[QUOTE=Starship;49420255]To me, I'd say the prequel lightsaber duels were jedi in their prime and the knowledge of the way they fought was lost and turned into a more "medieval" way of hacking and slashing like in the OT & Force awakens.[/QUOTE]
Knowledge of flipping around like an idiot while doing a ballerina dance with a glowing stick was lost after the Jedi were destroyed? Thank you Sidious.
I only hate the prequel lightsaber duels because they lack character emotion, are too fucking flash, no one actually tries to hit eachother, and all of the fucking CGI backgrounds make it look fake as hell. If the Darth Maul duel was set in the Obi-Wan and Darth Vader fight area I'd be fucking impressed.
The problem with the prequel fights is that there's no, to borrow a musician term, economy of motion.
You've got a slick laser sword that can effortlessly cut a guy in half, but the preferred way of fighting with one is to do twists and leaps and flips while hitting your swords together? Obviously it looks neat on a screen, but it's more a choreographic tour de force than anything else, and really doesn't serve much in terms of tension or danger. They showed real Kendo fights in the video, where you'd think the moment-to-moment make-or-break strikes and parrys crescendo-ing into a victory would translate well if it were life and death like in Star Wars, but they went in some weird "evolved" direction with it: where now the preferred way to parry something is to swing your weapon around your body and do a spin?
Also as an excuse to talk about the movie John Wick, that movie is [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-HSoOFdJ3s"]perfect[/URL] in terms of tension and believably. Wick is obviously going to kill everything in the room, but the way he goes through it, utilizing [URL="http://www.pointshooting.com/1acar.htm"]real life firing techniques[/URL] and using consistent techniques from both Judo and Aikido martial arts drives home tension and realism. Plus he takes cover, struggles with a few guys up close, reloads after every 15 shots, and goes for the easiest disables first before he gets all flashy. Basically what I'm saying is [URL="https://youtu.be/SNkC_ABia2s?t=2m19s"]it ain't no Commando[/URL]
I just can't find any grounding when watching space knights act more like space ninjas
[QUOTE=S31-Syntax;49419083]They were way too danc-ey for me. That couple with the fact that 90% of the swings made have no way of actually connecting with the opponent just makes them all feel very... bleh.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Dark RaveN;49419039]Say whatever you want guys, but I love the Prequels for their Lightsaber duels. They are just so satisfying to watch.[/QUOTE]
[video=youtube;t0qH2IaSjEU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0qH2IaSjEU[/video]
sorry but the prequal battles are best because if it wasn't for them this amazing shit wouldn't have been made
just saying
i love this. my dojo has gotten ~50 new applicants all ready to quit after 2 weeks because it's not all action showoff with flips and shit.
same shit happened when the last samurai came out.
I like prequel duels exactly for their speed.
Lightsabers are weapons that only have mass in the hilt and they are designed to be used as super fast weapons. The main advantage is that you can move your light saber so fast you can block a blaster round or cut someone's head off in split-second.
Add the fact that jedi actually move their lightsabers before the blaster round is fired because of the force and imhumane reaction times due to seeing into the future.
Prequels might have been dancey, but when I was watching the duels I didn't see that. I just saw amazingly fast and dynamic fights.
And the EP6 Luke vs Vader fight is one of the most boring fights I have ever seen in amy movie. It was ok for it's years (Mad Max 1 had the same kind of fights too), but it aged poorly.
It's like when you watch a Jet Lee movie you can clearly see the dancing, it's out in the open, but you still feel the tension and dynamics and your blood starts boiling. Its the same with prequels, except I personally didn't see the dancing in prequels until the internet showed it in my face.
[editline]31st December 2015[/editline]
The force awakens duels just shit on everything that was before, by the way. They are not dancey, guess that's good, but people (even super trained Kylo Ren) swing lightsabers like they weight a ton and carry a lot of mass.
Kylo Ren swings at Rey, Rey blocks the hit but gets pushed backwards as if she was hit with a club. This ruins the feeling of an elegant weapon lightsabers always were.
