DIRECTOR - WHAT HAPPENED?
Jake Lloyd was excellent in "Jingle All the Way" and I was surprised his Phantom Menace acting was so-so. Whoever was directing should have done a lot more directing.
shareGeorge Lucas is infamously not an "actor's director"; his sparse direction apparently had his crew at one point gift him with paddles which read, "faster" and "more intense" because those were the only notes he ever gave to actors. He also tends to direct dialogue scenes (particularly in the prequels) in a pretty bland way - shot/reverse shot stuff while characters sit on couches for blocking. It's no surprise he couldn't (or wouldn't) get a good performance out of Jake Lloyd. He didn't get great work out of Natalie Portman or Samuel L. Jackson, either (or Hayden Christensen, who I have heard can actually deliver a decent character with good material and an engaged director).
Star Wars has never had sparkling dialogue and its characters are archetypes, mostly, so it helps when the actors do some of the heavy lifting. Mark Hamill has said in interviews that he assumed the film was a comedy (based on the corny lines) and he played his role like a straight man, and it was the right choice. He created the awkward, whiny teenager, which gave Luke somewhere to go; he could become a hero because he wasn't one. Harrison Ford, Alec Guinness, Carrie Fisher - everybody brought uniqueness and "spin" to their roles.
The prequels has everybody a bit more "flat". I think this had to do with Lucas' detachment, but also because he could control more, people had more "reverence" for the material (so they wouldn't play with it as much, maybe?), and of course the omnipresent blue screens and CGI characters meant actors were in invisible rooms talking to ping-pong balls on sticks. That couldn't have helped...
Whatever the reason was he sure dropped the ball.
shareYeah. It really stings, too, because of his track record. Expectations were so high for the next Star Wars films and the first films Lucas really had a hand in in ages.
This guy came out of the gate swinging with THX-1138 and American Graffiti, and then he did the Star Wars trilogy and co-created Indiana Jones. Even Willow was underappreciated, in my opinion, and was pretty great.
Okay, Howard the Duck sucked, but the way they were going about that film it was a guaranteed dud. If they made it now and they went full Deadpool with it, they could pull it off maybe, but back then with the weird Jim Henson's Creature Shop Howard (instead of a Who Frame Roger Rabbit-style cartoon insert)...doomed.
But I digress. The point is that the ball-drop was bad, but made worse by the fact that, up until 1999, Lucas had basically just been knocking it clean out of the park and then he did this.