For people who disliked the Prequels, consider this:

Absolutely, or Breaking Bad.

Or to put it even more simply, we all loved Darth Vader. Isn't it thoroughly wrong to find the character of Anakin so much more likeable when he's a cybernetic genocidal monstrosity working as the right hand man for a disfigured Space Hitler... than compared to when he was a handsome young hero fighting for morality and justice?

Following on from a hypothetical Episode 1 that had an adult Anakin who was just awesome; a Han Solo or a Poe Dameron - not literally, just figuratively in terms of likability - that you just want to go drinking with, that the kids in the audience want to grow up to be, I feel his arc should have been presented in 2 & 3 in a way more akin to Michael Douglas' character in Falling Down; whereby his descent into darkness is something that we the audience are initially thoroughly on his side for; we can see his perspective and agree with it, we're rooting for him, we empathise and may even feel we'd do the same thing, he sees personal-rewards for his choices that make everything feel justified, until he slowly goes past the point of no return and he's forced to realise "I'm the bad guy?"
Having Anakin ignorantly screaming "From my perspective the Jedi are evil!" after having murdered innocent children is not the same thing. The important part is that we then as an audience have to take pause and discover that we too hadn't realised until too late that the protagonist had become the antagonist and the damage had been done (something that was beautifully done in the game Shadow of the Colossus). That's being seduced by the dark side. Not an intergalactic nazi monster yelling "DO IT!" whilst his face melts.

Sure the real Anakin had a couple of moments like that with the Tusken village and the execution of Dooku, but he was too much of a turd for me to empathise with him much regardless. If he'd become closer to the Lars family after the Tusken slaughter, that could have helped (well, a bit), but he never once showed compassion or value for their hospitality or their respective love for his mother. This is his step-father and step-brother; Cliegg loved his mother and took her away from slavery; he searched for her for weeks losing his leg and the lives of his friends just to find her; and as we know, this is also to be the family that Luke gets raised by. This family deserves ultimate respect in the scheme of the story and unfortunately they're treated as nothing more than a five minute pit-stop and dumping ground for Anakin's self-absorbed whining.

When Poe calls someone "Buddy!" you believe it, you can feel it. Not for one second did I ever feel that Anakin was "...a good friend".

 

The biggest mistake Lucas made was having 2 actors play Anakin (obviously because of the age difference). If he stuck with 1 actor, we could have gotten to know him in Episode 1 (should have been Luke's age in ANH), and he is just a good guy who is alittle reckless. The whole movie should have been about Anakin/Obiwan yucking it up, showing their good friends, and saving Padme and eventually falling for her. Episode 2 could be where you start to see the cracks as he starts defying the Jedi Council and just becomes too arrogant because he is the chosen one. Episode 3 should have started out with him turning to the darkside, and then you get 2 hours of evil Darth Vader. He could be slowly hunting the Jedi down for Palpatine and the Jedi Council would have no idea who was doing it, eventually finding out it was Anakin. So Kenobi goes to confront him and they face off and because their friendship was well developed in Episode 1, it's tragic to watch. It would be comparable to Han and Luke having a duel in ROTJ after being friends throughout the OT.

 

Honestly, I don't agree. It never bothered me. And this sounds like a back-handed complaint that the Prequel Trilogy should have started with Anakin already in his late teens . . . just as Luke had started the Original Trilogy. And I never understood this argument, other than it sounds like a complaint that Lucas should have adhered closer to the Original Trilogy narrative style with the Prequel Trilogy. And for me, that sounds like a lack of originality.

 

Except for me it ties precisely into my whole complaint about Anakin never being likeable and specifically "a good friend" to Obi Wan.

With Anakin starting as a child, that's all he is; an innocent child. Obi Wan is just his chaperone for part of the movie, indeed Qui Gon spends more time with Anakin than Obi Wan does. Alongside the rise of the Empire, the main purpose of the prequels was to show Anakin's fall to the dark side, his betrayal of the Jedi and the collapse of his friendship with Obi Wan.

