When it comes to Hayden Christensen’s performance as Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars films Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, there are, essentially, two popular schools of thought: He was bad in the movies and ruined the already wonky prequels, or, he was bad in the movies but it wasn’t his fault and we still love him. But what if there is a third option? Arguably, for a portion of the population, Hayden’s Anakin was good, but for entirely subjective reasons. And because a specific generation of Star Wars fans still holds a torch for Hayden Christensen, we’ll be devastated if we don’t see him in The Rise of Skywalker. Here’s why.
As a rational human being, I can tell that Hayden’s performance as Anakin alternates between melodramatic and unrealistic. But, as someone who was 21 years-old when Attack of the Clones hit theaters in 2002, Hayden Christensen’s take on Anakin Skywalker was a genuine reflection on what it felt like to become a grown-up. I imagine other fans of the series who are roughly my age (late thirties, early forties) feel the same way. In Star Wars, we’re caught between the original trilogy and the sequel trilogy, and in real life we’re caught between Generation X and Millennials. You’d think my generation would mostly have identified with Luke Skywalker, but that’s not really true. If you were a grade-school aged kid in the ’90s and drinking your first beer in the early aughts, the angst of Anakin was a clear and present touchstone.
This isn’t exactly a good thing, but it is true. I was born the same year as Hayden Christensen, and like a lot of Star Wars fans my age, I felt a kinship with him for this reason. This is hard to believe now, but in the summer of 2002, I threw a Star Wars party at my parent’s house (they were out of town, my apartment sucked, they had a pool) and everyone there totally loved Attack of the Clones. I remember one woman quoting Anakin, sneering “I’m taking him now!” before pushing a friend of hers playfully into the pool. Lightsabers were swung, people complained about slaughtering Tusken Raiders, and generally speaking, everyone acted like Star Wars was back. If you were in your early 20s when Attack of the Clones came out, Hayden Christensen didn’t ruin the prequels; he saved them.
Part of this, I think, is the fact that he wasn’t actually cool. You could argue that Hayden is “hot,” conventionally speaking, but his character is crazily unlikable in both of the prequel films that he’s in. At the time, this didn’t seem like a mistake. After all, this was the guy who became Darth Vader, he should seem like a weird self-entitled asshole, right? No one wanted to actually be like Hayden’s Anakin, but I think some people just on the verge of trying to adult for real, probably worried they were like Anakin. He says all the wrong things to someone he likes, he thinks he knows more than all of his teachers, and, often, he drives really, really fast. What’s a community college drop-out like me not to love?
Fast forward to 2019. Now we’re on the verge of this whole saga wrapping up, and Anakin’s last name is in the title of what may be the last Star Wars movie for at least a few years. For me, the idea of Anakin, as specifically depicted by Christensen, is inexorably wrapped up in the difference between wanting to be an adult, and actually becoming one. The story of Anakin Skywalker is many things, but perhaps the one most relevant is the fact that he simply fails at becoming a functional adult. Some of this is not his fault. His job gaslights him. The leader of the entire galaxy gaslights him. He doesn’t have a good therapist. He’s sexually repressed, etc. None of this excuses killing all the Younglings and becoming Darth Vader, but if you’re 22-years-old, and kind of confused about what do with your life, Anakin seems really relatable. He’s like the walking personification of that Blink 182 song, “Damnit.” He’s not sexy emo like Kylo Ren. Anakin is just a fuck up.
For those of us who remember what it was to feel like Anakin at the same time Anakin was in the movie theaters, not seeing Hayden Christensen return for a key cameo will be very, very painful. People talk a lot about how Star Wars changes childhoods or affects adolescence, but almost no one acknowledges that the prequels, and Hayden Christensen in specific, had a profound influence on the early adulthoods of millions. Obviously, Natalie Portman’s Padmé Amidala was the better role model in the prequels, but because even she—the smartest person in those movies—fell in love with Anakin, the prequels were saying something really honest about what being in your early twenties is really like. All you do is make mistakes while talking about how you’re going to fix those mistakes.
Anakin, of course, does fix his mistakes with the help of his children. As someone who has a little Jedi running around my house now, I get this. And now The Emperor is resurgent. But Anakin has grown. We have grown. And we want to see this in Rise of Skywalker or… well, the movie isn’t really giving us the “rise” of Skywalker, is it?
Ryan Britt is a longtime contributor to Tor.com and the author of the book Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths (Plume 2015.) His other writing and criticism have been published in Inverse, SyFy Wire, Vulture, Den of Geek!, the New York Times, and StarTrek.com. He is an editor at Fatherly. Ryan lives with his wife and daughter in Portland, Maine.
