The prequels IMO are just objectively incompetently-made movies aside from visual effects and some other technical aspects, poorly-constructed and really, really badly-acted half the time. I can enjoy them, but they're not "good movies". Lucas comes off like frankly a pretty amateurish filmmaker a lot of the time, at least in screenwriting and the way he directs actors (or fails to direct them).
The Phantom Menace is actually fairly enjoyable. Jake Lloyd is bad (YIPPEE!) but honestly considering his age and the fact that he'd been better in some other roles when he was even younger, I'd be inclined to say Lucas should get some (maybe most) of the blame. Making Anakin so much younger than Padme was a weird and iffy idea that makes it a little creepy knowing they're gonna be a couple eventually. Liam Neeson maintains his dignity, and Ian McDiarmid is good at least by SW acting standards, though between his acting (the slow sideways glance he gives Padme like two or three times while manipulating her in his apartment) and the way Lucas films his scenes, his "secret villainy" is also about as subtle as a brick. The Yoda puppet looks "off". The podrace is good, although it goes on too long. The climax is pretty good, with three battles (Gungans versus droid army, space battle, Duel of the Fates) going on simultaneously. The three-way duel is by far the best part of the whole movie. Jar Jar doesn't bother me as much as he does a lot of people, though he does get a little....well, "much" sometimes.
Attack of the Clones is a really narratively unwieldy, meandering, clumsily-constructed movie that really has a laborious pace a lot of the time, especially in the Anakin/Padme scenes. Both the dialogue in those scenes, and Hayden Christensen's wooden performance in general, are just terrible by any objective standard. They're just stilted and amateurish and really hurt the movie's ability to be seen as a "good" movie in any real sense when it has such gaping aspects where it just fails. There's just no better word for it. Casting what should be the most complex and conflicted character, who undergoes the most extreme character arc of anyone in the PT, with Christensen is like casting a random Gap model as Hamlet. Add in clumsy stuff like how the villain (at least the obvious outward one) Count Dooku doesn't even show up until like two-thirds of the way through, and the movie is just....clumsy and unwieldy. It's also just not a good-looking movie. It has a very drab, flat look to it, whereas Phantom Menace was at least bright and colorful, and that accentuates AOTC's dullness. Also giving a whole origin story to a character we barely saw in the OT (Boba Fett) was so obviously pandering fan service. Someone watching the movies in chronological order would be confused why Boba gets so much attention here and then does **** all the rest of the whole franchise. Also the Yoda/Dooku duel is just too goofy. It eliminates any dignity from Yoda and turns into a cartoon character who feels like he should be making Mario noises as he's zipping around. One of the many, many just plain goofy things Lucas threw in, especially in the PT. There are fun scenes, like the Coruscant chase, Obi-Wan versus Jango, and the arena battle, and the Kaminoans are cool-looking, but the movie overall is pretty weak.
Revenge of the Sith is....probably the strongest of the prequels (low bar), but has plenty of problems. If AOTC moved too laborious, ROTS moves too fast. It's almost like Lucas has to advance plot points rapid-fire because he didn't set it up in AOTC, which is just poor-planning. Like how he does virtually nothing with the Anakin/Palpatine relationship in AOTC (they've got one brief scene, IIRC), so he rushes through it and has Anakin turn to the Dark Side in what feels like thirty seconds here. One second he's "what have I done??" the next he's pledging himself to Palpatine and five minutes after being horrified at himself for behanding Mace Windu, he's marching off to destroy the whole Jedi Temple and massacre a roomful of children. It's haphazard and rushed character development, and Hayden Christensen's lack of acting ability doesn't help. Ian McDiarmid is good for the first half, then he turns into the Wicked Witch of the West, and I feel the same way about his battle with Yoda as I do about the Yoda/Dooku duel. It's just too over-the-top and silly and diminishes both characters who IMO shouldn't be big "action" characters. Same for the Anakin/Obi-Wan duel, which is over-the-top and just tries way too hard to be MOST EPIC DUEL EVER! It does have strong moments. The opening space battle is visually great, the ending juxtaposing Padme's death with Vader's "birth" packs a visual punch, and the silent wordless lingering bit with Anakin and Padme gazing in each other's directions across the city speaks more than any of their stilted "bad high school play" dialogue. I also like how stuff starts looking more like the OT, with Star Destroyers, proto-AT-STs, seeing Bail Organa's cruiser, etc.
