It's your brain trying to match up that look and hair, with his older face. Which simply doesn't compute. It's some uncanny valley ****.
Nevertheless, it was nice to actually get to see Hayden give us a worthy performance as Anakin. He reminded me a lot more of Clone Wars Anakin. It was clear that he had anger and control issues, but he was much more likeable and charismatic here than in the prequels here. His smirk when he thought he had beaten Obi-Wan was awesome. Although this series has been far from consistent in terms of writing and direction, you can really see Hayden's potential to have been a great Anakin, had the circumstances been better when the prequels were made in terms of writing, direction, his experience level, etc.
Ewan continues to show his mastery of this role. Horrible mullet hairstyling and make-up aside, you could clearly tell that he was playing his younger Kenobi in the flashbacks and he brought back a lot of the hallmarks of his AOTC and ROTS performances whereas his present day performance clearly has more age, pain, and world weariness to it and more strongly draws on Guinness's mannerisms and movements (when he goes off to take Bail's call, his movements remind me so much of Alec sneaking around the Death Star in ANH).
While I am not a fan of the black-grey colour scheme of Kenobi's new robes (its just not consistent with the character's colour scheme in any other appearance), I gotta say I love the Samurai-style sleeveless over robe he picked up here. That was an inspired costume design choice.
I've been thinking about this version of Vader's costume and conducted a bit of a deep dive on the RPF. Although it looks miles better than the Rogue One version with its weird neck, I wish they had kept the ANH-style matte finish to the helmet and armour. The cleaner, glossier finish draws too much attention to the two tone paint scheme, which I understand had more contrast in ANH (probably due to the more matte finish), but was toned more and more successively with each of ESB and ROTJ.
