Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
Phantom Menace itself is probably the best movie of the prequel trilogy. Taken alone it has few problems (other than the fact that the war droids talk among themselves deapite theoretically being puppeteered by a single computer). Look at this very thread; you're all talking about episodes 2 and 3. However, it does kind of set the other two movies up to fail by being basically a standalone and leaving the entire narrative load on the other two films
That is true, and yet ANH was also a stand-alone film when it was first made back when it was just Star Wars and not Episode IV of anything. ANH had just enough setup going for it to spin out a sequel. That ESB was such a strong sequel ensured its status as a franchise.

The problem with TPM was that it was always predestined to be the start of a new series and that it had a definitively known end point, which is to say that it was a prequel. As the first in a prequel series, it needed to set up the narrative for the movies to come, and at that it failed spectacularly, leaving the entire narrative thrust to be handled in two films rather than three. Of course this would still have been salvageable, if AotC had been a strong sequel like ESB had been--and of course it wasn't.