I just got back from seeing Star Wars: The Phantom Menace opening night. This is a spectacular movie!
  There's going to be a lot of comparasion to the previous films, and it's justified. PM is a lot like A New Hope in many ways. You can draw several parallels between characters and events. I won't give away any spoilers, so don't worry about it. There are some significant differences, too. You don't feel quite as much for the characters as you did in the first one, but the future information we already have changes our views about them as well. This future info can be kind of annoying too. We all know who Palpatine is, for instance. Another real departure is the character of Jar Jar Binks. He's comic relief through and through. C3PO was took this role in the previous movies, but Jar Jar is totally different in style.
  The special effects are beautiful. The fish move like real fish, the ship battles are sweet, and the pod race is awesome. There are some great touches of style too. John Williams' score is perfect and beautiful, as usual, but the lack of music during the pod race is so appropiate. The new battle droids are very cool, but the standard ones seem to have an awful lot personality. They're not much better than stormtroopers tho. I can't wait for the next two!

  I'm going to predict that The Phantom Menace is going to get much the same treatment critically as A New Hope did: The critics are going to give it 2-3 stars (as they are) for a couple of years and then they'll start looking deeper, and merge the story with the others and rethink their ideas.