I enjoy A New Hope for the most part, and appreciate it as "the one that started it all", but it has a very basic, simplistic, Point A to Point B vibe to it. You can tell it's the first one. Some of the special effects didn't age well, like the really obvious vaseline smear Lucas smuged on the lens to try to blur out the landspeeder's wheels in the age before you could just digitally edit stuff like that out. Vader and Obi-Wan fight like, well, people who don't really have particular swordfighting skills. At the same time, its world-building is still admirable. Actually I think Tattooine is the best-developed and lived-in world in the OT, with lots of world-building touches like the Jawas and their Sancrawlers, trading droids to moisture farmers, Mos Eisley Cantina, etc. Lucas manages to pack quite a bit of world-building into an outwardly pretty barebones environment (while also cleverly using Tattooine's sparsely-populated desert environment to help get around the sometimes obvious budget limitations). The story is entertaining enough, albeit simplistic. The acting isn't the greatest (apart from Old Reliables Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing), but the main trio, while obviously inexperienced and unpolished, are likable and enthusiastic and have clear chemistry, which helps a lot and makes up for their occasional acting deficiencies. The attack on the Death Star is pretty well-done considering the movie's age and budget limitations, with obvious influence from WWII dogfights and bombing runs.
Empire Strikes Back stands easily tallest as the best of the OT, in my opinion. It feels like it opens its universe way up and is on a way bigger/expanded scale, with the Battle of Hoth, Dagobah, Cloud City, etc. It also takes the characters on a clear evolution and expands and evolves Luke, Han, Leia, and Vader and delves into deeper, darker themes. And it introduced Yoda and the Emperor (at least in terms of movie release dates), which also helped expand the story it's telling. The acting is also up a notch which can probably be chalked up to Irvin Kershner, instead of George Lucas just telling them "faster and more intense!" as his only direction (yes really). Harrison Ford is easily in the best form and the most engaged here of any of his performances in the OT, and his chemistry and banter with Carrie Fisher is the best romantic dynamic in the whole franchise (just compare how easy and natural it feels to how wooden and stilted Anakin and Padme's scenes are). The whole duel with Luke and Vader is great, not necessarily the best technical duel ever, but so drama/emotion-driven and dat revelation! Overall, it's the best movie in the whole franchise. It's a good motion picture period, not just a good SW movie, which most of the rest can't claim, IMO.
Return of the Jedi is an okay ending, but the Ewoks really hurt it. The Galactic Empire gets taken down....by Ewoks. It's such an underwhelming climax. Fortunately the space battle is much better (even if rehashing the Death Star leaves one feeling Lucas was out of ideas), and the throne room scene is good. I love when Vader taunts Luke into coming at me by bringing up Leia, and Luke attacks in blind fury. The emotion of it, and the score playing during that scene is really effective. And then of course Vader's turn/redemption, and dying as Anakin. All great stuff. The Jabba the Hutt stuff at the beginning is entertaining, if an extended side detour. Harrison Ford is obviously checked out by this point and acts like he's stoned or something the whole time (he wanted to get killed off in the end, but Lucas wouldn't have it).
