[Devout Catalyst]

Most people blame the lackluster performances in the PT on the fact that Lucas is a bad director and is a poor hand at writing dialogue. They also point out that all of the leads have been good in other films.

I would certainly agree with those assessments of Lucas's abilities (or lack thereof).

But now that the prequel trilogy is complete, I would say that bad casting is largely to blame even beyond all that. Several of the key actors were just not right for their roles.

Jake Lloyd as young Anakin was all wrong. Whenever a child actor has a lead role, it is absolutely crucial that something set the kid apart from the countless other moppets who could deliver the lines. Jake Lloyd just didn't have it. Bad scripting aside, Haley Joel Osment might have been able to bring something to the role besides a pulse. Not sure he would have been the absolute ideal for young Anakin, either, but he would have been far better than Jake Lloyd.

Hayden Christensen just doesn't have it in him to play Anakin with the necessary gravitas. He can a play whiny, sniveling, weaselly character well (did you see him in Shattered Glass?). But he's too much of a prettyboy to be the Vader-in-waiting. His voice is too unsure and flutey. He lacks the physical presence. When he tries to be menacing, it seems like he's imagining passing a kidney stone to get into the part. A better actor for the part would have made it seem effortless. Anakin should have been played by someone more rugged, someone more self-assured, more capable of subtlety.

I'm not quite convinced that Natalie Portman is a good actress, judging from her non-SW movies. That aside, I certainly don't buy her as the woman who gives birth to Luke and Leia. And like Hayden, she doesn't have the physical presence. For one thing, she still looks like a teenager. Someone more mature-looking (and -sounding) would have been better suited to the part. Natalie seems a little too frail to play such a tough lady.

Ewan McGregor I think is well-suited to play Obi-Wan, so I'll cut him some slack. Didn't like him so much in TPM, but I accepted him as Obi-Wan Kenobi in AOTC, and by ROTS I didn't think anyone could have played him any better (with what he was given, mind you).

Samuel L. Jackson, as has been lamented time and time again, is just not right in the part of a Jedi Master. Pirate, gambler, mercenary...he would be perfect in plenty of SW roles, just not the one he got.

Individual actors aside, what the PT also lacked was the chemistry between the actors. Practically non-existent! I don't understand it, since judging from all the outtakes we've seen of the casting calls for the original Star Wars, great pains were taken back then to ensure that the actors played off of each other and that they worked well as an ensemble. I guess the process wasn't as stringent the second time around.

[Richard]

Yea I agree with what you've said. I think maybe in the original films, the actors didn't have any expectations and were just going-with-it and maybe feeling a bit more free. In the prequels, all the actors have this huge burden, and are trying to be all "Star Wars" and are maybe being too forced and wooden. I think Ewan does a good job in being relaxed and seeming like he really is in the role of his character. The others just seem like people who are in a star wars movie, but who don't really feel it.

[Devout Catalyst]

Oh, definitely, the hype and build-up surrounding these roles was incredible. With the PT, the characters made the actors. Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher became so indelibly etched in the public mind as Luke and Leia that they couldn't escape the shadow of those roles. Harrison Ford had much better luck escaping the SW universe. But even veteran actors like Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing, despite lifelong acting careers, wound up being most loved and remembered for their roles in SW.

With the PT, the actors should have made the characters. There should have been some quality to the candidates that just screamed, "YES! That's Anakin!" or "YES! That's Padmé!" So much so that the audience couldn't imagine anyone else playing the roles. Instead, the casting decisions wound up seeming completely arbitrary. It's not a good sign that any given person can rattle off five or six names of other actors who might have been ideal.

This post has been edited by Devout Catalyst: 24 May 2005 - 09:57 PM

[barend]

anikan shoul have been older...

why must it always be a fucking 17 year old as the hero for fucks sake!!!????

Other anikans: Christian Bale, Cilian Murphy (although he looks totally wrong, but a good performance would take care of that), Heath Leger, there are many other actors i could name, but this is off the top of my head...

[Lord Aquaman]

At this point, given the dialogue and direction of GL, I don't think anyone could have given a good performance as Anakin, not even Christian Bale (who will be appearing later this summer in "Batman Begins").

I do agree though that Anakin & Padme should have been older. And I agree that Hayden lacks the physical presence to be a foreboding figure of doom in the works (he looks like an ant when you stand him next to someone like Samuel L. Jackson or Liam Neeson, who are like 6'3" and 6'4" respectively and probably outweigh Hayden by about 30 to 40 pounds).

To be honest, I'm still having trouble disliking Samuel L. Jackson as a Jedi Master. Stiff and wooden maybe, but the man's mere presence is a welcome distraction from some of the more obnoxious crap. Here's one for you - Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Jedi Master, now THAT would have thrown people for a loop.

[ernesttomlinson]

Christian Bale, yeah! He's been my choice from a while back. And, while I'm not recommending the film, American Psycho shows that Bale can do evil - and make it really frickin' scary and convincing, too. Hell, even nebbishy Edward Norton would have been a better choice (see American History X to see Norton's dark side.)

I am 100% sure that Lucas cast the lightweight Christensen after much test-marketing into what young actor fluttered the most teenaged hearts. I've got nothing per se against that (I don't think that Christensen is that attractive myself but then there's no accounting for taste.) The irony is that, having (as I suspected) gone to some trouble to find a young actor with the greatest built-in appeal, Lucas had him play a role where he does nothing appealing. Without his boy-band looks Anakin has nothing going for him, nothing. He's not strong, he's not resourceful, he's not intelligent, he's not even that frickin' good with a lightsabre. His job in Episode II is to whine, commit genocide, get his hand cut off, and wait for the clone cavalry to save his sorry ass. So Lucas's casting a pretty boy in Anakin's role is a little amusing - Annie could have been played by frickin' Adonis and he'd be not a whit less distasteful a character.

[diligent_d]

Just a small point, after watching Return Of The Jedi, I see that the PT didn't really have anyone that could excersize comedic wit - wit which in turn gave the OT a certain diversity.

Lando, Han, even C3PO in a couple scenes provided what I thought was some good, intelligent humor - but no one in the prequels were really capable of this - thus the resorting to stupid robot/Jar Jar humour. So ya it was definately miscast from that perspective, as well as the others previous posters have mentioned. Having at least one character to break up the scenes and add levity to certain situations would have been advantageous.

This post has been edited by diligent_d: 24 May 2005 - 11:43 PM