Star Wars has given up the prequel trilogy’s greatest gift: sick somersaults
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace is return to cinemas on May 3 to celebrate its 25th anniversary. This essay was inspired by its republication.
In the quarter century since the Star Wars prequel trilogy launched, The phantom menace and his brothers and sisters are exalted, satirized, rehearsed, rehabilitated, loved and pitied. At the risk of cliché, they permanently changed what Star Wars meant to audiences and creators in terms of story, world-building, atmosphere and visuals.
The phantom menace introduced many new ideas to the franchise – a long, often embarrassing list that included midi-chlorians, Jar-Jar Binks and various uncomfortably accentuated alien species. But one of the best ideas it brought to Star Wars is about to disappear.
When did the Jedi lose their sick flips?
‘George has never fought in his life’
Image: Lucasfilm
George Lucas is known for his affection for dogfights in World War II cinema, no hand-to-hand combat. While the swordplay of the original Star Wars trilogy is iconic, there is very little finesse to it. The lightsaber duels are kinetic proxies for the emotional and philosophical clashes between characters, rather than set-pieces in themselves. The prequel trilogy’s move towards highly balletic, choreographed lightsaber battles wasn’t primarily Lucas’s fault; its design fell squarely on the creative shoulders of stunt performer and coordinator Nick Gillard.
“George has never been in a fight in his life,” says Gillard told Vulture in 2017. “So he didn’t really bother writing (a lightsaber duel). It would say something like, “A vicious lightsaber battle ensues – seven minutes,” and you could fill in the gap there.
Gillard already had twenty years of industry experience under his belt when he started The phantom menace‘s lightsaber battle. He had worked with Lucasfilm productions for almost as long, starting with the 1981s Raiders of the Lost Ark. But the way he filled “the gap” for the Jedi was entirely inspired by the cinematic action he saw on screen around him in the late 1990s. Given Lucas’ blessing and complete creative freedom, Gillard created a bespoke Jedi martial art that was fast, mobile and acrobatic and emphasized the order’s supernatural reflexes and Force-assisted aerial skills.
The fight scenes that followed – especially the climactic duels of The phantom menace And Revenge of the Sith – were among the only aspects of the prequel trilogy to escape ridicule. It wasn’t just the choreography either. These duels were extremely ambulatory and interactive, moving through rooms and changing environments. They showed sabers casually cutting through walls and stabbing through electronics panels, sending sparks flying and fuel hoses flying. They preferred swings that cut diagonally through the camera’s view, so that sabers could be better converted into streaks of light rather than simple lines. The prequels shifted Star Wars’ location on the subgenre map to the frontier of martial arts action, in an era when wire-fu standards like The Matrix, Crouching tiger, hidden dragon, Kill Billand, dare I say, Charlie’s Angels firmly grabbed the attention of the multiplex goers.
But Gillard’s influence has faded as Star Wars has returned to live action and the franchise has moved away from showcasing the Jedi in their prime. The saber duels of the modern Star Wars series of TV shows can’t match the duels we see in the prequel trilogy.
An elegant twist for a more civilized era
By The power awakens progressive, live-action Star Wars has largely turned the camera away from temple-trained Jedi knights in the prime of their lives. Rey is a self-taught quarterstaff fighter and Kylo Ren has killed all his classmates. The Mandalorian, Boba Fett’s BookAnd Andor They either don’t feature any Jedi, or they carefully keep them in the background, putting a lot of focus on the unique status of Din Djarin’s Darksaber – so saber-on-saber clashes are rare.
Even now that Jedi have returned to the screen in the Disney Plus shows, with few exceptions, the sword duels have been slow, stagey, and even…perfunctory. I was afraid I had exaggerated the difference in my mind until I started pulling up videos of the prequels while writing this article. When you look at those fights and the most recent one side by side, the difference in speed is immediately noticeable.