I actually enjoy The Force Awakens a lot. Sure, it's a reworked version of A New Hope (Jakku might as well be Tattooine, BB8 serves a similar plot function to R2D2 in ANH, Kylo=Vader, Hux=Tarkin, Snoke=Palpatine, Starkiller=Death Star, Republic planet=Alderaan), and some stuff is not developed/explained well, like how oh snap, pseudo-Empire is a thing again, and we don't even get to know anything about the New Republic. Flaws out of the way, JJ Abrams does a great job recapturing the breezy sense of derring-do that makes it feel more like the OT instead of the often laboriously-paced prequels, and how he visually emulates Lucas, using wipes and irises as scene transitions and relies heavily on real locations and a mix of practical effects and CGI, making it look more like the OT instead of the CGI/green screen oversaturation of the PT. The new characters especially Rey are compelling, the dynamic between her and Kylo Ren has the makings of an intriguing rivalry, and I love their mind struggle where he penetrates her mind and she turns it around on him, her using the Force to influence Stormtrooper Daniel Craig, and the closing scene. Han's death scene is well-done and well-acted by Ford and Driver. Ford brings his A game (maybe because he finally got his wish to be killed off) and gives some of his most enthusiastic acting in years, and his best performance in the franchise right up alongside Empire. Overall, it's a good and promising launching pad...
...that unfortunately gets almost completely squandered by The Last Jedi, where Rian Johnson thinks subverting expectations for its own sake without anything satisfactory to replace them with is inherently brilliant. I really like Johnson's original stuff like Looper and Knives Out, but this feels like a Star Wars movie by someone who doesn't like Star Wars and wants to deconstruct every single thing about it. The mysteries TFA set up, like Rey's parentage and who Snoke is, are anti-climactic fizzles. Snoke in particular, while the throne room scene is by far the best moment in the whole movie, is such a non-entity. TFA set up an intriguing rivalry between Rey and Kylo, and left us waiting with baited breath for what happens next when Rey finally meets Luke, and then we get Rey and Kylo benched for most of the movie, and Rey following Luke traipsing around an island and having Force Skype sessions with Kylo (implying a "Reylo" semi-romance that feels like fanfiction), while Grumpy Old Man Luke yells at her to get off his lawn. Rey and Finn are a likable duo in TFA....so here they spend the whole movie apart and Finn gets a whole superfluous subplot just to give Boyega something to do, I guess. Poe, the guy who admires and happily follows Leia's orders in TFA, is suddenly chafing at having a woman give him orders (yes Johnson flat out said Poe didn't like taking orders from a woman, even though he had no problem with that in TFA). It's obvious Johnson had his own deconstructing ideas and didn't really care how well they meshed with what came before, and honestly Kathleen Kennedy has to share some of the blame for not reining Johnson in. His kind of subversion and deconstruction might have been okay or even interesting in a stand-alone anthology film (I actually really like how Luke explains the Force to Rey and think it's the best anyone has ever explained it), but the middle chapter of a trilogy is not the time to let a filmmaker just come in and do his own subversive thing. Also Rose is a terrible character (no offense to Kelly Marie Tran herself, who did nothing personally to warrant the blatantly racist and sexist hate sent to her on social media). Her sister is a better character in five minutes than Rose is the whole movie. General Hux gets totally dumbed down into the butt of jokes every time he shows up (General Hugs). Overall, it's just a really frustrating movie.
I'm not even going to talk about Solo, because that movie is the very definition of "just there".
At this point (I haven't seen Rise of Skywalker yet), Rogue One is my #1 Disney SW movie. I still enjoy TFA and can easily get pulled into it, but tbh what comes after has retroactively soured the taste for me. I love how Rogue One feels like a gritty war/spy thriller set in the SW universe, and how it gives the Rebellion some moral gray area. Apart from a choppy narrative early on with all the planet-hopping, Saw Gerrera's subplot being kind of extraneous, and Krennic being a pretty "meh" and ineffectual villain (Ben Mendelsohn playing the same character in every single movie doesn't help), I really find it enjoyable and engaging. Also Gareth Edwards is great with visuals in both this and Godzilla, and should get more chances. Plus most bad-ass Darth Vader scene ever.