Heroes also don't use any stances. The jedi and sith had like a dozen different styles with select masters of art having their own, and each was marked by a unique stance. Yet Kylo Ren still swings his sword as if it was a plank.
[QUOTE=Marden;49421677][video=youtube;J0mUVY9fLlw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0mUVY9fLlw[/video][/QUOTE]
Because everyone just needs a reason to hate the prequels
[video=youtube;e1Ega_dU0_E]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1Ega_dU0_E[/video]
Can't find the actual clip
Still love the prequel fight sequences. Problem was that the other parts in those movies didn't really elevate them which I guess was the main issue. If the prequels had better, believable character drama, I don't think anyone would really complain about the fight scenes.
[QUOTE=Ignhelper;49421702]Because everyone just needs a reason to hate the prequels
[video=youtube;e1Ega_dU0_E]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1Ega_dU0_E[/video]
Can't find the actual clip[/QUOTE]
It's at 1:13
[video=youtube;O0rqfB_Y0Rs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0rqfB_Y0Rs[/video]
It's also not the focus of the shot and takes place over like a half-second, if you don't watch the slowed-down cropped version you'd never notice.
[QUOTE=Corndog Ninja;49421816]
It's also not the focus of the shot and takes place over like a half-second, if you don't watch the slowed-down cropped version you'd never notice.[/QUOTE]
Also in comparison to something like Episode III, it's not the culmination of three movies worth of relationship building between a master and apprentice.
Mark Hamill pretended to kick a randy in the face.
[QUOTE=MuffinZerg;49421626]
The force awakens duels just shit on everything that was before, by the way. They are not dancey, guess that's good, but people (even super trained Kylo Ren) swing lightsabers like they weight a ton and carry a lot of mass. [/QUOTE]
That how it's supposed to fucking be. That was literally the direction George Lucas gave during the duels in the OT, lightsabres are heavy, you swing it like it's a big steel sword because it's supposed to emulate duels of honour between medieval knights.
Personally I think the prequel fights would have been much better (and fucking shorter) if they jedi kept the style from the OT. The majority of the lightsabre fights in the PT were garbage, they were all flash and they went on far too long. Yoda should never have used a lightsabre, neither should Palpatine, and they definitely shouldn't have been flipping all over the place.
The only character in the PT who should have had a dancing style was Darth Maul, because he uses an entirely different weapon and he was fighting two opponents at once. The part where Obi-wan just starts wailing at Maul after Qui-gon gets stabbed is the best part of the first film. You can see the anger in Obi-wan as he wildly flails at Maul, while Maul is deflecting his attacks with ease. It should have been the jedi and their practical, 'boring' style against the sith with the flashy stuff. The way Maul moves in the fight as it is looks more like he's showing off because he's just that goo with a lightsabre, but it's less impressive because the jedi are also doing flashy shit that they have no need to do.
I mean if you're going to criticize OT fights, pick on the one from ANH, where an old man is waving a stick at a guy in stiff armor who can barely see out of his helmet
[QUOTE=Corndog Ninja;49421924]I mean if you're going to criticize OT fights, pick on the one from ANH, where an old man is waving a stick at a guy in stiff armor who can barely see out of his helmet[/QUOTE]
That wasn't a duel, they just sized each other up and Obi-wan realised he had no chance of winning in a fight, so he retracted his lightsabre instead of drawing it out. It wasn't a spectacle in even the smallest sense, but that was never the point.
I get that it makes sense for the prequel fights to be a little more energetic than the OT but that doesn't mean the fighting needs to involve backflips or swinging across a stream of lava.
the problem isn't that the fights are dancey, complex choreography [I]should[/I] have been a great way to show how ornate and honor-bound the Old Republic was. it's that everyone is interchangeable once the fighting actually starts.
this is shitty choreography because of one simple thing - if a character fights using the methodical restriction of their emotions/their hate or pain or pain or whatever, why do they get killed by something that could have happened to any other character?