It certainly makes sense that the badassery of a lightsaber fight should be somewhat reduced if practitioners weren’t simultaneously given a saber while learning to tie their own shoes. But even in scenes where canonically skilled Jedi knights give it their all – Ahsoka’s duel with Baylan Skoll, Obi-Wan and Anakin’s flashback sparring – it is a diluted shade of how it once was.
Maybe I’m harsh. Gillard set a high standard that is difficult to achieve. And you might be fine with modern saber duels – it’s a subjective rating after all. But I have one more question, based on 100% objective criteria: where are the damn jumps?
Why do all the Jedi now have their feet glued to the floor?
Image: Lucasfilm
The Jedi ‘Force leap’ (I’ll keep calling it ‘sick flips’, thank you) is not a Gillard invention. It goes all the way back to the original Lucas trilogy, where we see Luke training in mid-air somersaults with Yoda. Later, he uses that Force-powered jumping ability to jump out of the carbonite chamber The empire strikes backand to escape from the Sarlacc pit Return of the Jedi.
But the Star Wars prequel trilogy elevated that power to an art form. Sick flips were no longer just used to get out of a situation – Gillard wove them into the Jedi martial art, like breathing. The very first thing that happens in the legendary Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon ghost threat fight with Darth Maul that is Obi-Wan does a sick somersault over Maul so the Sith lord is flanked. And the very end, as Obi-Wan avenges his fallen master? That’s right, he does a sick somersault from a pit, sails over Maul’s head and splits him in half.
How works Attack of the clones Grant Yoda’s mastery of the philosophy of the Force in his saber style? Why, by giving him exponentially more sick flips than any other Jedi! Anakin and Obi-Wan’s pivotal battle against Mustafar Revenge of the Sith starts with a sick somersault, as Anakin launches himself over a platform towards his master. It also ends with one, where Obi-wan saves Anakin all three are remaining natural limbs. That’s what the whole infamous “I’ve got the high ground” conversation is about! Obi-wan says, “Don’t do a sick somersault from down there! It doesn’t work for me, because I invented that.”
The sick flip remains the clearest trademark of Jedi martial arts: any franchise could introduce fast, deadly, and mobile swordplay. But the Force-assisted flip is tailor-made for Star Wars. The Clone Wars And Rebels shows, with their animated environments, made the change ubiquitous in the fallow live-action Star Wars era between the prequels and The power awakens. And yet the cover is nowhere to be seen in the live-action shows, not even in duels between Obi-Wan and Anakin, Anakin and Ahsoka, and Ahsoka and Baylan Skoll.
I’m not suggesting that planning and staging great martial arts scenes is easy, let alone staging fights that rely on your lead performers rather than seasoned stunt persons. Quite the opposite! They require a lot of pre-production work and demand a lot from actors. That is probably a not insignificant source of the difference between the choreography of the prequel trilogy and the various Disney Plus series. The scheduling demands of episodic television are fundamentally different from those of a film production, and we live in an era defined by Hollywood’s drive to make more things faster, rather than taking the time to make things right.
Image: Lucasfilm
But I miss the inventiveness and mobility of the prequels’ combat. Watching AhsokaI was struck by how striking Hayden Christensen’s moves differ from his co-stars’. He drops his center of gravity, glides through his feet with predatory grace, and uses a good old, blindingly fast saber spin whenever he gets the chance. It’s clear that Gillard drilled him on the basics of theatrical swordplay during production Attack of the clones And Revenge of the Sith are still there.
Perhaps Star Wars will never again achieve the perfect combination of resources, talent, and contemporary action flavor that allows it to border on wire-fu and martial arts cinema. I may never realize my dream of seeing Jedi fly through the skies again to dive on their opponents. And then… there it is The acolyte.
The upcoming Disney Plus series has an overt mandate to show a time when the ancient past of the Jedi Order was truly at its zenith and not about to fall. Trailers for the show feature a lot of martial arts, with even a glimpse of some wire-fu. And most intriguingly, the biggest name in the cast is The Matrix‘s own veteran Carrie-Anne Moss, who is definitely no stranger to sick flips. This is Star Wars: we can always hope.