Strange Little Anakin

Rating: Null/10 (29 May 1999)

I was perfectly at home with a blue demon salesman that flapped around in the air against all principles of areodymamics, and comfortable with the hairless Chihuahua-man who walked on his hands, but I found little Anakin Skywalker, played by 8 year old Jake Lloyd, rather strange, even in the setting that he was in. Although the boy is appealing, there are critical instances where he seems odd and contrived. Anakin has the face of a six year old, is about the size of a nine year old, and often acts as if he is past thirty years of age. When young Anakin drives his pod with equanimity that marine combat pilots could envy, I chalked it up to precociousness and perhaps the effect of the "Force" within him. His tremendous courage and resilience I attributed to worldliness created by a harsh childhood of slavery. However, what struck me as unnatural about the boy was the clumsy foundation set for the love relationship Anakin will have with Queen Amidala in the next two films.
The young boy compares the Queen to an angel and he declares his feelings for her with a wide-eyed simplicity that, unfortunately, falls just short of believability. I found the scene taxing to my suspension of disbelief because boys less than ten years of age typically don't like girls the way Anakin likes Amidala. If Anakin had been just a few years older, say 13 or 14, then not only this scene, but his character would have been more plausible. As it is, he simply is too young to be doing and feeling the things Lucas wants us to accept. An older boy would have made it easier for the audience to see why Yoda said that Anakin was too old for training as well. My son did identify with Anakin, but only on a superficial level, not at all the way he dives into Luke Skywalker. For example, my four year old watched the pod racing scene with open-mouthed wonder, bouncing in his seat, obviously enthralled with seeing another young boy doing something so exciting. However, the second time he saw the film (a week later), my preschooler was already bored with this Ben-Hur inspired race, yet he has watched Luke do similar things over and over, never tiring of him.
I think that is because, even though the effects for the pod race are amazing, it is a shallow event, even for a four year old. I think a big improvement could have been made had Anakin known that he was racing for his freedom. As it is, the boy is merely racing, and it could have had more meaning for the audience had it been more personally meaningful for the character himself. His actions and his personality don't seem to be reaching the audience as much as they could due to these two shortcomings in basic writing and development. Anakin needs to be a bit older to be realistic and he needs more pathos to be more interesting. Perhaps this is why Luke works so well, yet Anakin seems to be falling a bit flat: Luke's character is infinitely more natural and convincing due being more closely matched in age to his level of maturity. It is ironic that Anakin's character and how the tone of his relationships is set seems to be the major flaw in "The Phantom Menace", because Lucas went to such lengths to make sure that he wrote, directed and produced the movie, in order to retain full artistic control. It is my opinion that a director and/or a producer would have probably made improvements here, not to the point of disrupting the artistic integrity of the story, but adding to it, rather. As with all one man shows, the creator retains control, but his flaws are there for all to see, and with Anakin, I am afraid that we see why Lucas truly does hate to write: he could be better at it.
Quality in the craftmanship of the films is, and will be, crucial, and I can only hope that the best writers and directors will be involved in the next episodes. Star Wars is not a simple space opera anymore and we need more than what we were given with "Indiana Jones." Never before has there been such an ambition of character development on the big screen as we see in the Star Wars films. Anakin is carried through six films, and his hardest development is yet to come, Obi Wan Kenobi is in four, and Yoda is in four or five. The story is not episodic, rather it has a finite structure and these characters go through many changes and developments within the plot line. Special effects simply will not make up for any defects in these characters, therefore. The characters will have to be so fully explored that it is essential that they be developed highly, or the films will become an artistic failure. This does not mean that the rest of the trilogy is doomed, however. Reportedly, Lucas will not be so overly involved in the next two films and I think it realistic to hope that they will exceed "The Phantom Menace" in quality. They will have to, or no one is going to see them, I suspect. We've grown up in the twenty three years that have passed between trilogies and frankly, Lucas's audience demands more than special effects now and hopefully others more talented will take his place and answer that challenge successfully.