In The Phantom Menace, Obi Wan isn't his friend and the character as an innocent child isn't nuanced or rich enough in characterisation to begin the arc. He's just a sweet little kid. The criticism for me has got nothing to do with it matching the beats of the original trilogy, it's to do with wasting a whole film showing absolutely no growth to the character of Anakin, giving him no personality (like I said, he's just a sweet little kid, he's not his own person yet - something that's forged through age, growth and maturity), no development of relationships with people as an equal (they're just his custodians listening to a nice little boy chat about his observations) and then that results in not only having to get to know a whole new Anakin in Episode 2 who doesn't look or act anything like the previous incarnation (he might as well be a new character), but his downfall from hero to super villain has to take place over just two movies instead of three. You can show the downfall to evil in just one if it's done well, like the aforementioned Falling Down, but you can't clutter the rest of the movie with subplots, tons of characters, multiple antagonists and enormous set-pieces if that's the case, it needs to be streamlined and that's the main story you tell. The downfall of Anakin needed to be a few movies long since they've got the enormous decade-spanning intergalactic political story to surround it with, but Episode 1 takes place over the course of what seems like just a couple of days and has Anakin begin as sweet and innocent and ends with him still sweet and innocent at an alien disco party with a crap haircut. They ridded themselves of a whole movie with which to begin his major arc for no reason I can understand.

If they'd shown his slave life to have been horrific; to have him beaten and starved, something that would have sewed seeds to show that the child has suffered things his peers wouldn't understand, that would have altered his thinking and emotions, that had made him grow up faster because he had to grow up faster, then perhaps that would have worked towards making child-Anakin a useful representation of the character. But instead he seems to just work in a shop doing what he loves; building robots, fixing things, racing pods. A well-fed supposed-'slave' child yelling "yippee!" and "Mom I'm home!" who's free to walk around town and happily play with his friends has no sympathy value so what was the point of making him a slave? Jyn Erso's childhood trauma was tackled in ten minutes and it carried far more weight than Anakin's over a whole movie.

If they wanted to show how much he loved his mother and that was his weakness, then have him not wanting to go with the Jedi. Have them insisting he goes for the good of the universe, the prophecy or whatever, but have Anakin desperately wanting to stay with his mother; he's crying, screaming, begging not to go but they convince her, force her or pay her to take him. That would give him good cause to begin turning against them later in life as his awareness, understanding, strength and power all grow; blaming them for losing everything he loved and forced to leave behind. In the actual movie however, aside from a very brief puppy-dog-face, he's instead skipping out of the front door going "off to live with the space wizards, k thnx bye!"
I personally wouldn't have wanted to have been taken away from my family at 9 years old no matter how cool their spaceship was or that they've got a Nintendo onboard.

And it never changes the fact that Episode 2 & 3 Anakin was just an unlikable, self-absorbed, whining little tool. As I've said before, The Clone Wars' Anakin brought likability to the role, he was "a good friend" to Obi Wan, he was plucky, loyal, valiant, caring and moral, but had a weakness for his anger, overconfidence and jealousy taking control of him and losing himself in the moment if he let it. When Anakin went from loving-partner to deliberately walking in when uninvited and beating the hell out of Rush Clovis even though Padme had told him to trust her in regards to extracting information from him, I thought it was a masterful presentation of seeing Anakin as a real flawed person with a genuine 'dark side' that was growing. All his chivalry and heroism in prior episodes, especially after his recent defence of Asohka's murder-charge when all others believed it, had been suddenly undermined for his lack of trust in Padme and his brutal violence that resulted from it. Padme ends their relationship afterwards which again I thought was a perfect end-result to this breakdown.

The movie Anakin never displays this variety of character traits; he is nothing but consistently creepy, pervy, sulky, angry, whiny, gullible, reckless, obnoxious and above-all petulant with an entitlement complex. He was never likeable, so when he has nasty outbursts, it's just seeing a horrible snivelling little worm just becoming even worse. And where's the interest in that? There's not one moment in the movies that makes me understand why Obi Wan's friends with him or why Padme could even possibly love him beyond, what, the fact that he was once a nice little boy? That's not how adult relationships work. I wouldn't want to be friends with him; if he rang me up to ask if I wanted to go out on Friday night I'd hang up and block his number, if he added me on Facebook I'd decline, so why am I expected to believe that lovable old Alec Guiness was ever his friend too?

He's a spoilt, temper-tantrum-throwing, black-clad teenager slamming his bedroom door shut, screaming "YOU'VE RUINED MY LIFE!!!!" because he's been told to stay in and study for his final exams instead of going out to drink alcopops in the park with his douchey friends. Except this one murders kids instead of cutting himself to Evanescence because of it.

 

I was saying he should have started Anakin in Episode 1 closer to Luke's age more in a general sense, not to replicate the story told in the OT.

My point is it's very hard to explore any character development when the character is a kid compared to an adult. Anakin in Episode 1 doesn't really do much in terms of character arc and that is a result of starting him off as a kid. He is essentially the chosen one and you go with it because you've seen the OT.

