I’m sure like many kids who grew up in the 80s I thought it would be neat to see Darth Vader before he turned evil. You know, how did he turn into such a gigantic bastard? And how did all the Jedi get wiped out? Yeah, I kind of wish I’d never found out.

The biggest mistake in The Phantom Menace is the casting of a kid as Anakin Skywalker. Come on, who really wants to see Darth Vader as a nine-year old? Who wants to see the evil one at an age where he’s still being tucked in for beddy-byes? Well, George Lucas apparently. But he surely must be the only one.

In the first trilogy we’re constantly told that Luke Skywalker is too old to start the training. I always thought this seemed strange, seeing as he looked about ten. But finally we have a kid who actually is about ten and once again we’re told he’s too old to start Jedi training. For fucks sake, how young do the Jedi take them? On second thoughts, maybe I don’t really want to know.

But the consequences of casting a child in the role are disastrous. Lucas is obviously under the impression that seeing Vader as an innocent child will add to the tragedy, but instead it just gives the film a queasy paedo vibe.

First of all, there’s the idea that little kids will be whisked away from their parents by strange men. ‘Oh, hello. I’ve just met your son. Just seeing him made me feel the Force quite strongly. Do you mind if I take him far away so that I can train him? Don’t worry. Everything will be okay. I’ll teach him well and you’ll never see him again. Bye.’ Doubtless the children are whisked away by the promise of puppies and sweeties in the Jedi’s cockpit.

Then there’s how inappropriate the relationship is between Anakin and the Queen, played by Natalie Portman. From the very start we know they become lovers, so every time they share a lingering glance you remember that at a later date they’re going to butt heads. It’s icky. This woman is going to nail this seven year-old.

One instance occurs after Anakin has left his mother’s bosom. He’s talking to the Queen and seems rather sad. ‘I care for you,’ he says. ‘Only I…’ And then the Queen butts in and says that he misses his mother. No, I don’t think that’s it. He has a new mother now. One who probably gives him a strange feeling somewhere. He feels the Force every time he sees her. Blech.

And at the very end when the Queen lovingly looks over at Anakin, I could only think that they’re going to shag. I do believe I almost puked in my mouth.

Jesus Christ. Why couldn’t Lucas just make him a teenager? You’d have better choice as regards acting talent and you wouldn’t be constantly reminded of how inappropriate the whole thing is. I mean, for fuck’s sake, the Jedi council meet up at the top of a tower that looks exactly like a giant phallus. And there they interrogate little children and get them to reveal their deepest fears. They should have stayed with their mothers.

And while I’m on the subject of the Jedi, I have to mention how disappointing they are. In the first trilogy, you only have Obi Wan and Luke Skywalker to look to. And they were cool – well, Luke was cool eventually. Therefore, when you think about many Jedi, you think of a group of brilliant warrior monks. You know, hardasses that are all spiritual and shit. But instead you have a bunch of terminally boring dullards who sit there all day talking nonsense. Plus the Council looks like an alien Benetton commercial. You have an alien of every shape, size and colour as a member. They don’t look like warriors. They look like they’re advertising a diversity campaign. And one of them is even a conehead. The alien design in this film is appalling.

Speaking of design, Yoda looks rotten in this film. Somehow puppet technology has regressed in the 16 years between The Phantom Menace and Return of the Jedi. It looks like Yoda has been injecting himself with Botox – his face is expressionless.

And it’s horrible how the film kills the mystery of the previous trilogy. Suddenly the Force is a virus or something. It lives in our blood and we can even take a test to see how strong it is in us. Great. Instead of the Force being an amorphous connection with the universe, it’s now like a good form of HIV. ‘The bad news is you have a blood disorder. The good news, though, is that it means you can pick up shit with your mind and see the future.’

And apparently the midi-chlorians (the things that live in someone’s blood and communicate with the Force) had sex with Anakin’s mum and conceived him. He has no father. Sigh. So now Anakin is Jesus gone bad. This is what would have happened to Christ if he’d been an alien, if he’d had a lightsaber and if he’d listened to Satan? Great.

