I was dragged to see The Phantom Menace by an 11 year old (I would have gone myself). We both hated it. It is really boring, boring in the sense of completely predictable, and makes not much sense (one scene has people shooting 24th century bombs out of medieval catapults. Huh? The great evil opponent devil shows up for no reason, and fights for no reason, and is up against 2 Jedi knights, which breaks every rule of these films, and then he dies, and no one cares anyway). The best part is the Queen (I am quoting now from my assistant critic) but anyone can figure out what is going on with her.
The script is poor. It is also seriously racist, people have talked about JarJar Binks who is portrayed as a sort of dumb Rastafarian, but worse than that, the evil leaders are all like Asians out of Charlie Chan films, and far worse than that (which no one seems to have mentioned anywhere) Anakin Skywalker's owner is a caricature Jew merchant with a big hooked nose.
Worse than all that, is the fact that there is so much killing going on. The film is a series of massacres. Lucas seems to think that if you kill robots, you can enjoy the experience without incurring any moral problems, since they aren't real people being killed. This supposedly excuses all this mayhem.
I really liked the second Star Wars film (the first few minutes of the first film are good too), which was a fine piece of work. This one stinks!!! Enjoy!
yours, Peter T.