Well the movie was actually rated 7, but yes I completely agree, 5 is about right.
Calling the recent trilogy flawed and saying this is not as bad as people made out is completing rewriting history. It wasn't well received at the time at all, it was a huge letdown to fans of the first trilogy, and people mocked quite a few elements of the film.
The new films are not perfect, but even so, all three of them are in a different league of filmmaking to The Phantom Menace.
Reread the critical response at the time. A snapshot can be seen on wiki. It was pretty well received, considering. I'm not even just talking about crazy reviews like the notorious Empire 5/5 one, but even Ebert gave it a 7.5 back in May '99. I'm not rewriting history, you're ignoring it in favour of the fashionable modern opinion of just hating on it. Someone even called it
at the time in one of their reviews "I’m sure in about a week, it’s going to become quite fashionable to bash this flick — hard. But I’d like to go on record as saying I dug it. It’s a good movie with great moments."
I'm defo not saying it's not massively flawed, just that there's a reason so many enjoyed it at the time.
And I actually think a better follow-up may have left people regarding it a flawed but decent enough start to a prequel saga which had impossibly high expectations to begin with.
Hell, imagine what people would think of Star Wars: A New Hope these days if Empire had been
awful. Do you think that things like Mark Hamill's atrociously acted Luke, the bumbling droids, the incompetent stormtroopers etc would have been so easily forgiven?
Unfortunately Attack of the Clones sealed Phantom Menace's - and the prequel trilogy's - fate.