I’m not old enough to have caught the original Star Wars trilogy as they came to cinemas in the early ’80s, but I’m old enough to remember the churning, violent whirlpool of rage that accompanied the release of the prequels.
Now, barely two decades on, to say that the fandom has turned over a new leaf so far as the prequels are concerned would be a huge understatement. If anything, it seems that the supposed brilliance of those films is only just dawning on us. It doesn’t matter how absurd and utterly whimsical a scene is, because you can trust the newer generation of Star Wars stans to find some sense in it. And if that doesn’t work, well, “it can’t be any worse than the sequels” now, can it?
In this particular instance, some fans over at Reddit are hailing one of the most-memed sequences in Revenge of the Sith as “peak Star Wars,” and it’s hard to determine if they’re joking.
As you can see for yourself, the scene in question depicts Obi-Wan and Anakin in the thick of their epic lightsaber duel, casually waving their elegant weapons of a more civilized age back and forth without even attempting to hit the other person. We know George Lucas thought of those earlier duels as a dance, but this particular shot always highlighted the worst of the prequels for me, all bark and no bite.
Superfluous doesn’t even begin to cover it by half, but one fan has posited an interesting theory. Maybe this was the Star Wars version of feinting an attack during a sword fight, with Obi-Wan and Anakin both looking for an opening to score a hit on the other.
Then again, a lot of people also remember watching this as children, and how it completely ruined the suspense.
As ever in the Star Wars fandom, it seems that we’ve come to a head, so let’s head over to the thread and thrash it out. I mean, what’s one more heated debate for galaxy far, far away fans?