I don't recall being enthused with his performance, although in part I agree with the general sentiment that it is hard to get a good teen/adult audience connection with a child actor. It isn't impossible, although it takes the sort of writing and directing chops that weren't in evidence. I don't blame Lloyd, since there's so many Oscar winners and lauded actors whose talents didn't seem to be utilized.I was never one of the "Anakid" haters, because I always enjoyed Jake Lloyd's performance; I thought he was great for his age, with great facial mimicry. In the extended cut of the movie he emotes far more with his face during the pod race as he struggles to fix his crippled racer than many grown action stars could ever hope to.
I haven't seen the extended cut, but if some of Lloyd's best work is in it, then again it shows choices made higher up in the production were not helping. Outside of the movie, the amount grief I later learned he got over what should have been a positive experience from realizing a fan kid's dream saddened me. One can't really blame Lucas for the actions of kids and the fandom, either.
Making Anakin so deeply embedded into the other characters, like building C-3PO also had an effect of shrinking the universe.Still, the character is just way, WAY too young for the shoes he's supposed to fill. He's a natural-born mechanic, pod racer and builder of droids......at age SIX. That's simply beyond the realms of credibility "force prodigy" or not. Then he's supposed to be an accomplished starfighter pilot too, only he hasn't ever sat in a fighter by the time Obi-Wan meets him in Episode 1, making Obi of Episode 4 a doddering misremembering old fart.
Also, as Lucas intended the prequels to be a fall from grace tragedy, Episode I effectively wasted an entire movie of time building up the emotional component, since neither Obi-Wan or Padme really interacted with him in anything that carried over, and the later movies had to "tell not show" or rush things. Whatever investment was put into Qui-Gon was burned up as well, since he spent more time caring (sort of) about Anakin at all and his impact on Obi-Wan was such that he was barely commented on ever after (except that cringe-worthy callback in III).
I think there was an off-hand comment made by the office Vader force-choked about it being his religion. I wouldn't say it's enough to produce specific monk formulation, or the policies on self-denial.
The desert robes made sense in the original trilogy on Tatooine, for example, but perhaps Lucas in some desire for consistency decided to retcon that into making them Gregorian monks with "laser swords".
If anything, after all these movies and books, I would have figured their one job would have been to hunt down the planet/system destroying superweapons that someone builds every 10-20 years. Nothing else seems sustainable.
Lucas dropped the ball on so many levels with his shoddy writing, it's really sad.
The weird romance handling and the movies' treatment of love seemed alienating to me. I'd wonder if it would have been better if the movie started with the adult actors and had focused on the treatment of Anakin's mother and the Jedi Order's complete insensitivity to the persistence of slavery (and then embracing of a form of it) to better justify his character's fall from grace. It would have required that he remembered his slave mother more often than just once over a decade later, though.
