How To Use a Lightsaber, Deconstructing the Choreography of The Phantom Menace

There are three things about Star Wars: The Phantom Menace that stick out to me as good. They in no way redeem the whole movie, but, much like all of Iorek Byrnison’s scenes in The Golden Compass movie, I wouldn’t mind paying for a DVD of just those bits. They are: Queen Amidala/Padme, functioning as a clever, dedicated, compassionate and powerful character before she gets relegated to love interest, plot device, and crying gestational receptacle for later main characters in the later two movies; Liam Neeson‘s Qui-Gon Jinn; and the movie’s climactic lightsaber fight.

I might have to shorten that list now.