Qui Gon Gin gets abruptly punched in the nose and then stabbed. not because of an exploitable flaw in how he fights, he just makes an easily-missed mistake in the last couple seconds of a five or six minute long duel. i guess he felt tired.
Darth Maul stands on top of a pit and then a guy jumps up and cuts him in half while he stands still like an idiot, despite seeming like a perfectly capable fighter five seconds ago. he expresses no emotion as he dies. this comes after Obi-Wan seems to get really mad. Obi-Wan does not use this in any way in his duel with Maul, and also expresses no emotion as he kills him.
Grievous gets shot in the chest in the last thirty seconds of a car chase.
Dooku fights until his hands fall off at some point. Anakin might have cut him.
basically these fights happen until they decide not to, there is no appreciable progression or reason for anything. and they all go like this:
[IMG]http://cdn.makeagif.com/media/7-10-2015/_vz4Mp.gif[/IMG]
[QUOTE=RaxaHax;49421551]The problem with the prequel fights is that there's no, to borrow a musician term, economy of motion.
You've got a slick laser sword that can effortlessly cut a guy in half, but the preferred way of fighting with one is to do twists and leaps and flips while hitting your swords together? Obviously it looks neat on a screen, but it's more a choreographic tour de force than anything else, and really doesn't serve much in terms of tension or danger. They showed real Kendo fights in the video, where you'd think the moment-to-moment make-or-break strikes and parrys crescendo-ing into a victory would translate well if it were life and death like in Star Wars, but they went in some weird "evolved" direction with it: where now the preferred way to parry something is to swing your weapon around your body and do a spin?
Also as an excuse to talk about the movie John Wick, that movie is [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-HSoOFdJ3s"]perfect[/URL] in terms of tension and believably. Wick is obviously going to kill everything in the room, but the way he goes through it, utilizing [URL="http://www.pointshooting.com/1acar.htm"]real life firing techniques[/URL] and using consistent techniques from both Judo and Aikido martial arts drives home tension and realism. Plus he takes cover, struggles with a few guys up close, reloads after every 15 shots, and goes for the easiest disables first before he gets all flashy. Basically what I'm saying is [URL="https://youtu.be/SNkC_ABia2s?t=2m19s"]it ain't no Commando[/URL]
I just can't find any grounding when watching space knights act more like space ninjas[/QUOTE]
Haha oh shit, now I'm just perusing Youtube for movie shootouts and I think [URL="https://youtu.be/U02E2sjwlLM?t=3m34s"]Equilibrium[/URL] might be the Star Wars prequels of gun fight scenes
[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;49421900]That how it's supposed to fucking be. That was literally the direction George Lucas gave during the duels in the OT, lightsabres are heavy, you swing it like it's a big steel sword because it's supposed to emulate duels of honour between medieval knights.
[/QUOTE]
But they are not heavy. They have no mass except for the hilt. What's the point?
[QUOTE=MuffinZerg;49426055]But they are not heavy. They have no mass except for the hilt. What's the point?[/QUOTE]
It's not about what it actually is, it's about what it's trying to convey.
Star Wars is heavily based in arthurian legend and thus, Lucas wanted the fights to be similar to medieval sword fighting. Fights would be highly lethal but movement would have to be slow and deliberate due to the weight of the weapon.
[QUOTE=cdr248;49426528]It's not about what it actually is, it's about what it's trying to convey.
Star Wars is heavily based in arthurian legend and thus, Lucas wanted the fights to be similar to medieval sword fighting. Fights would be highly lethal but movement would have to be slow and deliberate due to the weight of the weapon.[/QUOTE]
You should watch modern knight reenactors fight. It's anything but lumbering and slow.
The OT fights were designed around old school choreography and around old school direction, they had most of those scenes in wide shots from a good distance so you saw the whole fight, there were few close ups and minor camera movement. Everything in those fights happened due to the direction of the films, where they were going emotionally.
The issue is if you compare the OT and PT and they're emotional climax's during their actions climax's, they're vastly different approaches and one can be argued to have succeeded much more so.
