How they MIGHT have filmed it better...

Watch this fight and pretend these two are Obi-Wan and Anakin in ROTS:

YouTube video

The Obi-Ani fight in ROTS is pretty good, but of course there is room for improvement. The heavy cgi mutes the emotional potential, and it could have been better executed all around.

This scene, the final fight from House of Flying Daggers, is just about perfect and would transfer nicely to ROTS. These guys are fighting because the woman they both love is dead and each blames the other, and The Obi-Ani situation inspires similarly intense emotions.

Why is it better than ROTS? The starkness of the setting and the fighting contrasts with all the preceding fights (characters trading superhuman moves with grace and beauty, in marvelous settings). Those fights are awesome, but the director strips it all away to remind us that real fights are about killing and to communicate the anger and anguish or the combatants.mNo superhuman feats, no showy moves, simpler choreography and fantastic acting performances.

Please share other examples of awesome movie scenes that could have inspired different renderings in any of the Star Wars movies!

Superior visuals aside, there's more to the Flying Daggers fight that makes it better. That the film as a whole wasn't a clusterf*ck of crap and stupidity will help to make the climactic fight scene more emotionally impactive.

That duel also lacks what the RotS fight has in abundance: duelists aiming for the other guy's sword instead of the other guy. Anakin and Obi-Wan looked and felt like two guys who had rehearsed a non-lethal swordfight for hours, instead of looking and feeling like two real people trying to kill one another. That's the point of film, to create the illusion that it's not fake. Those two actors up there look like they're trying. They're struggling, they're emoting, they're yelling, they're stumbling. Jump to 3:25 when they're tumbling about in the snow, and the one quickly tries to slam his sword down in to the other before he rolls out of the way. It looks tiring, sweaty, gritty, exhausting... just like an actual swordfight. Combine the effects of actually being emotionally invested in these two characters and their stories, and the plot they're tied to, and you have yourself a rather well done fight scene. Kudos to the visuals as well.

Now look at this boring piece of overly-practised, highly choreographed, uber-precise, emotionless, computerized crap. You may have seen it before, from a movie that sucks:

YouTube video.

As for other films that did a swordfight right... Mr. Plnkett compares the Obi-Ani fight to the duel in the 007 film, Die Another Day. Not exactly a harbinger of wonder, that film, but all the elements for making a damn good duel are there. It doesn't drag on forever for no reason either:

YouTube video

THE ROTS fight goes the opposite way of the HOFD: it ramps the drama of the setting and the effects up even higher, instead of toning them down. Lucas has always been about pushing the effects envelope and there's nothing wrong with that in general, but in this case it detracts from the scene rather than enhancing it.

I had forgotten how the fight also begins right after the most ironic line from the movie: "only a Sith deals in absolutes". I spent the first minute of the fight wondering if Obi-Wan had really just said that and if he realized that he had just proved himself wrong since he is a Jedi and he was clearly dealing in absolutes. I used to just assume that it was Lucas being a horrible and very unreflective writer. (In his defense, little details like philosophical coherence have never been important to him, so I doubt it bothered him at all.)

But I've come around to seeing it as actually a very good and important line. The first thing to remember about the Jedi Council is that they are wrong about EVERYTHING. (That's to restore balance, Anakin had to wipe out the Jedi and the Sith, to wipe the slate clean. The Jedi misunderstand the prophecy because they're wrong about everything!) Obi-Wan's obviously self-contradictory and totally unaware statement shows us blindness of the Jedi in case we hadn't figured it out already. And meanwhile on Curoscant, Sidious explains to Yoda exactly where the Jedi error come from - arrogance!

Thanks for the Bond clip. I actually managed to miss that one when it first came out, even though I liked Brosnan as Bond.

The PT lacks a lot of soul. That's why all the fight scenes are well choreographed, but without soul… it's all rather meaningless. Check out the messy lightsabre fight in ESB… now, that's a FIGHT fight… not a CGI infested ballet. It's not about the moves, but about the emotion, about what's at stake…

"Lightsaber duels have less to do with the fight itself, but more so with the internalization of the characters. So if you've ever said that the duel at the end of A New Hope was the worst one because it had bad fight choreography... well then I'm afraid you've missed the point entirely."

They'd be better if it didn't look like the fighters were aiming for each other's lightsabers, or all end in the most anticlimactic fashions ever.

I hope in Episode VII that no fights involve dangling over or falling into a precipice. That idea got played out several movies ago!

Hehehe… personally I wouldn't mind any lightsabre fight. We've had quite a number of them now.

Episode 7 should take place like 30 or 40 years after the events of ROTJ, where the jedi order is finally fully established and republic is also restored. It's good all of the stuff after ROTJ is non canon, (I like nearly everything about the new republic era up until the time after the yuzzhan vong war ended and the NR is renamed "galactic federation of free alliances,"it sounds way to star treky) I like the legacy series but the only thing I hated was the GFFA. What I'm hoping for for episode 7 is moar saber fights, moar cgi soldier fights and cgi battle scenes,1000's of cgi jedi and sith fighting, and a dark, good, storyline

Didn't we have that in the PT already? And look where that got us.

Anyway, everything you're summing up is EU. Who says there will be a new Jedi Order? That whole idea is from EU books. We have no idea what the movie will be about.

Originally posted by PTforthewin
What I'm hoping for for episode 7 is moar saber fights, moar cgi soldier fights and cgi battle scenes,1000's of cgi jedi and sith fighting, and a dark, good, storyline

Not a bad idea

Yes it is.

I've always thought this fight, from the Matrix, was more like what the B team attacking Sidious should have looked like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPyLF7NxZyY

From about the 1:50 mark on, the choreography is good enough that it doesn't even look like they are attacking him one at a time like every action fight always seems to look like.