But the worst thing about the film is all the racial stereotypes. The bad guys speak in comedy Japanese accents, Jar Jar is a buffoonish black man and Watto is a miserly Jew. They’re all handled with the subtlety of a Nazi salute up your arse. And even though Jar Jar is thoroughly irritating and objectionable, it’s Watto who is perhaps the most offensive. After all, he’s hideously ugly, he has a hook nose and he worships money above everything else. You’d think that Adolf himself had conceived this character.

And the CGI for Watto is completely gratuitous. He flies. But not for any real reason, just because he can. Now that ILM has the technology, Lucas decides he wants his characters to crawl and fly and slither and run across the screen. There’s visual clutter everywhere. Every frame is over-packed with…stuff.

There are only two good things in the film: the fight with Darth Maul and the pod race. And even the pod race is packed with nonsense. First we have the annoying two-headed commentator, then we have silly aliens that look like they’ve popped up from a Looney Tunes cartoon and then we have the predictability of the whole sequence. But still, the pod effects are good and it’s reasonably exciting. For a very brief time, you have fun.

But far better is the lightsaber duel. It almost makes the film worthwhile.

What’s so pleasing about the lightsaber fight is how simple it’s kept. Yes you have the gimmick of the double-ended dildo (I mean saber), but apart from that it’s just three people trying to chop each other to bits. There’s no dialogue, no distractions in the background. It’s just a good, pure fight.

My favourite bit is when it’s just down to Maul and Obi Wan. There’s real intensity between them. They’re really going for it. This is how you envisioned another Star Wars film when you were a kid.

But just to bring you down to Earth, cut around the fight are three awful action sequences. There’s a tiresome space battle, a pointless blaster shoot-out, and, worst of all, a hideous CGI battle between the Gungans and some robots. Somehow we’re meant to enjoy the sight of Jar Jar Binks accidentally killing robots by getting a robot torso stuck to his leg. Oh how endearing. Oh how hilarious. Yes, fart gags, idiot aliens and paedophilic relationships were just what the Star Wars series needed.

Fear gets mentioned quite a few times in Batman Begins. In fact, it gets mentioned about a hundred times. 'I seek the means to fight injustice. To turn fear on those who prey on the fearful.' 'Now you must journey inwards, to what you really fear.' 'There is nothing to fear but fear itself.' Etc. Etc. And then the whole of Gotham gets The Fear and tries to rip itself apart. It's almost as if the filmmakers are trying to say something. Is it a comment on paranoia in the Bush era? Or is it an insight into how ordinary people are running scared from real and imagined criminality? Or then again, is it just a bunch of cool stuff in a big Hollywood blockbuster? It's probably a combination of all three, although, as you'd expect, the cool stuff takes precedence.

And it’s certainly cool to see Batman back on the big screen after he was gang raped into a coma by Joel Schumacher and everyone else who was involved in the last two pieces of shit. You can’t keep a good money-spinning cash cow down for long.

But you have to wait a while for Batman to make an appearance – unlike Burton’s film where his presence is immediate. Therefore you have to endure the dreaded back story, which is quite often the death of many a comic book film. I mean, the origin story is often like the first couple of hundred pages of a biography. Yeah, I don’t give a shit that Barry Big Bollocks was born into poverty and that he had to take coal sandwiches to school. I want to read the bit where he makes it big and fucks some slut with a mud shark. And so with a comic book character you often just want to see them in action.

But the build-up in Batman Begins is well handled, even though the ninja training is a tad dull. Yeah I know we have to see how Bruce Wayne gets his skills, but still, it’s rather ho-hum. Neeson’s mentor comes across as a bland, slightly malevolent Apollo Creed or a less interesting variation of the old git out of The Karate Kid. Thrilling cinema it isn’t.

However, other stuff in the build-up is superb, especially the scenes dealing with Bruce’s childhood. They have real heart and feeling, which reminds you that this isn’t some bland product churned out by some easily intimidated hack, but a film made by someone who genuinely cares about the characters.

