thats it. They're still so seething about how it 'destroyed the canon' or whatever. Its got to be some of the most weird form of movie brain worms that they just hated that movie instead of Revenge of Skywalker or whatever it was called, which was one of the worst movies of all time.
Oh for sure. To be clear: as a prequel apologist I do not mean that the prequels politics were less concretely defined in phantom menace...just that the online discourse around them and the political backlash against them at the time was less concretely defined.
The critique of the politics of the phantom menace on release was mainly that they were boring. It was aotc and rots where, online at least, you started to see the libertarians rearing their ugly heads complaining about how star wars was about escapism and how they were annoyed at how Lucas was shoe horning his politics in.
I genuinely do wonder, if the Internet had been around in 1977, how that would have played out. Been years since I've seen them but there were early conversations on like darpa net or some shit someone fished out once about ROTJ that were kind of errie in how familiar they read.
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Obviously it can never be known for sure...but I genuinely think that's the case and I have for some time now...and not just because of the movie itself but also because of the discourse from the creators themselves which would have existed around it's release. At the very least you would have had an Avatar situation. Agree with your point about the banality of evil also.