Yeah, much as I like Star Trek, this one is pretty easy. Despite most people not liking episodes 1 through 3, those opinions are (I believe) mostly people just believing that they don't measure up to the original trilogy. They are not "bad" movies though. Star Trek, for all it's greatness, had a couple of stinker movies, and in the end that is enough to sway the vote for me.
My son has recently gotten into them, so it's been fun to rewatch them through the eyes of a child for the first time.
I think Phantom Menace gets a bad break, but Attack of the Clones doesn't get enough criticism. Jar Jar taints Phantom beyond salvation for some people. But besides him and the cheesy pod race announcers as cringe-worthy characters, it's not bad. Clones on the other hand has really long stretches of nothingness, carried solely by the "chemistry" between Christensen and Portman, which is non-existent.
Plus Phantom has Darth Maul, and (spoiler alert?) killing him at the end was the biggest mistake Lucas made in the prequels IMO. He was badass, and could have helped a lot. I suppose he was used primarily to put Obi Wan over since he spent most of I as 2nd fiddle to Qui Gon, but having him in place of Christopher Lee through II and part of III, to finally put Anakin over would have been better.
I think the 2 major flaws with the prequels is (i) the overuse of CGI when we weren't there yet; and (ii) the awful dialogue/chemistry between characters. So much of the prequels just looks awful because of the overuse of CGI. You could literally keep everything the same, and reshoot it with the same script and actors, and make it substantially better. The dialogue is cheesy/awful, but it was in IV, V and VI too. I think movie dialogue in the 70s and 80s was generally worse by today's standards though. Watch Rocky, hell watch Godfather, they all have ick moments. So I don't think it stood out quite as much. Plus the actors had chemistry so they sold it better. Hayden Christensen sucks, but the rest of the cast was good. Portman has an Oscar, I don't remember if Neeson does or not, but he's been nominated a couple times, McGregor is a great actor (and actually comes though fine in the movies), Christopher Lee is great. But together? Blah.
