JohnGreenArt said:
I think Obi-Wan's fighting in ANH is weak sauce because it's likely he hasn't used his lightsaber in almost 20 years.
Nevermind the fact that Alderaan just blew up and that great disturbance in the Force probably did a good deal of damage on ObiWan's Force-chi or whatever.
Dooku, on the other hand, is a Sith. He gets his power from hate and anger. In ROTJ, Luke didn't start kicking Vader's ass until he got angry.
I have no problem with the Jedi & Sith in the prequels being able to jump around and stuff, so long as the fight makes sense. Sadly, though it looks nice, a lot of the time it was just flash without substance. In each of the duels in the OT the combatants are carrying on a conversation as they fight. But in TPM, for example, after the Jedi Council tell Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan to discover who this new Sith guy is, when they encounter Darth Maul they don't ask him a single question. Wasn't it their job to find out why he was there to kill Amidala, who his master is maybe, how did this Sith come back... you know?
It really wasn't until EpIII that we started getting some dialog during duels again.
That really doesn't work as a solid explanation (though it's clever, I'll grant you that), because, even if we assume that Obi-Wan really hasn't used his lightsaber in 20 years...
We're given no indication in the movies that such things occur. Obi-Wan says he'll be all right and he's just fine later. Anything more than a momentary headache and heartburn is, I think, reading into the scene what isn't there. If his Force power was reduced, why didn't he lose the fight with Vader? The fact is that they were in a stalemate, but escape was never his plan (as Vader indicates earlier), and he literally gave up, to distract Vader, giving Luke & co. time to escape.
How does "hate and anger" suddenly give you the ability to move fast and flip through the air? I guess this explains why Yoda, an 870+ year old goblin can flip around too, right? The fact is that everyone in the Prequels has these abilities... being able to do mid-air flips is a basic Force skill like blocking blaster shots. Last I checked, these things were not "Sith skills."
Heck, look at ESB, Yoda trains Luke to do those flips pretty early on!
We don't see that fighting style because Alec Guinness was a senior citizen, Dave Prowse could barely see in the suit, and they didn't have the time and budget to whip up some other arrangement that would have allowed for more energetic fighting... (as we see in the latter two movies). Add into this the fact that at this stage of the production, they each basically had car batteries up their sleeves and those easily broken rotating reflective rods in their hands. Too swift or elaborate movements exposed the wires or risked damaging the fragile tubes.
But the main reason we don't see prequel style fighting in the OT is because The Matrix and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon had not yet been released to change public expectations of what "cool fight scenes" should look like.
Everything else is an unsatisfactory, after-the-fact rationalization for what is essentially a stylistic choice based on tech/budget limitations. Going by the rules "established" in the Prequels, both Vader AND Obi-Wan should be as agile as General Grievous and Count Dooku in that scene, and if Lucas were to go crazy (again) and re-do it, that would be the logical way to pull it off. But it really doesn't bother me that the movies are different from one another. They each are consistent within themselves. It's the whole popular Mythology Lucas has created about how he "always intended" this or that (and the repetition of such cliches in the Expanded Universe material, ad infinatum), that has gotten people so upset about discontinuities and coming up with explanations like that.
What Adywan did with the duel was a reasonable compromise to "juice up" the fight a bit, without totally destroying it (I personally objected to the PT music being inserted, but once I saw the scene in question thought it "worked"). Of course, short of getting some guys in costumes to re-enact the scene with some CG (which is way beyond the scope of any fan editor's project to make it actually blend in), that's about the best he could do.
