Episode I has the podrace and the Darth Maul duel and those are right up there with the best of Star Wars. II is a little saggy in the middle, but it's far from trash. The Battle of Geonosis was sick.
A film critic weighs in on the haptic vs. optic cinema discourse in 1977:
"When you have a film that's 90 percent special effects...you might just as well be watching an animated cartoon, because finally all those special effects begin to look totally unreal. You are looking for something that looks like flesh and blood there. You have three lousy actors in the main roles who don't contribute much flesh and blood, you have ghastly dialogue, terrible plotting, miserable characterization, which also do not contribute flesh and blood."
If you're not the kind of person who "gets" Star Wars, this isn't exactly wrong. What happened in the late 90s and 2000s is that Gen X critics--while they had grandfathered in the Star Wars films from their childhoods as good movies--in fact no longer "got" Star Wars at all, if they ever really did. That's why their analysis of the prequels sounded indistinguishable from this. It's also why Lucas would get ruthlessly mocked for making straightforward statements trying to explain it: "Dialogue is a sound effect," "It's based on a Saturday matinee serial from the 1930s," "It's like poetry, it rhymes," etc.
It's also why people were and are so eager to recast a movie like The Empire Strikes Back as some sort of gritty, dialogue-driven, psychological drama made for adults, a description which bears such little relation to the movie as it actually exists that it's hard to believe it could be sustained in people's minds even after so many ostensible viewings.
Episodes I and II were shit and you know it.
Episode I has the podrace and the Darth Maul duel and those are right up there with the best of Star Wars. II is a little saggy in the middle, but it's far from trash. The Battle of Geonosis was sick.
Pure spectacle, zero substance.
There is actually a wealth of careful visual symbolism in the prequels, overshadowed by their excesses.
This post is also quite trenchant:
A little overstated, but worth considering.