FXitinPost/YouTubeIt’s often said that you should never mess with perfection, and I’m very much of the opinion that the film that kick-started a mega franchise, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope , is as close to a perfect film as you can get.
Of course that never stopped George Lucas from going back to the iconic sci-fi flick to repeatedly tweak and screw with his creation, throwing in all kinds of unnecessary CG bells and whistles like a deranged painter who’s convinced themselves their masterpiece will never be good enough.
So, while I’m usually inclined to believe that you shouldn’t mess with perfection, if George Lucas wants to mess around with Star Wars I reckon the fans should be able to have a crack too. It’s not like they’re gonna come up with anything worse, after all.
This brings us to the fateful Death Star duel between in Darth Vader and Obi Wan Kenobi. At the time, this was the first lightsaber duel we’d ever seen, so the slow and methodical pace of the fight made sense for a number of technical reasons, and the fact that Sir Alec McGuiness was a classically trained actor in his early 60s.
But we’ve now got approximately twenty million pieces of Star Wars media to pore over, and lightsaber fights tend to be a hell of a lot more intense and quicker paced. The newer installments have CGI, fight choreographers, and all kinds of tricks on their side to create more engaging set pieces.
There’s also the fact that the prequel movies added plenty of context for the complex relationship between Darth Vader and Obi Wan, which gives their reunion on the Death Star a lot more weight, making it all the more disappointing when its over so quickly, even when you try and consider the technical limitations of the time.
LucasFilmOf course, times change. We saw in Rogue One that Darth Vader can bloody well move when he wants to, and Star Wars Rebels showed us that Obi Wan still has plenty of tricks up his sleeve, despite his old age.
All of this has resulted in a dedicated and immensely talented fan by the name of FXitinPost creating his own version of the Death Star duel. He’s managed to maintain the spirit of the original fight, cutting in Luke and co’s daring escape, while injecting a bit of flair and flourish to the duel itself.
A brief teaser for the project attracted a lot of buzz when it was released back in 2017, but the entire six minute video is now available to watch in all its glory. You can find it below, and I strongly suggest you put some time aside to sit back and enjoy the whole thing.
While it’s immediately obvious that this rehashed fight has a lot more going for it technically, I’m especially into how the scene draws on the prequels to create a more satisfying conclusion to the Obi Wan/Anakin dynamic, without cheapening or changing the emotional heft of Obi Wan’s original sacrifice in any way.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.