I waited in line overnight in a freezing drizzle here in Green Bay to get tickets for a movie that I had waited sixteen years to see. I watched the trilogy over and over in the weeks preceeding the release of Episode 1. I ignored the critics reviews that gave it low marks. I arrived at the theater 2 hours early just to get a good seat.
I had thought of George Lucas as godlike, and an excellent candidate for president.
He was in my will.
A tear came to my eye as the line came across the screen:
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...
I was ready to accept anything that Lucasfilm produced, I just wanted to see the Star Wars universe come alive again.
I have to say that I am now a changed man.
The Phantom Menace was absolutely terrible.
I have to admit that the special effects were extraordinary.
But, special effects alone do not make a movie.
Deep down there was a plot. It seemed like it had potential. It was hard to spot this plot, I think it had to do with a planet being invaded as some kind of conspiracy to make Senator Palpatine into the Chancellor. To grasp this plot you either needed to have a lot of background information, or you needed to be psychic. This plot was developed over the course of the bits and pieces of movie in between the special effects. The movie was made up of long scenes with great special effects with short "plot" scenes in between which try to catch up for the lost time. There is no time for the character development which occurs in the old movies. We learned who Han Solo was because of the way he interracted with the other characters in conversation and in the different situations they got into. You learn about who these characters are either by having read the book, looked them up on the internet, or again by being psychic. There is no character interraction, only events happening and special effects.
There is a scene of anakin in a "pod race" against a bunch of aliens on Tatooine. This scene has great special effects, and was fun to watch. However it took at least twenty minutes just to show the race (which was shown in its entirety), and the race really didn't even need to be a part of the movie, it was just a little bit of a side-thing. The storyline had obviously been altered just to fit this scene into the movie. The scene didn't support the main plot (not that that's important I guess), and because of the time spent on that scene, all sorts of dialogue and character-work had to be sped through and watered-down.
The acting in the movie is horrible, especially the kid who plays Anakin Skywalker. His acting and the lines scripted go together to make his part pull the movie down even further. I'm not sure on the exact way that the lines go because I don't have the movie memorized as I do the first three, but this is a good paraphrase of young Anakin's first conversation with the disguised Queen Amadilla (we'll get into this later): 
I should mention however that effort was made on the part of one or two actors to actually put some acting into the movie, most notably Ewan MacGreggor(thats probably misspelled) as Obi Wan Kenobi. If you watch close, you can see the attempts of some of the actors during the five or six lines they speak throughout the movie.