As someone who has never been averse to the Prequel Trilogy, this article has still given me a fascinating angle on Anakin Skywalker – on understanding the character and what he brings to the films – to the point where one would be very happy to see some echo of him pop up to look his truly disappointing grandson right in the eye and say “Kid, I’m prepared to love you because I used to BE you but Force help me event I didn’t WANT to be that!”
On a less serious note, we clearly belong to different generations because the character I always identified with was Obi-Wan Kenobi … despite the fact I’m actually younger than Mr Hayden Christensen. Truly, the mind works in mysterious ways!
i don’t know if it was just the writing, or the direction, or simply hayden. but his acting was terrible. he was unable to show anakin’s descent (granted, a lot of the contributing factors are in the clone wars series)…it plays off as just “they don’t trust me” and you don’t see why he feels he should have earned that trust: all his missions during the clone wars, for example. anakin feels constantly betrayed by those he trusts/loves. a major factor is that he has to hide his marriage. another factor is the jedi suck in dealing with this sort of thing, which is why they don’t try and train anyone who is not a toddler
still, a better actor could have pulled off the building rage and fear that lead him to the dark side, without it seeming like overreacting teenage angst. why does he want order? because he’s grown up during a war! fighting is nearly all he knows, and imposing order through force and violence is all that he has seen work. it makes a ton of sense that he would be broken: he is taken from slavery into a monastic order, his family is killed, he has to hide his emotions and relationships, his padawan abandons the jedi order and he knows it is because the order betrayed her, his life experience has been nothing but slavery and war…being driven to the dark side, in order to bring, if not actual peace, an end to war, makes sense to him. more sense than force dreams of losing padame, frankly, and sure,that is hard to convey in 2 movies, but not impossible. anakin is a complex character, his descent is no accident, but hayden plays it as grumpy teenage angst and then, oh, i’m evil now, SURPRISE!
@2. I cannot improve on that critique, I would add only that it’s astonishing to me that whomever casted Christensen and Portman did not see the complete lack of chemistry between them in screen tests.
Ryan – I really love this. Interesting hearing your perspective. I’m slightly younger than you (I was 15 when AotC came out…) but for me I very much did appreciate the extreme awkwardness and angst of Hayden as Anakin. Me and my friends definitely had a lot of fun mocking and riffing off the prequels and for us at least, it was in all in love and all in good fun. We didn’t quite have the real world experiences that would have led us to identify even more with Anakin, but the emotions resonated with us. (And yeah – just so much good mocking material! Still fondly remember that “Lost Hope” parody video which my friends and I quoted ever so often…)
I think Anakin has to show up, if they’re going to legitimately sell this as “a climax to all nine”. In that case something has to loop back to The Phantom Menace, and that brings us back to Anakin being responsible for a balance in the Force. Jury’s still out on when/how/if he did that. This is the last chance to clear it up, and would mesh well with the title interpretation that “Jedi” + “Sith” = something called “Skywalkers”. If it’s just the Jolly Tale of How We Beat Palpatine Again, that doesn’t do any better than ROTJ already managed and structurally this trilogy would remain an appendix.
Meh… I’m 38 and always disliked his performance. Not altogether his fault: he had some truly terrible dialogue to contend with: but others managed it.
Given the way we’ve seem Kylo basically worship him, I don’t think it would be a stretch at all for him to show up.
I’m commenting on this without fully reading or engaging the comments because at this point I’m getting hyper aware of spoilers, etc (especially with knowing that there’s a leaked script out there), but I will just say I emphatically agree. Not just because I like to defend the prequels (and especially RotS), but becuase if this truly is about the Skywalkers, and because they DO seem to be leaning into some of the prequel lore about ‘balance’, etc, then Anakin truly is a part of this. Plus, it makes a lot of sense for Kylo’s character and the path he’s followed.
But also because I want to see ghost Hayden :)
I’ll have to come back after I see the movie to read fully :)
I’m just along for the ride. There’s all kinds of aspects about the entire star wars franchise that we love to hate and hate to love. it is what it is but star wars 4 life, always
The (or A) problem with the prequels is that we needed to see a compelling story of how a great Jedi fell, and we got a story of how a slimy politician took a whiny, unprepared brat and dragged him down by his testicles. We never saw Anakin being great, and didn’t care that he became Vader.
Then, the new trilogy could have gone off in a completely new direction with a new cast, but someone decided it would be the conclusion of the “Skywalker Saga” and give us 8 more hours of Luke’s dysfunctional family. (Seriously, Anakin was already redeemed in Episode 6, even if we didn’t believe his fall in Episode 3. Why plow that field again? It could have been a completely different story.)
