Let me start off my saying that I don't care about CGI, a lot people see CGI and instantly hate the movie for it. But I don't really care about that, I look past it and and see the movie that lies beneath it. Unfortunately, there wasn't much underneath the CGI
From what I could decipher, this movie had a fairly good plot, but it had terrible execution and almost impossible to follow. Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor work very well together, it's just too bad that they characters were incredibly flat and uninteresting. There are are plenty of visually appealing action scenes, but that's about it. Most notably the Lightsaber battle between Darth Maul, Qui-Gon, and Obi-Won, which was amazingly choreographed.

The biggest problem though was Anakin, he was really annoying, but he's a kid, so I won't blame him for bad acting.

Despite it's many faults, I really think people have been too critical of this film, it isn't all bad, but it is definitely not very good.

Finally, I would recommend this review to everybody.
http://www.redlettermedia.com/phantom_menace.html