I think it's good.

Rating: 9/10 (7 November 2019)

I think people are unreasonably hard on the prequels.
I think people have an idea in their mind what a Star Wars Movie is supposed to look and feel like and because they have so much nostalgia for the originals (often since they saw them very young, before they'd seen many movies) that they subject the prequels to an impossibly standard.
I don't want to make a case that they're some intellectual experience, they're the basic blockbuster experience. But so were episodes IV, V and VI. One doesn't owe it to a movie to like it, only to judge it by its own terms and I think, when viewed as a movie by itself or at least as a sequel to Phantom Menace, it brings everything one could have expected it to.
The vivid science fiction world -building serves as our back drop to a haunting vision of a man drawn into dark forces by his own desire to protect his loved ones amidst a tale of political duplicity and war.
Halliwell's described the romance as "chocolate box" and that's fair enough, but in a movie with a light sabre wielding Muppet, is that really that off-brand?
With captivating action sequences, fascinating design and technology, a great sense of humor and characters I really do want to follow and cherish, it can be hard for a very serious science fiction/fantasy to judge its own tone well but unlike Lord of the Rings the prequels really come through for us.