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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 1938262" data-attributes="member: 1288">I've been trying to stay out of the "old trilogy vs. new trilogy" debates recently, because I can't usually add anything to them that hasn't been said by the time I got there.(Well, that's not entirely true. I have a whole essay in my head about why the "Special Editions of the OT are worse than the originals, not only on a personal opinion level, but by accepted standards of storytelling and movie-making. But this isn't the time and place for it; I'm not sure there will ever be a time and place for it. But I digress... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />)I do, however, have to jump in and comment on npiccini's comment. Specifically:I'm sorry, but I couldn't disagree with you more. There's no comparison at all.No, I'm not going to claim that Mark Hamill's acting in ANH was great. It wasn't. Very few of the performances in the first film were very good. Even Harrison Ford's performance wasn't fantastic, though it improved by leaps and bounds from ESB onward. (So did the others, but not as much.)But they stand head and shoulders above most of what we've seen from the new movies. Ewan McGregor's done very well, so let's leave him out. We'll leave out Hayden too, for reasons I'll come back to.But Jake Lloyd and Natalie Portman are lead weights around the necks of these movies. Mark Hammil may not have been the world's greatest actor in ANH, but at least I got the impression he was truly trying to act. His heart was in the right place. But with Portman, well... I've seen more emotion from people reading off a teleprompter. (For the record, I blame Lucas, not her. I know she can act, so I have to assume she's not being permitted to do so.)This, BTW, is why I can excuse Hayden's performance--he's clearly giving it his all, and I think he actually did quite well, given the abysmal dialogue he had to work with. I know I'm in the minority, but I like him as Annakin. I just don't like the way Annakin's written.Bottom line? I'll take mediocre actors who actually try to act (ANH) over actors, good or bad, who can't be bothered to emote (PM/AotC) any day of the week. That, as much as anything else, is the nebulous "soul" that people say is missing from the new trilogy.</blockquote>

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