from what i gathered, hayden tried. he tried to make some bad lines work. he tried to get george to change it but he didnt listen to hayden's suggestions so... i know hes humble but he must've been frustrated af
this pic says it all folks
HC’s performance gets amazingly better if you put the TV on mute. I don’t mean that as a slam against him, but a slam against how horribly crippled he was by the poorly written dialogue. I didn’t realize it myself until I got in the fandom (due to TCW) and started seeing PT gifs everywhere, and it’s just like - wait. His nonverbal nuances, body language, facial expressions, little quirky things like the way Anakin hides his hands in the sleeves of his robe - none of those are the signs of a bad actor. They’re the signs of a good actor who understands his character. HC gets an assload of shit he doesn’t remotely deserve.
This is exactly the same thing I’ve noticed. When I first started getting back into Star Wars fandom, I noticed all these prequels gifs that looked absolutely amazing–and it wasn’t just a small handful. Just about everything of the PT looks really gorgeous in gif format! Yet when I go back to the movies, it is difficult to get through them sometimes–and not just with Hayden, but everyone in the cast. I can barely listen to Ewan’s scenes or Sir Christopher Lee’s scenes or Natalie’s scenes, all of whom are considered good actors. Yet the gifs look great?? You absolutely can tell what Anakin’s going through in pretty much any gif of Hayden from the movies?? So, why…? There’s just something about the sound of the movies that doesn’t work for me, as well as the dialogue. (Which is better in written form, if not by much.) Between the wooden dialogue (George has said himself that he’s the king of wooden dialogue, yet he still wouldn’t let the actors change it–the only reason the OT wasn’t as bad was because apparently I guess Mark and Carrie just went and changed it anyway, but that was before he was GEORGE LUCAS) and that George is famously not an actor’s director/Hayden needed more help than he got (that story Ewan tells about little Boba not getting the scene right and how George was no help to him pretty much says a lot), we got a weakened surface of what’s actually a really good story. I maintain that George Lucas is brilliant at creating worlds, that he’s great at the overarching stuff, but the minute detail stuff is where he suffers and the PT got the brunt of that. But if you can look past that, there’s so much there that really, really holds up and it’s why I will defend the prequels for life.
If people want to be honest, the only actors who managed to escape the prequel hating unscathed in most of their performances are notably classically trained UK actors - Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Ian McDiarmid, and Christopher Lee - and this is ultimately no surprise and even more of a sign that the issue is with the writing and not the performances.
George Lucas has a tendency of writing unwieldy and wooden dialogue, they’re near impossible to deliver right because that’s not how people talk. That’s why you get so many actors, even good ones like Natalie Portman and Samuel L Jackson faltering under the dialogue because it makes no sense to speak this way. So why then could the four actors I noted manage to make something of the dialogue? Because what else has unwieldy lines and ways of speaking that isn’t normal? Shakespeare, theater.
The four actors usually noted for being better performers in the films happen to be UK actors trained in theater and Shakespeare, they’re trained to know exactly how to deliver unwieldy and uncomprehending lines in a way that makes it enjoyable to listen. They know and can make George’s dialogues work because this kind of unusual way of speaking that isn’t normal is something they are familiar with, especially in theater performances which they all would have had plenty of experiences in their careers.
So when you got those actors who are trained basically to handle horrible dialogue, of course they look better on screen next to the unfortunate American actors who had an entirely different way of training when it comes to acting and performing.
Just think about it, the OT had some atrocious dialogue too, most notably in A New Hope, which George also did - and frankly he only got away with it because Alec Guinness could read a phone book and make it sound like holy gospel, the film was completely unprecedented science fiction story telling and visual effects masterpiece, he lucked out in finding actors who had swag and charisma, and that’s kinda how people spoke and acted back then so it actually fit the audience.
George Lucas is a brilliant visionary, he is simply unmatched in that, no one will ever convince me otherwise, this man created Star Wars and this universe in his head and he should be given every credit for what he did, most especially for special effects with ILM - but he isn’t a writer, and it shouldn’t be shocking that the better and most beloved Star Wars films happen to be written by someone else like Larry Kasdan.
I can guarantee you that if you give Hayden Christensen the same Anakin dialogue that Matt Lanter had from the Clone Wars series, the prequels would have been received so differently. This is why I so much want to see Hayden given another chance again as Anakin, especially Force Ghost Anakin, somehow in Ep 8 or 9. Hayden under the guidance of someone like Rian Johnson who knows how to direct actors and writes amazing scripts would actually have a chance of changing people’s perceptions of the prequels and his performance in them.