The first two movies are underwhelming; a re-hash of the original, and a middle finger to the fanbase. What Abrams needs to do here is to rehabilitate the Skywalker Saga in a way that makes the first 3 movies must-watch, excuse or retcon the weaknesses of the 7th and 8th movies, and ends with a finale that makes the whole thing worthwhile. (Otherwise, we can all just watch the middle 3 over and over again and pretend the rest never happened.)
If fixing the saga means having Hayden Christiansen dance the hula with Yoda and Palpatine, then make it happen.
Prequel Anakin was Lucasfilm’s first try at telling certain parts of the fandom they “were the baddies” now, and they completely lost their shit about it.
Hayden is in a incredible actor(seriously go watch Life as a House) and did a hell of a job portraying a grown ass man without one whit of emotional maturity.
I mean look at how differently Kylo is perceived by the fandom than Anakin, though they are both emotionally immature manbabies(though for different reasons). Because Anakin was portrayed in a way that made you feel concern about his actions, despite the fact that Hayden is a charismatic man who could have easily played Anakin in way meant to create empathy in the audience for him, he understood he was showing a man’s growth into becoming a monster and you were supposed to be creeped out by it!! The fandom, OTOH, has embraced Kylo, despite being another whiny butt who’d rather break everything than let someone else have it, because he exudes masculinity and has violent outbursts, where Anakin’s anger was mostly inwardly directed.
Anakin was a sleazy man at best in the two movies we’re talking about here. I couldn’t care about him or his face-heel turn.
Not until the writers of The Clone Wars animated series gave us a reason, that is. His arc of finding responsibility and respect even though he never fully grew out of his own experiences and fears. Asoka made it possible to see an Anakin that was worth caring about. An Anakin whose fall from grace really was actually a tragedy.
I don’t care if he is or isn’t in 9. I don’t hate these movies like some, especially gamergaters, do. I want to see a Star Wars story that takes the final seconds of the Last Jedi and runs out the clock.
@10 “we needed to see a compelling story of how a great Jedi fell, and we got a story of how a slimy politician took a whiny, unprepared brat and dragged him down by his testicles. We never saw Anakin being great, and didn’t care that he became Vader”
This!
So on the Anakin acting by Hayden- So far no one has really put any of the blame on Lucas and his script. The great love story that Han and Leah had in the original trilogy didn’t actually contain them falling in love. The fun was seeing 2 people already head over heals for each other try to come to terms with it. So George writes the half he skipped in the first trilogy and well, I can not say it helped.
I have seen Hayden act well in movies, so i can’t give him full blame here, but some portion has to go to the writer. Porttman is a good enough actor to rise above a script, but many can admit that Lucas was never as good as when he has someone assisting him with the writing and keeping the focus.
Is it then wrong for me to go 50/50 on the blame. I mean Hayden did get so much right about Anakin and it is arguable the script and editing did nothing to really help him.
My take: Hayden was as bad and as good as he was allowed to be. I think the Prequels only really gave us three solid performances; Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, and Ian McDiarmid. Actually make that 4. Pernilla August was great as Schmi. Everyone else was either truly terrible or good in some places and bad in some places. Both Hayden and Natalie Portman were as good as George’s direction allowed them to be. Both of them (especially Natalie) are great actors. The dialogue and the direction for the prequels was spotty. Some of it really works and some of it really doesn’t. George has never been one to really understand and direct emotion convincingly. If you think about, A New Hope, of the three originals is the one that suffers most in terms of emotional connection between characters. There are some great moments but in comparison to the second two, particularly the Empire Strikes Back, the emotional resonance is light years ahead of A New Hope. That would be in large part due to Irvine Kershner’s direction and the benefit of Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan’s roles in writing the screenplays. After the success of the sequels George was pretty much able to do exactly what he wanted with the prequels. George is a fantastic dreamer and visualizer but I’m not 100 percent convinced that he truly understood what clicked with the fans for his movies. All that being said, I really do enjoy the prequels. As I said, some of it works really really well, and other parts don’t work at all. Quite a bit of what Hayden brings to the role really works well particularly in Revenge of the Sith. I also thought his acting after the death of his mother in AOTC was very good. The scene with Padme where he describes the killing of the Sand People was very effective.
I can only think of one scene where Anakin was an effective character – when he and Padme were looking and thinking about each other across the city. And, surprise surprise, it’s a scene that has no dialogue!
Interesting perspective. It would make sense, especially since the Emperor’s ghost is appearing, for the Skywalker who started it all to also appear.
@AlanBrown, I mean I agree it’s a necessity, The title literally references Skywalker, and has to be referring to Anakin if Palpatine is involved.
