THAT PREQUEL MOVIE
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review written 2/22/2003

I may have laughed at this more than any other fan film ever. Of course, at 45 minutes, there's more than enough opportunities for laughs. This takes on TPM in ways nothing else has. And survives.

Let's take the bad stuff first. This film looks terrible. Boring, flat backgrounds. Animation limited to the point of staticness. The art may have been done by a three-year-old. You cannot have bad art in a 45-minute Flash animation. It simply doesn't work.

And the voice acting—well, creator Alex Bobbs does most of it himself, and not very well (although his Qui-Gon voice has a certain charm).

And some of the jokes, indeed, many, fall flat.

But still, the laughs are there, and they keep on coming. There's not a single thing in TPM that goes unexamined. Remember Obi-Wan's line "What's this?" when he meets Jar Jar? Bet you never thought you could make a good joke out of that. The Neimoidians get an interesting spin that works well. George Lucas shows up a few times, often very-well used (I assure you that the line "Ha, ha, Antilles" works better in the film than it does on paper). Ric Olié's line about a droid invasion (not gonna spoil it for you) had me shrieking with laughter.

Just tracking the jokes in chronological order, the humor ranges from the surreal ("Have you made apple pie?") to the sort of stuff only a Star Wars geek will get ("stupid metal plates") to the sitcom-ish ("I just sneezed") to the deconstructionist ("That's good" says Nute Gunray) to the observational ("How come we droids talk to each other?") to the gleefully ridiculous ("We can't land there!") and genuinely clever ("the ruler of Sanity"). I'm listing only the good jokes, mind you. I don't want to list the bad ones. Too painful.

Boss Nass has never been funnier (his timing in particular is comedy gold). Another example of good timing is the Senate scene. One great thing about animation is that you can refine timing to a frame. Queen Amidala has a line "I don't get it", and it is devastatingly funny (in fact, I stole it and have worked the joke concept into one of my own scripts). There are so many ways that joke could have NOT worked. Yet it works. (Queen Amidala's general handling, unfortunately, is one bad joke stretched out for the whole movie until you're so sick of it you want to die. Palpatine/Sidious is handled much the same way, come to think of it. Hmm.)

Oh, one more thing. Once Were Warriors gets mentioned while describing a villain. This is well before Temuera Morrison, the star of that film, was cast as Jango.

Anyway.

I would have loved to see this script in the hands of someone else, who could chop out all the unfunny bits and maybe not make the animation suck (not that I have any right to talk). But, "question not the ways of the script, there's always a bigger fish." Words to live by.

That Prequel Movie is perhaps the biggest loss of potential since the movie it mocks. But, like The Phantom Menace, it's still a great ride. There's no other film this long and this funny that can be downloaded in this short a time. Set aside 45 minutes and watch this gem. It's lacking in many areas, but somehow seeing any lower grades looked wrong to me. I'd give it an A------ if I could. It made me laugh... it made me laugh.