If Lucas starts Anakin at 18-20 years old in Episode 1 then he can show some flaws, maybe have him flirt with Padme, maybe have him do something that Obiwan worries is reckless. That was all wasted in Episode 1 so Lucas had to rush his character development in Episodes 2 & 3 and forced him to gloss over so many important parts of the overall story. The last half of ROTS is literally a greatest hits checklist of dream plot points that Lucas simply ran out of time to tell, and it all goes back to wasting Episode 1 with Anakin as a kid and Obiwan essentially being a secondary character.

 

I'm late to the game but I can't help myself but participate in such discussions. I respect your perspective but disagree with it on almost every level.

To me there is a difference between opinion based on evidence and opinion based on opinion. So many of the statements you make, in particular prescribing baseless and unverifiable motivations for Prequel criticism, are purely speculative and have no factual credence. You can justify virtually anything, that doesn't in turn mean its well executed, but rather justifiable on a virtually endless scale. For example, I have seen videos and posts trying to criticize TFA for not making sense. Every single argument made has a viable and believable counter argument, rendering them void to a rational objective individual. In the same token, these same aspects most often can be criticized for being poor plot devices even though they may technically "make sense".

So, just because something "fits" or "makes sense", does that in turn prove to it is the best narrative choice? And just because something exists in real life, does that mean it belongs in a movie? Imagine Geonosians swarming Obi Wan's ship and cleaning it spot less from top to bottom, expecting proper compensation upon completion.

Shouldn't people be able to sympathize or relate to characters? The best character development facilitates sympathy or relate-ability in unusual or impossible circumstances. Do you really think that people can't relate to teen age rebellion, rejecting expectations, and making bad choices due to compromised or changed perspective? I believe nearly EVERYBODY can relate to these circumstances, or at least I have no proof to suggest they can't. A large aspect of film making is human psychology. And this is not a definitive statement because there are certainly exceptions, but film makers are tasked with predicting audience reactions. So in my opinion, if an audience doesn't understand something, it is more often than not because the film maker did not explain it well enough. But my theory why you don't agree with people about the prequels is because you can't relate to their reasoning versus their reasoning not being justifiable.

Whiney people do exist, but they are also annoying, so why would I want my main protagonist that way. It distracts from his nobleness and goodness more than it adds to his character. Anakin in RotS was portrayed much better in the sense that he was a strong, good person who still has selfishness in him that ultametly led to his demise. In contrast, whininess can be portrayed in a way that doesn't grit your teeth and properly serves the character, like Luke in ANH. One of the differences is his character arc is less abrupt and better developed, not to mention better dialog. You must remember that many of the complaints are intertwined with other aspects contributing to perceptions. From one movie to the next Anakin goes from self less and mature to selfish and immature without much of an explanation as to why, in an environment that you would not expect would breed such contempt. And sure, the introduction of power can breed over confidence, which should be expected, but not on the level of a five year old temper tantrum. Of course, this perception could have been erased with better dialog, acting, and direction.

Personally, I think the Anakin character would have been better served in his teenage years. He would have been revered by some and considered a street thug by others but otherwise well known in the community. He would have been mostly good, but a little rough around the edges, able to justify a bad action if the consequences appeared good. He would have gotten into philosophical arguements with his step brother Owen, worked as the local mechanic, and participated in speeder races. He would be snarky and strong willed, caring in some ways and selfish in others.

Here's an interesting question: does Owen know that Anakin became Vader? And if the answer is no, then what about Anakin did Owen not want Luke to portray? Was it merely he didn't want Luke to join the fight and get killed? It seems like there is a lot more context there that was not properly expanded upon in the prequels.

And with Jar Jar, your argument falls really flat. There are many types of humor. I have no problem with Jar Jar being a funny, clumbsy character, so was 3PO. But just because some people think putting a tshirt over your head and saying I am cornholio is funny, doesn't mean its a good decision for a Star Wars movie. Humor should be intelligently integrated. One of my big issues with the prequels is so many aspects are overt and obvious. 3PO, R2, BB-8, and Wicket are good examples of well integrated, intelligent, light hearted humor. Instead we got "exsqueeze me" and fart jokes.

And to say Lucas knew what he was doing with Anakin is not entirely true. He admitted multiple times in the commentaries that he didn't like scenes where the characters talked and has stated that the visuals are more important than the story. So how can you put confidence in a film makers character development skills when he wasn't concerned with the story and didn't like writing dialog? Hard to develop a good character without that.

 

My two cents on the subject is that objectively, the prequels are not great, but they had a lot of good ideas that were unfortunately executed poorly.