OT's emotional climax is the duel with Luke and Vader in ROTJ, the slow lumbering fight that was driven entirely by lukes emotions, and the Emperors desire for a new apprentice. Vaders role in that fight is essentially a punching bag. There's so much going on in that scene in terms of emotion, and motivation. You can see why every character wants to do every action they take.
Yeah the fight is slow and lumbering but that's due to the nature of the characters emotions and the desire to just "Let a scene play out" as they say.
PT's emotional climax is also in the 3rd movie, ROTS, between Obi and Anakin. This is a direct contrast of how the first climax plays out.
This is like 4 different environments, 40 different cuts and shots, and never at any point until the fight is actually over, do we get to see the actors play off each other. Hayden and Ewan never really get a moment to [B]ACT[/B] with each other because they're entirely consumed with trying to nail choreography. The PT's fight is fast, fluid, and flashy. It uses all the tricks in the books and amazing choreography to try and tell a story. The thing is, it really just needed to slow down. It goes too fast, it does too much, it has too many setpieces, it has too much going on for the real focus of the scene to [B]ever[/B] be witnessed by the audience. At some point in that scene we needed the emotional climax to really peak, we needed Hayden and Ewan to act off each other. A slow scene would have let this happen but because the PT focuses so heavily on choreography, it's never even attempted to really let the two of them act. Lucas told the story by getting human actions figures to fight with each other, then let one win.
Compare that to the OT, and it's clear that the PT didn't really achieve the same level of excellence. the OT has them fighting because of their emotions. The PT has them fighting because they must because that's where the story has been told to go.
People complained before the prequels that the OT sword fights were slow, lacking and boring.
Lucas went over the top sure but it was entertaining to watch, it doesn't matter in the end if it's realistic or not because at the time that's what people wanted. It's fun to watch, but the years have passed, people see it's flaws and now we're at a time where we want something both exciting and realistic. OT and PT only got one of the two. TFA got both.
It's a matter of changed mentalities of the time.
[QUOTE=cdr248;49426528]
Star Wars is heavily based in arthurian legend and thus, Lucas wanted the fights to be similar to medieval sword fighting. Fights would be highly lethal but movement would have to be slow and deliberate due to the weight of the weapon.[/QUOTE]
What the fuck, swords do not weigh 40kg so you have to move them around like sledgehammers. If anything, the prequel trilogy fights are more true to medieval sword fighting than original trilogy fights.
[QUOTE=HumanAbyss;49427290]You should watch modern knight reenactors fight. It's anything but lumbering and slow.
The OT fights were designed around old school choreography and around old school direction, they had most of those scenes in wide shots from a good distance so you saw the whole fight, there were few close ups and minor camera movement. Everything in those fights happened due to the direction of the films, where they were going emotionally.
The issue is if you compare the OT and PT and they're emotional climax's during their actions climax's, they're vastly different approaches and one can be argued to have succeeded much more so.
OT's emotional climax is the duel with Luke and Vader in ROTJ, the slow lumbering fight that was driven entirely by lukes emotions, and the Emperors desire for a new apprentice. Vaders role in that fight is essentially a punching bag. There's so much going on in that scene in terms of emotion, and motivation. You can see why every character wants to do every action they take.
Yeah the fight is slow and lumbering but that's due to the nature of the characters emotions and the desire to just "Let a scene play out" as they say.
PT's emotional climax is also in the 3rd movie, ROTS, between Obi and Anakin. This is a direct contrast of how the first climax plays out.
This is like 4 different environments, 40 different cuts and shots, and never at any point until the fight is actually over, do we get to see the actors play off each other. Hayden and Ewan never really get a moment to [B]ACT[/B] with each other because they're entirely consumed with trying to nail choreography. The PT's fight is fast, fluid, and flashy. It uses all the tricks in the books and amazing choreography to try and tell a story. The thing is, it really just needed to slow down. It goes too fast, it does too much, it has too many setpieces, it has too much going on for the real focus of the scene to [B]ever[/B] be witnessed by the audience. At some point in that scene we needed the emotional climax to really peak, we needed Hayden and Ewan to act off each other. A slow scene would have let this happen but because the PT focuses so heavily on choreography, it's never even attempted to really let the two of them act. Lucas told the story by getting human actions figures to fight with each other, then let one win.
