Actors are just people hired to do a job, if a movie sucks it's not their fault, they're not involved with creative decisions and as far as the prequels go, every actor was wooden, what chance did a little kid have?
It's a shame.
And in the case of child actors such as Jake Lloyd in TPM,it's more a shame since such young actors have less control and awareness of what's going around them. In many cases, they probably get coaxed more to say their lines or emote in certain ways as the script dictates. It's one thing to criticize bad acting. A-logging actors, especially child ones, isn't a good thing because of all the factors out of their control such as a bad script or director.
It's a bummer to hear how downhill his recent life has been. May Godbear help him put the pieces back together somehow.
To give people an idea; I actively discount Rebels or whatever the fuck that new cartoon is called BECAUSE of the use of time-travel; it comes off as fanfiction-tier writing and I hate cop outs designed to try and retcon things like character deaths or ways to get around things the writer can't be fucked with dealing with.
Quite frankly, I've discounted anything new beyond Season 5 of (Filoni's) Clone Wars simply because the material has messed things up more than it's advanced the SWU franchise and canon.
Sad thing is that time travel, if used properly, could actually work. Unfortunately, it's been used sloppily when it's appeared so far in SW content that it's hard to objectively say, "Yeah, this was a good thing to introduce. More, please."
He's equipped with a nightstick that turns into a sword and a... giant claw crane? This doesn't help the fact that people been jokingly referring to these guys as Lobster guards.
I can see it now, Episode IX has an awful campy joke or reference to a lobster gram or these troopers being crushed in their shells (armor). The ST is so bad that not having something like this would be a letdown.
Of course there's a lot of improvements to be made, like Rose should have been played a more attractive actress, nothing wrong with an Asian female character in a Star Wars movie, but why couldn't she be cuter?
The actress is generally considered conventionally attractive in her other roles, but Ruin Johnson purposely uglified her with makeup and costume. In early drafts of the casino planet subplot, Rose and Finn were originally supposed to disguise themselves and blend in by dressing up in formal evening wear, thus revealing Rose to be conventionally attractive (like a "she was beautiful all along" moment), but Ruin Johnson rewrote the whole subplot and threw out that sequence without making any changes to the ugly makeup and costume Rose would get for the rest of the film.
As others have already said, Kelly Marie Tran is a rather attractive woman. I can't recall if it was a preview event or something after TLJ was released, but she totally rocked the red carpet with how she looked in the pictures I saw from said event.
While I can understand concerns about creepy male gaze or over-sexualizing female actresses in outfits so skimpy they'd fall off after a sneeze, I still don't understand why it looked like everyone went out of their way to make the Rose Tico character look as frumpy as she did. Heck, George Lucas didn't want Carrie Fisher's bosom bouncing around from the lack of a bra on-set and had it taped down, but he still made sure her character looked attractive and feminine in ANH while portraying Leia as a kickass fighter when necessary.
It's a shame the formal wear portion of the casino scenes from TLJ got scrapped. This could have been a good chance to show Finn and Rose being impressed at how the other looked "outside of work" so to speak. They didn't even have to wear anything too outrageous; a simple tux for Finn and a formal, modest dress and accessories for Rose would have worked perfectly. Instead, we're stuck with both characters looking out of place in the casino with their blah typecasting/outfits they stayed in for the entire film.
