What hasn’t already been said about The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and The Steaming Pile of SithRevenge of the Sith?
The first movie is honestly pretty boring. If you like racing scenes, that helps, but for me the first fun part is the big battle against Darth Maul. I could have done without the video-gamey “oops the shield’s up, guess you have to watch your master die now” silliness, but it’s a minor point – this one high point makes the movie worth watching for me.
I’ve been feeling like how much stronger the series would have been if Attack of the Clones had been the first movie. Teenager Anakin is much more interesting than Child Anakin, and building a trilogy on the relationship between Anakin and Obi-Wan (a thing that they sort-of half did) would have been a really interesting & fun way to do it. The opening chase scene of Clones is really excellent. It establishes the camraderie and brotherhood between master & padowan. The rest of the movie (and most of the 3rd movie) foolishly split up the two characters with the best on-screen chemistry, and suffer for it.
The third movie is outright bad. Without The Clone Wars, the justification for Anakin turning against his best friend is just too weak. The writing is terrible. The action is pretty boring compared to the high highs in the first two movies. If you instead had Attack as Movie #1, and The Clone Wars as Movie #2, you give yourself room to grow – how do you go from the teenager with anger problems to the adult who’s scarred by war, disillusioned by the Jedi, and ready to join the dark side? By having a movie where we get some of that backstory, darn it!
I’d be sad to lose the great ending fight scene from The Phantom Menace in my alternate-history where the second movie was the first one, but it would be worth it to have a chance of telling a coherent story with comprehensible character arcs (that would also require good writing, but we can dream).
I can’t decide if Sith is worse than Rise of Skywalker, but they’re at least in close competition as incomprehensible letdowns.