George Lucas cut the best Star Wars lightsaber fight from the prequels
ew.com/movies/2019/12/11/star-wars-best-light...Posted Dec 11, 2019, 9:47 PM UTC
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Well that’s annoying. That does sound like a cool fight scene.
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He Indiana Jones’d him!
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Definetely for the best. The Obi-Wan/Grevious polotline in ROTS is already superflous as is.
Right? It's a bit of a mess. We get a scene where Grievous tells the Seperatists to go to Mustafar, which wasn't really needed, since we already had a scene of Sidious telling Grievious to tell them that, we could infer he did it offscreen.
A brief fight (the aforementioned container dropping thing.) A Lightsaber fight, a chase sequence, a brawl on the landing pad, and the general "Clones vs. Clankers" shooting each other to bits sequence. While there's nothing wrong with these, it's... really pointless, and exists solely to pad out the runtime and have something to cut away to inbetween Anakin's scenes.
Which wouldn't be so bad, except the Kashyyk scenes do exactly the same thing, they're just there to show... war and stuff, inbetween the things the movie is actually about. Again, not a bad thing, but kind of pointless.
It's not superfluous. Obi-Wan needs to be separated from Anakin so he doesn't have him to seek for help when he turns. If Obi-Wan needs to be off world during a war film it should be to deal with the war.
Yes, he needed to be separated. Doesn't mean we need to see it. Grevious was a disposable and superflous villian. The whole sequence isn't vital to the main story and is just an excuse for a big action sequence. I think it slows down the film. In comparison, the Obi-Wan/Kamino plot in AOTC was far more relevant and interesting for example, IMO.
So we... What? We don't explain why Obi-Wan is missing after Anakin's tantrum until he turns up on Coruscant? That's just far worse. Or you could make it like Yoda and show him on a planet in a battle, and Order 66, at which point removing Grievous serves to trim all of about 4 minutes in total from the film.
But there are also other issues if you remove Grievous:
I guess you could get away with a droid capturing Skywalker and Kenobi on the Invisible Hand in order for them to have their daring rescue complete with heroic landing. Maybe.
But if there's no one commanding the CIS, Obi-Wan has no one to arrest, thus no reason to be separated from Anakin. And the film structure breaks apart. Though this could be given to the Viceroy (however it takes away Anakin thinking he's bringing peace, so ruins his arc). Also it doesn't cut anything from the film minus the 130 seconds Kenobi and Grievous are actually in action.
Grievous is also written as the way Kenobi escapes from Order 66, having used his ship. Another reason could be given, but would be a deus ex machina and would also need devoted screentime, not actually streamlining the film.
I'm too tired to think in-depth about this but I think Dooku and Maul should have gotten more screen time in place of Greivous, which would alter the structure a lot.
As it is though, I think the whole Utapau sequences could just be cut outright and the movie could be improved. We can assume he defeated him. Might be jarring with the cut we have, but it's better than boring.
Also, Grievous could be given a different personality. I hate his over the top voice actor and comedic relief personality. He should have been far more threatening. I would love to see a fan edit of that because that may actualy be possible. I've seen fan edits with the Nemodians voices changed and it worked pretty well (not necessarily better, I can't remember tbh, but it was cool).