Thinking about the SW prequels versus the original trilogy again and I was trying to come up with a "Binary Sunset" equivalent moment within "The Phantom Menace". You know that moment where Luke stands alone on Tatooine before his adventure begins, looking off into the darkening horizon, and the music swells with all of these unspoken emotions?
Watching "A New Hope" after watching the prequel trilogy is interesting, because the original film is a lot slower in many ways. It allows the viewer to really sit in this fantasy world, appreciate its unfamiliar details, and think about what the characters must be feeling without being directly told. While I don't think that TPM should try to copy ANH beat for beat by any means, I do think that the prequel trilogy, especially TPM, could have used more scenes that let the actors and the music work to impress upon us that kind of emotional interiority.
For example, Obi-Wan is given a stunning lack of emotional focus throughout TPM, up UNTIL his solo battle against Darth Maul and his grief urging him to take on Anakin as an apprentice afterwards. It's good that we have those moments, and yet I don't think the battle hits as hard as it could have if we'd been offered scenes beforehand that told and showed us more about who young Obi-Wan was and how he felt about what was going on, so that we cared a little more about his deep personal loss, especially given that the Obi-Wan and Anakin later relationship is an emotional core of the trilogy's tragedy. Obi-Wan spends a lot of TPM as just "that guy standing next to Qui-Gon", leaving fans to turn to novelizations and their own assumptions for a little more depth, which I think is poor filmmaking.
Padmé receives perhaps even worse treatment than Obi-Wan in regards to her emotional interiority early on. (Especially in "Attack of the Clones", which is so focused on how Anakin feels about everything that it's hard to know from the films alone why Padmé as a specifically flawed person might find him appealing, making what could be a deliciously ill-advised affair of passion and need for comfort much more one-sided and flatter (and sexist) than it could have been.) You could even argue that TPM really ought to be "Padmé's" movie, in that it's her homeworld under attack, for which she (despite being a child) has been made responsible. Her desperation, her fear, her anger, is manipulated to put a future Sith Emperor in a position of power. The Jedi are helping her, yes, but it's Padmé relentlessly driving the plot forward.
Instead of being relegated to more of a supporting character position, I think Padmé should have been given some of those slow "protagonist" moments in TPM to showcase her emotional state, specifically a scene that would have been the rough equivalent of Luke returning to the destroyed farm after the stormtroopers attacked. Padmé's party manages to escape Naboo without the film ever really dwelling on the violence, which is yet another missed opportunity. TPM ends up treating war a lot more comedically than the shootouts and climatic dogfights of ANH.
I think it would have kicked ass if the fight to get the queen on an escape ship had been even harder. The queen is hustled onboard, the ship takes off, and then we see one of the handmaidens (Padmé) rush to the window to watch as another wave of attack rushes over her city, her people. The prequel trilogy is tonally all over the place, so it's nice to imagine another version of TPM setting the tone with its own version of the "Binary Sunset" moment in which a devastated Padmé silently looks out over a horizon that's falling to pieces. Fire reflected in her eyes and everything. With the music swelling grandly with the unforgettable, life-ruining horror of war already begun.
If I had to put a "Binary Sunset" moment in the prequels, that's where I'd put it and who I'd give it to. Young Luke still has an entire heroic future ahead of him, but young Padmé is going to helplessly watch everything she cares about be destroyed by powers far greater than her.
