Honestly, I was kinda hoping he would kill Ewan McGregor because he was goddamn awful. Made me hate Obi-Wan. (again, not blaming Ewan for that one)
I know, right?!
That series clearly laid out how terrible of a director (you know, directing your
talent on set, not just coming up with ideas) he truly was when nobody questioned him. And he never saw the horrible wooden acting.
I've said numerous times, almost all of the actors in the prequel trilogy were A+ actors, golden, with wonderful acting credits in their resume. And then he got his hands on them and made them look like high school drama dropouts. It was painful. Hayden can act, and coupling his best performances with better dialog on Star Wars would have been a very compelling Anakin-Vader transformation. Instead, Lucas can't write dialog and can't detect bad acting. To be fair, you can only act your way out of a box if given at least a something to work with, and Lucas provided no assistance.
Every single actor/actress in that movie, at least those with other credits to their name, has performed admirably both before and after those movies. T'is a shame. The story was just fine IMHO, tweaked a bit could have been grand, and the themes really lent themselves to a great movie. As a younger kid when those movies came out, I thoroughly enjoyed Jar Jar. I mean, he's like a squirrel embodied in a humanoid frog. I loved it! Frankly, I still do, but it was drastically out of place for the movie after more than a few moments. I'd love to sit down and watch all of the movies again, but I just cannot bring myself to watch the prequels because of the dreadful dialog and acting.
But Episode 1 was awesome... we need more pod racing games. The few they had around that time were epic.