Grown ass adult star war fans be like

We’re going to murder a child for being a child

His performance isn't good but neither are most of the performances in the film, even by talented, well-established actors. The writing and direction is really to blame here. It's hard to be a good actor when you're delivering terrible lines in front of a green screen, talking to a tennis ball on a stick.

As a side note they really should have aged up Anakin to around 13 or 14 instead of like 9. It would have allowed them to find a more charismatic child actor, and removed the weirdness of the Padme age gap.

Yeah the kid was fine and of course didn't deserve the hate.

The whole movie would have worked better if it just started Anakin closer to the age he is in attack of the clones though. The Jedi are already calling him too old anyway, and it would have made the hotshot piloting fit better and also the start of the Anakin/Padme thing less weird.

Yeah I never really got what all the hate was about.

Unless he wrote his own dialogue, he's absolutely not the problem with the movie. It's actually kind of a fun movie in a shitty bad movie kind of way.

I remember when the toxic side of the Star Wars fandom first made itself loudly, even violently apparent when The Phantom Menace came out...

So many adults (and I must say it, almost entirely men) acting like enraged children because whatever they imagined the first prequel was going to be didn't happen, up to and including expressions of outright violence (destroying toys and memorabilia on camera in ritualistic gestures of rage), edgy Newgrounds animations that focused on homophobia-coded violence against Jar Jar Binks, and yes, bullying Jake Lloyd for playing a character in a movie. And the bullying went on and on for Jake Lloyd for so long that he abandoned that psychologically painful part of his past, disowned all association with the character and the franchise, and he's still traumatized by the experience.

My disgust for the Star Wars fandom in general had its genesis there.

I thought you meant IN the universe for a moment. And I also agree with that as well as what you meant. Why did the Jedi make an extremely traumatized slave the one true hope for a profession that requires perfect emotional regulation again?

Being an average child actor is sort of by definition bad. Child actors have not had years to train to convey or even honestly learn a broad array of human emotions. There are sometimes good child actors and they are unusual and, for this reason, noteworthy. (And FWIW I think Jake Lloyd was below-average child actor, but it's not necessary to agree for my point to stand.)

Jake Lloyd was terrible, but like it's not his fault - he was a child. It's Lucas's fault for unnecessarily trying to start his story at childhood, not waiting until a genuinely natural child actor came along and not giving Lloyd (or anyone) natural dialog to work with.

I actually think TPM is the best prequel film.

I was literally his age when the movies came out, don’t understand the hate to this day

He was one of the least offensive parts of the movie tbh, I think people just didn't like that there was no "main character" to self-insert as.

Anakin is a weird genius messiah-figure slave child, not really relatable and only comes into the movie halfway through and is given very little screen time outside of pod racing (pod races were the best part of the movie though).

Obi-wan was a weird aloof nerd who kept whining about the rules and never expressed any emotion outside of annoyance.

Qui-gon was pretty funny, but died part way through (spoiler). He kinda rocked, as an old burnt out dude who doesn't give a fuck about the rules anymore and has to deal with this annoying hall monitor kid nipping at his heels.