Star Wars: The Force Awakens - 6 Things That Were Perfect (And 3 That Were Disappointing)

Perfection:

6. The Lightsaber Duel Brings The Best Of Every Previous Fight

Everyone loves a good lightsaber duel, and The Force Awakens has a great one. It's an intense, exhilarating action sequence that puts our heroes in real peril against a villain who's severely lacking in limits by this point. It's one of the extended sequences we'd seen the least of from trailers, and that makes it all the more exhilarating here (even if the true participants were kinda obvious). The duel is very much like a merging of the two vastly opposite fighting styles we saw across the previous two trilogies - there is a heightened physicality and general creativity with the laser swords that we saw in the prequels (no flipping acrobatics though), but the focus is very much on the fight as in terms of emotional development, telling us about and actually developing our characters, just as it was in the originals. J.J. Abrams also brings some new elements to it all - the camera spins around the participants up close and, instead of being an orchestrated dance, things are messy, with characters getting grazed and burnt by waylaid blades. Its conclusion is brought about by outside events, meaning a rematch down the road is all but inevitable.