was done to create a lot of humorous dialog and for most people they didn’t mind the harsh cuts in audio. But the cuts stood out too often for me to overlook them. I would give the audio editing a 2/10 because of all of abrupt cutting. For future edits I feel that if the audio cuts were smoother I would enjoy it more.

NARRATIVE. Phantom Menace's plot sucks, but this was an improvement to be honest.

ENTERTAINMENT. This is another polarizing aspect of this edit in my opinion. Firstly, let me state that humor is mainly subjective. I don’t think anybody (or anything) can be universally funny. Some people may love a certain joke and some may hate it. That being said, the humor was very much hit-and-miss for me. Many jokes did not make me laugh. I felt that the entire edit was too long for my tastes and that it would have worked a lot better without so many repetitive jokes. I give the entertainment value a 4/10 due to how many of the jokes weren’t funny for me and I got bored too easily. I’m sorry, but the stuff that made me laugh couldn’t outweigh everything else.

I’m not going to give the DVD presentation a rating. It looked fine, but to me how good the DVD menus are doesn’t affect how I feel about the rating itself.

In the end, I will say that I know how much work Frink put into this edit and I do not want him to feel that I am attacking him. I know how it feels to be criticized harshly and I really don’t want one bad review to spoil all the positive ones. A lot of people loved the hell out of this edit and for that Frink should be commended.

Just to echo what others have said I found a lot of the gags to be unfunny though comedy is a selective taste. The consent choppy to the dialogue soon became annoying to the point I just wanted the Phantom Menace instead. While the Phantom Menace was lacking in plot the edit to me removed any and all story, if I’d never seen the Phantom Menace before I wouldn’t had a clue what was going on and who was who.

There are some great moments within the edit the pod race, Yoda snoring and Darth Maul’s walking on sunshine sketch are among the highlights though for every gag that worked I found there to be 10 gags that didn’t work.

The end credits are also a highlight as it shows the number people that have contributed to this edit. TV’s Frink really captured something special and it’s great that the fanedit community were able to help in contributing towards the edit. I also see this as the first of many edits that spoofs a well known film.

Overall it’s worth seeing though I don’t have any desire to watch it again, would have preferred a more shorter 80min film instead as I found it to be a bit of drag 5/10

Review from 1 January 2012

Sorry, just didn’t work for me. I admire the idea and even the execution, but I really couldn’t get into it, however much I wanted to.
The repeating clips I found particularly unfunny, and the constant (unavoidable?) cuts made it very difficult to follow the movie and to understand the (new) motivations of the characters.
A lot of it didn’t make sense to me – like Anni saying “are you an angel” to everyone. Is he retarded?
Also, the cuts were a bit too long, so everything seemed very slow. Cutting fast to the next dialogue would really have helped keep up the tempo.

I did like:
the video game sounds entering the Gungan city
the Darth Vader voice out of Anni
the new subtitles
the video game health bar in the final fight
“Obi Wan”

but, unfortunately I was really bored: Phantom is boring anyway – A new hope may have been better to do this with since the humour doesn’t have to carry the entire film.

I very much uhmmed and ahhed about writing this review because I really like Frink on the forums and felt like I was being somehow disloyal. Then I realised that this is a rating site, and some people LOVE certain movies, and others don’t, and people have different tastes and some people might find this review helpful.
Don’t take it personally Frink. Didn’t work for me, but others loved it. It certainly shows that we can expect more from Frink in the future. For what it’s worth, Congrats on your first edit!

Review from January 2 2012

I’m afraid I’m in the boat with those who thought this idea was probably better on paper than in reality. The video editing was great (I enjoyed the funny transitions/wipes etc), but the audio editing was far too choppy for me. I also found the laughs were few and far between, even though I was able to appreciate the effort that went into this grand production.

It’s clear the film was intended to be in the vein of funny youtube clips like “Vader being an ass” where he keeps closing his ‘pod’… Many of the jokes felt like they were trying to replicate this style of humour. But trying to stretch this concept out over a whole film was hard to watch. Some of the humour works well, but for me, the majority felt forced and fell flat, particularly due to the hard audio cuts.

If this had been released as a series of funny clips from episode 1, just taking the funniest scenes as ‘skits’, I think it would have worked better than trying to thread a whole movie together. But for originality and the immense creativity and effort required to put this whole thing together, drawing individual lines, songs and sounds from so many different sources, credit is certainly due.

Trumps The Phantom Edit by chubby margins. This is now my definitive go-to version of Episold 1. Deal with that, Mr. Lucas.

Certain parts are brilliant and righteously nuts.

Bravo with thunderous applesauce, Frink!