In terms of world-building and differentiation from previous material, the prequels do well. There are a lot of cool designs of creatures, weapons, and starships. The cinematography is competent, and both production and costume design were well-done and intriguing. The music is brilliant, and the overall sound design was done very well. There are moments of comedy, drama, action, suspense, tension, joy, and more, so there are many good things you can take away from these films.

Where the prequels fail is the lack of clarity for the layman, the lack of character development, and overall writing. Not to say that is was bad, but it was sub-par; it seemed as though only 1 or 2 drafts were written before being approved. Not much was given to the audience to allow for empathy, and the plot seemed like it was too complex for itself.

Still, I enjoy them.

 

It has nothing to do with emulating the OT. Personally, that is one reason I don't like the idea because even though there are and should be parallels, we don't need the same movies over and over again. However, it would have created a stronger contrast between Luke and Anakin's character arcs to show the "light" path and the "dark" path (certainly its more complex than that but I think you get the idea). That being said, the reasons (and certainly this is not an exhaustive list) for Anakin being a little older in the first movie are as follows:

-Allows for a slightly more serious tone
-Allows him to be more established in the environment facilitating character depth and world building
-Allows greater emotional complexity
-Creates a more logical character arc between movies
-Allows for the development of stronger relationships in the first movie to carry over to the other two and beyond ie Obi-Wan, Padme, Owen etc
-Greater involvement in the action
-Makes it more clear why the Jedi couldn't mold him to their model
-Gives more significance to Yoda's statement about Luke being too old to begin the training if Anakin was closer in age

Are these enough reasons? I could probably come up with more given enough time. It honestly does bother me when those who are critical of the prequels are labeled and minimized into a corner for being "biased" and "nostalgic" when there are many legitimate reasons for the many criticisms. It does make me wonder how many of those who tell PT critics to just except the PT as a Star Wars fan and stop whining are whining about the new movies. Just curious...

 

I agree with @YubNubBub, especially his initial point about Anakin. I was almost 19 when "The Phantom Menace" hit theaters, and 25 by the time "Revenge of the Sith" was released. I grew up a loner, with no deep social skills but a great desire to be loved and appreciated...so in some ways, i really identified with Anakin. I'm also a hopeless romantic, so I never understood why people cringed over the dialogue between him and Padme. Too many folks treat love and relationships like a game now, with no real purpose...and the lack of seriousness has wrecked the whole thing for a lot of people. I often say that if more people took things seriously such as love, relationships, sex, and parenting...divorce rates would drop like a rock. All this crap about "casual relationships" honestly makes me want to puke, along with the very people who pursue them being surprised when things go wrong. It makes me want to scream, "What did you expect, moron?!"

For all his mistakes, at least Anakin started out selfless; it was only his fear of loss that drove him toward madness. Of course, the Jedi Council didn't help any, either - particularly Yoda, Mace, and Obi-Wan. They were so extremely attached to dogma, that it blinded them to what was really happening...exemplified best by Kenobi's self-defeating line, "Only a Sith deals in absolutes." I wanted to pose the obvious question in response: "What about the Council's absolute devotion, to peace and justice?"

 

George Lucas also cringes at the love scene dialog, listen to the Aotc commentary. He admits that he doesn't like writing scenes of dialog and it shows. For the most part the scenes are poorly written, there is little to no chemistry between the actors, the acting is not believable, the scenes are not natural and feel incredibly forced, and they have to set aside 30 mintues to isolate the love story versus properly integrating it into the story allowing for better pacing. That is why so many people don't like it.

But I'm sure they wish they could just...wish away their feelings.

 

Starting Anakin out as a 9 year old is another idea that’s great on paper, but terrible in practice. Lucas wanted to juxtapose Anakin’s environments. A child fated for slavery, with no prospects but had the love of his mother - then replacing that with the near limitless opportunities provided by the Jedi, but lacking that core emotional nourishment he’d grown dependent on.

How does that scenario inform someone’s psychology? Wouldn’t that produce a person constantly seeking outward acknowledgement? What happens when that person is raised by people who actively shun demonstrative affection? Wouldn’t he look elsewhere and be more amenable to darker influences? That type of contrast simply wouldn’t work with an older figure. They’d be more self-reliant and adaptable.

It’s a brilliant concept IMO, but falls square on its face in the onscreen story. Lucas, the writer and director, just doesn’t have the range necessary to convey that degree of character depth. That’s not his strength. The intent is lost and motivations seem to come out of nowhere and seem inorganic.

 

I think the prequels are great in principle, just not always well executed. Seem too much aimed at kids at times. hard to put your finger on what doesn't sit quite right! But it doesn't have the poise of the original trilogy. Then again, neither do the sequels!