I see the point of people who say “we were supposed to see the fall of a great Jedi” and didn’t get that story, but the ONLY person who referred to Anakin as great was Obi Wan, and we are shown in the prequels why his judgement is biased in regards to Anakin, and we’re shown why he’s unable to see Anakin’s fall, so it doesn’t bother me. I think the biggest thing, is that after TPM, when we see Anakin as a literal child, we were supposed to discard our preconceptions of who and what Anakin was, but most of us were unable to do that. Yoda explicitly tells Luke is TESB that “wars not make one great” which should have been a hint to people that learning the truth about Anakin’s past wasn’t going to be what you thought it was.
The fandom ignored these clues, and built Anakin’s fall into something it wasn’t. IMO, Anakin’s fall being because he isn’t capable of emotional maturity, was perfect. This isn’t to say the prequels are without flaw, but the story of who Anakin was and how he fell to become Vader, through the simplicity of basic human failings, is a powerful story to tell, just like showing Kylo as an entitled brat who believes he is destined for “greatness” because of his bloodline is also a powerful story to tell.
The fandom’s acceptance of these characters is directly related to how implicated they feel BY the characters, and how Hayden’s Anakin was accepted is a direct indicator of that.
I also doubt what we will see is just the “Emperor’s Ghost”. The trailers appear to show some sort of apparatus that has kept Palpatine’s “essence” in play.
Given how derided and infuriating Hayden Christensen being overlaid onto the original footage in Return of the Jedi: The Fiddled Edition is, do we really want more of the same?
@11
”The fandom has embraced Kylo”? Really? Guess I’m hopelessly out of touch because I think he’s pretty terrible.
@20, I like it myself
@21, He’s been woobified by the girls(Reylo make me want to puke), and lot of the TLJ haters really seem to like him.
@20, I was more upset that Hayden is the new force ghost for logic reasons, since Anakin died at a far advanced age. Why don’t Obi-Wan and Yoda get to be young again as ghosts? If it’s because that was the last time that Anakin was good before his fall, what reward for constancy is that? Old and wrinkled forever, bah.
@23, one can hand-wave it away by saying that Force ghosts manifest based on the person’s psychological identity, in which case it just means that Obi Wan and Yoda were comfortable with who they were at their deaths, and Anakin was not. This makes a certain amount of sense. But, personally, I never saw any need for Sebastian Shaw erasure.
@20 That should have never been edited into RotJ for one very specific reason. Anakin never learned how to be a force ghost! It was said (I think in RotS) that Qui-Gon Jinn had learned the ability of being a force ghost but didn’t complete the training before his untimely death (that’s why his body didn’t disappear upon death and he could only manifest as a voice, not a ghost. He then used the ability to train Yoda and Obi-Wan, who had the time to perfect the ability. No where does it say that Anakin or Vader learned this skill.
we need new Legends material. Disney needs to give the fans what they really want.
I totally agree – Hayden rocks as Anakin!
thanks for this excellent write up!
@25, Except it was never said that Qui-Gon was working on it before death. He learned it after dying, which means Anakin could have as well.
So, I came back and read the article since I figured that at least would be spoiler free :) I have to say, this spoke to my heart, and I loved reading your reminiscing. It brought back a lot of similar memories. As much as it was cool to hate on the movies in the media, most of the people I knew loved or at least enjoyed them.
I was 16 when The Phantom Menace came out; my sister was 3. By the time Revenge of the Sith came out, I was 22, and my sister was 9 and it was my last summer at home before leaving the state for graduate school. It’s actually interesting to see the way her generation accepts the prequels. Anyway, one of the things we bonded over was in fact the prequels – she came with me and my friends to the Revenge of the Sith midnight showing, and for weeks afterwards we would quote scenes to each other (especially the “My allegience is to the Republic, TO DEMOCRACY” scene, lol. Gosh, I remember my dad got into a bad car accident, and once we knew everything was okay, we both said, “Another happy landing!”) and to this day, we still casually refer to RotS-Anakin as ‘Hot Anakin’ (she actually had a huge crush on him for most of her teen years although she admitted recently that she’s moved on to Obi-Wan.). As it happens, I’ll be home for Christmas in time for Rise of Skywalker (we’re both December birthdays so I’ll be 37 and she’ll be 24), and we’re going to see it together. We both know we’ll lose our shit togehter if Hayden shows up in this movie.
