Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 12 Reasons It's Better Than The Prequels
3. Lightsaber Fights With Emotional Weight
Every Star Wars movie needs a good lightsaber duel: not only do they provide an entertaining and tension-filled action scene, but they can also offer some serious character development for those involved. The lightsaber fight in A New Hope is admittedly not very good. Although it provides more depth and backstory to Obi-Wan and Darth Vader, the duel is still a battle between a man in his 60s and a man in a robot suit, so the mobility of the major players is severely limited. However, the later fights between Vader and Luke are both excellent. In Empire, Luke is inexperienced and unsure of himself with Vader is simply toying with him and taunting him, while in Jedi, Luke is more experienced and at one point snaps and tries to kill his father. The prequel fights all have at least one player who the audience knows next to nothing about, between Darth Maul, Count Dooku, General Grievous, and Mace Windu. This dissolves any tension from the scene, since we have no knowledge of character motivations. On top of that, the fights are the opposite of the one in A New Hope, in the sense that they are way too over-choreographed and feel more like a dance planned in advance than a real battle. The only prequel fight that has real emotional weight and great realistic choreography is the one between Anakin and Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith, but that fight has way too much going on visually and continues for much longer than necessary. Both of the climactic battles in The Force Awakens strike a fine balance between emotional depth and realism. In the first duel, Finn is shown to be extremely inexperienced and out of his element, while Kylo Ren is slashing out in rage at his traitor. Between the terror on John Boyega's face, the fact that he's always on the back foot, and the fact that he gets destroyed pretty quickly, we learn a lot about his character in a short sequence. When Rey later joins, in an epic shot of her grabbing Luke's saber out of Ren's force pull, she starts out on the back foot as well. As Kylo Ren punches his chest to feel pain and fuel his rage and dark side, he corners Rey, at which point she takes a turn, believes in The Force, and starts to take the lead. Through this fight, we see Finn's inexperience, Kylo Ren's rage and surprising inexperience, and Rey's strong connection to The Force, we learn so much about their characters with very little dialogue.
