New, Shiny...and Empty?

At Popular Mechanics, Darren Orf has a couple of rueful observations about the recent video upgrade of the lightsaber duel between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars.

Some big-time fans used modern technology to make the duel far more elaborate and insert touches of realism such as damage to floors and walls when the sizzling laser swords struck them. Also added were swifter movements and some things we saw Force-capable duelers do in later movies, like smacking your opponent with flying machinery. Ghostly audio cues from Revenge of the Sith remind us of the first fight between Kenobi and Vader (then still Anakin Skywalker).

Orf notes that even with some new bells and whistles, the end result of the fight is the same: Kenobi seems to surrender at the last second in order to give his friends a chance to reach the Millennium Falcon and escape. Vader swings his saber through the old man's body, but instead of a bisected foe he finds nothing but empty robes.

I'd make an observation or two of my own, pointing out that the enhanced fight is not unlike the video tweaks series creator George Lucas added to the original three movies when he released them on DVD. Sure, the technology of today can give us a better-looking fight than could the technology of 1977. But the meaning of the battle and its outcome has nothing to do with how elaborate and kewl! its visuals are: It comes from the dialogue between Alec Guinness and James Earl Jones, and from the smile on Guinness' face as he lifts his lightsaber away from its guard position so Vader can strike him down.

Which is one of the reasons that the simpler, more primitively shot fight between Kenobi and Vader carries so much more weight than, say, the hopping pixels of Yoda vs. Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones. Yoda, a puppet voiced by Frank Oz in the original trilogy, is just lines of code in Clones, pitted against a stunt double topped with Christopher Lee's digitally-inserted head. Guinness and David Prowse, the man inside Vader's armor, had to make their fight look real. The 78-year-old Lee and puppeteer Oz barely had to show up. As in so many other areas in both the lame prequels and the more recent sequels, the difference is clear.

And really, far more than convincing.