At the same time, though, you have to marvel at how gosh darn great Bruce’s dad is. Like a superhero he saves Bruce when he falls down a hole. Then he carries Bruce to his bedroom and takes care of him. Then he provides Gotham City with a cheap public transport system. What a wonderful guy. No wonder, then, that his death would fuck Bruce up to such an extent that he dresses up like a giant bat.

The appearance of Batman himself is wonderful. Some hoods are conducting a drug deal down at the docks and then suddenly they begin getting picked off one by one. It’s like something out of a horror film. And then our first full glimpse of the Bat Man sees him dangling upside down behind a criminal. It’s a joy to finally see Batman trying to scare thugs rather than give them hard-ons by flashing bat butts and bat nipples.

And Bale has the perfect voice to intimidate people with. His Batman growls and screams. There’s no messing around. In particular I like the scene where he drags a bent cop up by his ankles and then interrogates him. One second you’re having a nice snack and the next you’re upside down being screamed at by a giant bat. I think anyone would be well within their rights to shit themselves.

And it’s also pleasing that the film is quite scary for a mainstream blockbuster. A large part of the story revolves around a hallucinogenic drug that makes people freak out. Cue then lots of cool visuals of people seeing scary stuff. My favourite is probably the satanic Batman that people see flying over the city. But the demon Batman that Dr Crane/Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) sees is really cool as well. Oh, and I also like the Scarecrow’s horse – it has glowing red eyes and breathes fire.

As far as the villains go, Dr Crane is easily the best. Excellently played by Cillian Murphy, he has a cold, slimy, sleazy vibe to him. He might not be physically threatening, but his eyes are as cold as ice. Therefore it’s a huge disappointment that he plays second fiddle to Liam Neeson’s colourless Ra’s Al Ghul. Honestly, when he returns, you kind of sigh. You just want to give him a drink to loosen him up. Maybe if he had a laugh he wouldn’t feel so compelled to destroy society and be such a pompous downer. At least you felt Crane enjoyed being evil. He even makes a Roger Moore-style quip when he sets Batman on fire: ‘You need to lighten up.’ Excellent.

And the whole League of Shadows thing is silly as hell. Apparently they’re a group of vigilantes that keep the world in check by destroying societies when they become too corrupt. According to them, they sacked Rome and burnt London to the ground. What the hell is this, The Da Vinci Code? Are they the Priory of Sion or something? For a film that tries to drag Batman back into a sense of reality, this stands out as pure silliness.

Something else that doesn’t really work is the casting of Katie Holmes. She doesn’t embarrass herself and she’s not annoying in a Vicki Vale type of way (although at least Kim Basigner and her acres of hair gave me confusing trouser rumblings as an innocent youth), but she’s ridiculously out of place as a DA. She has no authority. She has no screen presence. She’s amorphous.

Thank fuck then that the rest of the cast, Liam Neeson aside, is superb. Michael Caine is excellent as Alfred, Morgan Freeman does a good job as Q (er, I mean, Lucius Fox), Tom Wilkinson shines in the short amount of time he has and Gary Oldman does a decent job with the thankless role of Gordon – although for some reason the way he says ‘Kevlar’ at the end makes me laugh; just listen to the way he says it. And of course Christian Bale is excellent as Batman. He might not look as deranged as Michael Keaton, but he's far more convincing.

But Bale actually isn’t the best thing in the film. The best thing is the Tumbler. The car chase here is magnificent. The Batmobile flies over roofs, crashes through walls and blows shit up, yet it feels completely authentic. Quite a feat if you ask me. And it’s certainly one of the best action scenes in recent years. And it makes up for the rather bland fight scenes that pepper the film. They try and ape the ones in the Bourne movies but they’re even more blurry and hard to watch.

But even though I have reservations about certain things, the film isa massive success. The serious treatment of the characters has to be applauded and the film itself is engrossing and exciting. Here’s hoping the next one is even better.