a review of

• I think there is a point where, even though you love your children a great deal, you must let go, which is actually what The Phantom Menace is about.
• The Phantom Menace is about letting go?
• *nods* about letting go.
• In what sense?
• In the sense that you have this young boy, who's 10 years old, who has to leave his mother and go off on his own. And the mother has to let him go because otherwise he would be a slave for the rest of his life.

One of the reasons why The Phantom Menace is the greatest Star Wars movie is because of what it says about destiny and the place of suffering in life. Shmi has to let Anakin go so he would avoid the life of suffering as a slave, but Anakin is destined, through his own inability to let go, to become Darth Vader, suffer and inflict a lot of suffering onto others, and then be redeemed through his son. Most religions and their associated mythologies, cosmologies and philosophies are designed around trying to make sense of suffering. That's arguably what ontology is all about. The idea that suffering is inescapable is something that modern media normally tries to avoid because they can't figure out how to create optimistic stories around that. This in turn has conditioned a large portion of the populace to be almost allergic to wholesome, light-hearted stories or exploration of religious concepts. Everyone reacts to it as being "corny" or straight up fails to understand basic ideas because of their own cultural illiteracy. Without TPM and the prequels, the original trilogy is a much less-nuanced and less-interesting story. I remember Simon Pegg said "I don't respect anyone who likes the prequels," and most people accepted that and still watched and liked the movies he and his buddy JJ Abrams made (where are the people that like screaming "nepo baby!!!" when it really matters?). That's okay, because the disrespect is mutual. Personally, I think people who hate the prequels are dumbasses, and, unlike you, I can actually prove it.