re: Is casting a 9 year old as young Anakin the worst casting decision of all time?

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Anakin in the prequels should have been a character in the same mold as Dacre Montgomery's Billy from Stranger Things - an arrogant young shithead with a ton of charisma. It would have been easy to see that character transition into Darth Vader. He's better than everyone else at the Force and that makes him think he's better than everyone else at everything, and all problems could be solved if everyone would just shut the hell up about "the Senate" and "the Jedi Code" and get the frick out of his way. That kind of character would be easy for Palpatine to subtly manipulate into becoming Vader because he truly believed it was the right thing to do. Instead we got, "I had a really bad dream! TIME TO KILL CHILDREN."

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There would be nothing tragic about a character like this succumbing to the Dark Side though. The arc that culminates in ROTJ would make no sense.

Anakin: Are you an angel?

Queen Amidala: What?

Anakin: An angel. I've heard the deep space pilots talk about them. They live on the moons of Iego, I think. They're the most beautiful creatures in the universe.

Queen Amidala: You're a funny little boy. How do you know so much?

Anakin: I listen to all the traders and star pilots who come through here. I'm a pilot, you know, and someday I'm going to fly away from this place.

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The role of Anakin in Phantom Menace was clearly written for a 16-year-old or so. But at some point Lucas apparently sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night worried he might not sell enough toys, and so he recast Anakin as a preteen without changing the script in the slightest

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Honestly, I give George the benefit of the doubt a little on this one. If TPM starts with a teenage protagonist on Tattooine, he gets read to filth for ripping off his own movie. It would be the same criticism TFA got x 1000. He had to balance working with what he knew and what he wants with the inevitable pushback.

I think focusing on Anakin at all was a mistake. I-III should have been Obi-Wan's story even before Ewan showed out every movie.

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think that I was like 8 or 9 when it came out helped out a lot with the reason Ill always love it.

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Well... yeah. You and your parents’ pocket book was a very large target audience. Gotta sell them toys.

And how have we made it this far into a TPM thread without mentioning Jar Jar Binks?

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I still can’t get over the space battle and blowing up the generator at the end.

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We watched it again watched last week. It is not believable, at all, that Qui Gon and Obi-Won took Anakin to a planet where a war was raging. It's not like they didn't know a battle would break out. They went there BECAUSE a battle was going to break out. No one takes a 9 year old into that situation.

The whole point was to show Darth Vader as an innocent kid, which is a pretty good idea in theory.

I have no issue with Anakin being 9 in that movie. The dialogue written for him sucked.

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The whole point was to show Darth Vader as an innocent kid, which is a pretty good idea in theory.

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The poster with young Anakin walking and his shadow casting a Darth Vader silhouette was pretty awesome.

ETA: This one

Every time I watch Episode 1 I think, “How the F did the producers and crew watch the footage and not think this is the worst dialogue/wooden acting ever?”

Seriously how could all those people not realize that?

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There would be nothing tragic about a character like this succumbing to the Dark Side though. The arc that culminates in ROTJ would make no sense.

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Sitting down for my morning shite, so I finally have time to respond to this.

If you are at all familiar with the character of Billy from Stranger Things, then you know that while he comes across as a selfish, arrogant jackass, he's not actually a bad guy. When push comes to shove he will do the right thing. He just is who he is because of things that happened in his background. Anakin should have been the same way. One of the major problems with the way he is presented in the prequels is that prequel Anakin does not mesh with OT Vader. They seem like two different people. Anakin needed to have a darkness, an edge to him, to make us believe he would one day be capable of Force-choking Admiral Ozzel to death just for coming out of lightspeed in the wrong place. We never got that. We got a likable, good-hearted kid who had one bad day that is supposed to have turned him into one of the greatest villains of all time. Not believable.

Give Anakin some darkness. Make him mean well, but also make him dismissive of those who do not see things his way. Make him frustrated by the Jedi, not only because they don't recognize and respect his incredible strength in the Force like he wants, but also because they refuse to decisively deal with the Separatists when they clearly have the power to do so. Make him actually too old to begin the training, and show why that is so. Play up the difference between what he expects Jedi training to be (being taught how to control and use the Force) with what it actually is (years and years spent learning self-discipline so when you finally do learn to wield incredible power, you are ready to control it). Have Palpatine subtly manipulate Anakin into believing that the Jedi are slow-playing him because they are afraid of him, rather than trying to help him learn how to control his strength. There is a crucial difference between the Jedi position of "strength comes from wisdom" and the Sith position of "strength comes from strength" that should be made clear. Given the right character traits, it would then be immediately obvious why the Sith view would strongly appeal to Anakin.

Then play the political situation, which should really be mostly in the background, off of those same themes. Palpatine proposes the creation of a centralized Republic military to respond to the Separatist threat. The motion narrowly fails in the Senate, as many systems feel that, lacking a true external enemy, a Republic military could have as its only real target the systems of the Republic themselves. Palpatine responds by staging a "Separatist" bombing attack on the Senate itself, and then declaring a state of emergency which grants him essentially unlimited power. He establishes the military by executive order, and in response many of the dissenting systems declare their intention to leave the Republic - the seeds of the Rebellion. And use all of this to play up Anakin's internal struggle. He believes Palpatine is acting in the Republic's best interest and is angry at those who refuse to see that and fall in line - and most especially with the Jedi, who refuse to take part in any action against the seceding systems. Palpatine plays this up by telling Anakin that the Jedi Council don't really care about the rule of law, they care about holding onto their privileged place as the ultimate arbiters of peace and justice in the galaxy, a position which will be challenged by the new military. As events unfold and the conflicts (both internal and external) deepen, Palpatine ultimately offers Anakin a role as his Imperial Executor, a role which he promises will leave Anakin free rein to act as he sees fit, as long as he acts in the best interests of the Empire. It is as this point that he also reveals himself fully to Anakin, who has already guessed the truth anyway, and who is ready to become a Sith. His first mission? Bring the Jedi Council to heel.

Obviously that's just the bare bones of what would be a much larger story, but to me, that would be a tragic tale of a man who really did want to do good, but who, ultimately, ended up doing much more evil in the name of the good he intended to accomplish.

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They sucked at training them anyway since most of them went down like bitches to 3 or 4 stormtroopers.

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That's why I've said ROS gets too much hate for use of plot devices.

The abrupt shift from Jedis running though hordes of stormtroopers to Jedis being taken out immediately is just one of many prequel plot devices.

The dream about Padme's death is a major part of Anakin's going to the dark side, and it's 100% a plot device.

Even the Death Star flaw in the original movies is a plot device.