Compare that to the OT, and it's clear that the PT didn't really achieve the same level of excellence. the OT has them fighting because of their emotions. The PT has them fighting because they must because that's where the story has been told to go.[/QUOTE]
there is a moment in the duel on mustafar that could have been very very good but it was hampered by poor writing.
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KirbH3WDKhk[/media]
the fight at that point even seems to slow down. however, the lines hayden christensen had to tell and the way lucas told him to do it are just terrible. the only good bit is the "this is the end for you my master". i love that line. but because the movies themselves were such a catastrophic failure in establishing the relationship between obi wan and anakin it carries zero weight. i think that's my biggest disappointment with these movies
i really hope ewan mcgregor can come back as obi wan somehow with a competent director and a good script. he played such a great obi wan
[QUOTE=God of Ashes;49428287]there is a moment in the duel on mustafar that could have been very very good but it was hampered by poor writing.
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KirbH3WDKhk[/media]
the fight at that point even seems to slow down. however, the lines hayden christensen had to tell and the way lucas told him to do it are just terrible. the only good bit is the "this is the end for you my master". i love that line. but because the movies themselves were such a catastrophic failure in establishing the relationship between obi wan and anakin it carries zero weight. i think that's my biggest disappointment with these movies
i really hope ewan mcgregor can come back as obi wan somehow with a competent director and a good script. he played such a great obi wan[/QUOTE]
This is something I really enjoy about the Clone Wars film and series. It really establishes the relationship between characters better than the films ever could have. Not to mention it's a fantastic show altogether.
[QUOTE=Amplified;49429232]This is something I really enjoy about the Clone Wars film and series. It really establishes the relationship between characters better than the films ever could have. Not to mention it's a fantastic show altogether.[/QUOTE]
not only that but it actually made anakin a character. anyone who writes off the clone wars tv show is missing a lot of great stuff
I think it might be safe to say you could not watch the prequels and instead watch the Clone Wars for a much better experience.
Yeah, the prequels really do have problems with emotional weight. One thing that really annoys me is when people say "the Jedi restrain their emotions - fear, anger, etc - and are like calm monks" or "the stiffness of the Jedi is supposed to highlight Anakin's frustration with the council" because it's boring and leads to [I]suffocatingly[/I] bland performances when all the characters are told not to act.
[video=youtube;7SqTR0DorSw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SqTR0DorSw[/video]
Like, I've heard this described as a powerful scene because "Obi-Wan never shows emotion so this little bit of emoting is really striking" but really it just comes across as a flat performance.
[QUOTE=MuffinZerg;49426055]But they are not heavy. They have no mass except for the hilt. What's the point?[/QUOTE]
I was always under the assumptions that lightsabers are incredibly heavy and unwieldy to use, which is why only Jedis use them. They can use the force and their training to functionally use a lightsaber.
[QUOTE=Dark RaveN;49428242]What the fuck, swords do not weigh 40kg so you have to move them around like sledgehammers. If anything, the prequel trilogy fights are more true to medieval sword fighting than original trilogy fights.[/QUOTE]
Not really lumbering, but more like [I]grounded[/I]. They were meant to be held two-handed and swung like a longsword. You had to keep your poise and couldn't flip around to swing with one hand.
[QUOTE=Dark RaveN;49428242]What the fuck, swords do not weigh 40kg so you have to move them around like sledgehammers. If anything, the prequel trilogy fights are more true to medieval sword fighting than original trilogy fights.[/QUOTE]
Do you really think medieval knights swung their swords around like this?
[QUOTE=Marzipas;49419117][IMG]http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_SWF9i3Vzpac/TMpz4ZSVEwI/AAAAAAAAA88/VDBItE6uTJE/s1600/Lightsaber+Battle.gif[/IMG][/QUOTE]
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