As soon as I read your opening sentence, I thought, “Actually, I think Hayden’s Anakin was good.”. Maybe not quite as good in Attack of the Clones – I will give you that. He’s stiff, awkward and can’t survive the dialogue. Although in a way, it’s exactly how I would expect an emotionally repressed individual to act especially given the Jedi are no help to him here. It actually aids my viewing of the movie to just view the creepiness as intentional (and to assume Padme has some fixer tendencies). But in Revenge of the Sith I think he’s legitimately good. Maybe it’s just the haircut, I don’t know :) Especially in scenes where he doesn’t actually have a lot of dialogue – where he’s reacting, or just needs to have presence and brood and glower, OR when he can finally let loose with ihs emotions. The scene where Padme tells him she’s pregnant, is probably one of his best scenes. The opera scene, and pretty much anything from Mustafar on, I think he’s fantastic.
“He’s not sexy emo like Kylo Ren. Anakin is just a fuck up.” this made me laugh so hard. Although, as I said, I had a huge thing for that haircut. To this day, I call that scene at the end of Anakin’s Dark Deeds his ’emo tear’ and when I saw he’d built a frickin emo castle on Mustafar in Rogue One I had to stop myself from squeeing. Although I’ve also had the thought that both Anakin and Luke could do with a good therapist! But really – especially if you view the prequels with the idea that Palpatine is the protagonist, it’s about how both a person (and a government) can become corrupted; and the latter half is about how his children learn to be better (and even help redeem him). And your talk about seeing Anakin through the eyes of a young adult; I never really thought about it that way, but my first year of graduate school (well, really all 3 years – I ended up dropping out) was incredibly hard for many reasons. The Revenge of the Sith soundtrack became an emotional touchstone for me and I would put on Immolation Scene and just literally sob. That soundtrack and that scene seemed to represent what my life had become. No, I hadn’t killed any Younglings, but, yeah, I felt like a huge fuck up with broken dreams, broken relationships and wasted potential.
So, yes, honestly, I will feel a bit unsatisfied if he doesn’t show up, especially given Kylo thinking he’s hearing from him and being guided down a path of darkness. The movie might be otherwise awesome, but I feel like without that connective tissue, it will feel a bit incomplete. I want to see an Avengers worthy portal scene with all the Force ghosts, heh. I don’t care if it’s fan service, it just feels very thematically satisfying to me. I kind of worry that they’ll shy away from it simply becuase it feels too pat or predictable. But I want what I want.
(BTW, I purposely am now playing a prequel Anakin-centric playlist :) Anakin’s Theme (super underrated), Across the Stars, Battle of the Heroes, Anakin’s Dark Deeds, Immolation Scene, Anakin’s Betrayal… :) )
Reading everyone’s comments was fascinating. I agree with whoever said that Hayden was as good as he was allowed to be. And with whoever recommended the film Life as a House. He was terrific in that. I’d also recommend Shattered Glass, another good film in which he starred.
This article gave me a whole new perspective on Anakin. I was in my 30s when the prequels came out, so I never thought of young adults identifying with Anakin. In AOTC I thought he was completely believable as a petulant teenager. In ROTS I felt his “greatness” as a Jedi and the reasons for his downfall were never clearly established. The novelization did a much better job; then again, a book can be more detailed.
I will be disappointed if Anakin is absent in Rise. The Star Wars films are called the Skywalker saga, so the major Skywalker should at least show up. I think Anakin should be more than a cameo, but not necessarily a major character.
Hayden Christensen was fantastic as Anakin.
I will rewatch Revenge of the Sith anytime just for him. Love his final confrontation with Obi-Wan and despite all the best efforts from JJ&co I don’t think we will see as epic, operatic climax between Jedi again. Their light has gone out in the universe…
Correct. We never saw Anakin as a great Jedi. Just a whiny kid that should’ve made the Jedi think twice about training him. Instead, we are all left with why the Jedi didn’t see it coming in the first place.
Ryan I’m a 41 year old woman who loved Star Wars as a kid and this critique is dead-on. I felt that both he and Natalie Portman saved the prequels. I understood what people were saying about his acting but felt that it was star-wars appropriate and that he did the best he could with what he was given…not much. Hayden Christensen was SAF in those movies and in every other.
I was born in 1982and this article resonates with me. I think the difference between generations is, Millennials love relatable characters I.e. just look at the Joker movie. And Gen x liked Bad ass characters. A generation who grew up on action movies and cartoons full of mary sues. With out an understanding of how bad the economy and things were becoming. Millennials, who grew up with more information, and a better understanding of how bad things have become. Related to Anakin because he was a mirror to their own insecurities. It is to bad Disney went out of their way to destroy sci-fi competency. It is the de rationalization of society that is going on here. And fantasy is being pushed. But I personally think these movies works artistic masterpieces with so many layers I never get tired of watching them. Truly Americas best works of art.