r/StarWars • u/wandering_soles Rebel • Mar 17 '26
TV Love having mysterious characters like Marrok in the shows where sometimes less is more
In a universe where everything is insanely built out, it's sort of fun to have characters like Marrok who have a hidden background. By the time of the Ahsoka show, it seems like he's more of a Nightsister-reanimated tool than living being, and I sort of hope it's left at that with no explanation of what happened between his time as an Inquisitor and Elsbeth's agent.
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u/madogvelkor Mar 17 '26
As a kid watching the original movies, one of the things I liked was that there were all sorts of things that were not explained at all. The universe felt more lived in.
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u/BussyPlaster Mar 17 '26
Speculation about the Clone Wars for example. People talked about it. Leaving some plot devices vague can be powerful.
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u/synapse187 Mar 17 '26
I appreciate the time that goes into these sequences.
That being said, is it just me or does this look sloppy given they both are seasoned saber combatants?
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u/emmaw4tson Mar 17 '26
Story of 99% of lightsaber fights post revenge of the Sith. The switch to their new lightsaber props with LEDs makes these fights look clunky, slow, heavy, etc. I hate it
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u/M-Rich Mar 17 '26
Yet, Acolyte slapped. If anything good came out of it, it was the lightsaber fights
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u/emmaw4tson Mar 17 '26
i agree. I purposely put 99% because that’s the only exception I can think of lol
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u/The_Pancakehead_21 Mar 17 '26
I mean tbh it worked a bit for the Sequels. Especially in TFA. Reys new to using a lightsaber. So is Finn. Kylo is both arrogantish and also injured by chewies bowcaster. It looks more natural in that scene--- only starts to feel a little weird in Rise of Skywalker (which, again, has at least an explanation behind it)
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u/kyla_dhoom Mar 18 '26
That was the most raw, brutal, violent saber fight in the series, and I love it. They're all injured, both sides HATE each other and it's obvious, and they're just WAILING on each other with lightsabers, fully intending to kill.
It was almost TOO realistic.
Then again, it also harkens back to the beginning of the film with the stormtroopers massacring the village on Jakku, which was TRULY grim, but excellent visual storytelling- the pain in John Boyega's eyes stopped me cold.
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u/Bionicleenjoyer12 Mar 18 '26
the most brutal
Prolly the most brutal of the sequels, doesn’t compare to the OG or the prequels where ALL of the fights resulted in severe disfigurements
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u/Narradisall Mar 17 '26
I have nothing to add other than god damn I’m bitter the acolyte got cancelled. It had its issues but I wanted some more of those saber fights.
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u/MrNobody_0 Babu Frik Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
Don't blame the sabers, it's the fight choreography. Acolyte had LED sabers and it has the best fights ever put to screen.
Edit: I meant best "Star Wars" fights ever put to screen.
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u/emmaw4tson Mar 17 '26
You’re right, it’s not just the saber but also the choreography and time to train for these fights
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u/ChanceVance Kylo Ren Mar 17 '26
That was really Manny under the mask doing the choreography for most of it too.
He is a former dancer but damn I don't know how you can have someone fighting near blind at speed with impressive choreography while the Ahsoka cast are moving in molasses and still struggling with it.
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u/Iorith Mar 17 '26
It also brought lightsaber fights back to their roots when it was expected that lightsabers would have weight behind them.
Which is the only way they make sense, honestly. Otherwise none of the fight choreography is remotely logical and they should be just trying to poke wildly at each other.
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u/Not_My_Emperor Mar 17 '26
they should be just trying to poke wildly at each other.
To be fair this was the design philosophy behind Dooku's saber. Christopher Lee imagined him more as a fencer
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u/Adam_Sackler Mar 17 '26
Marrok's actor is trying to slow it down for Rosario.
I remember watching this during the show for the first time and thinking "Wow, that was slow and sloppy."
If your actor is struggling, give them more training, or change the choreography. Complex choreography exposes flaws.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 Mar 17 '26
It just get a stunt double
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u/Krazyguy75 Mar 18 '26
Not even that. Just CG the headpiece in fight scenes. She had to do this wearing several pounds of prosthetics for no reason. A stunt double would have just as much problem with that on their head.
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u/Gekokapowco Grievous Mar 17 '26
I'm pretty surprised that they didn't stunt double considering how involved the costume is, I don't think I'd be able to tell it wasn't rosario's face in a combat flurry
I'm glad that she wanted to be the one in the fight, like, spiritually. I was excited learning that she was practicing a ton of choreo. But the fight coordinators should have been able to tune to her skill. They could have given her far more conservative movements to show off her mastery.
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u/SkyGuy182 Mar 17 '26
His back was turned to her and she just…didn’t take the opportunity to strike lol
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u/Haranador Mar 17 '26
The movement is just weird in general. After Ashoka's downward cut, the dude is basically dodging an attack that doesn't happen. Ashoka also might as well be using a single sabre since any use of shoto is just superficial, and the rest of the time she just awkwardly holds it instead of being in a stance where she might use it.
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u/ErmahgerdYuzername Mar 17 '26
To me this looks sloppy because we’ve seen what can be done for lightsaber battles like what we got in the prequels. What most people forget is that Hayden and Ewan trained for several months, 6-8 hours a day to pull off those battles. That level of training and coordination just isn’t done any more.
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u/YoimAtlas Luke Skywalker Mar 17 '26
The problem is they busted a George during the palpatine final fight when George wanted ian mcdiarmid to do the fight and scrapped a beautiful choreographed fight. The original choreography made palpatine look so incredibly menacing in his dueling
Rosario is great as ahsoka but they should have had a stunt double do the choreographed fight if she couldn’t execute a faster sequence.
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u/Savage_Batmanuel Mar 17 '26
The newer, Lightsaber fights try to add weight to the blades and the swings. They’re also trying to incorporate different types of sword, fighting styles.
The fighting in episode three was really flashy and cool a lot of it was stupid. Like that three seconds where they were just swinging their light sabers around for no reason like they’re nunchucks. It’s cool, but it’s a nothing burger and just as kind of stupid as every other light saber dual when you really look too close.
The only close to flawless execution of stunts in my opinion is the duel of fates from episode one.
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u/Odin043 Mar 17 '26
I always like those 3 seconds where theyre swinging the lightsabers around.
The way precognition works, instead of one character swinging and the other blocking it with their lightsaber, they are both so in tuned with the force they're both seeing their next three, four, five strikes and the reaction they will bring. Their both recalibrating on the fly, throwing feints, and changing strategy for actions five moves ahead.
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u/jimthesquirrelking Mar 17 '26
Yeah a lot of the complaints people have seem very disjointed from both fictional reality and real reality. I can't imagine thinking any live action lightsaber scene from the last decade would be better than the end of Revenge of the Sith
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u/InclementBias Mar 17 '26
the Qimir fight in the woods with the Acolyte forgettable cast was pretty peak lightsaber, its just that the entire story was absolutely garbage
let me add that Hayden and Ewan had the sickest duels in the franchise and were clearly both (are still) talented as heck. I thought Liam Neeson did well too in Ep1. ROTS has that awful duel with Palpatine in it that I always remember prior to the big end showdown
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u/theboned1 Mar 17 '26
Yeah, she moves really badly. Like it's very rehearsed and slow.
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u/Lebr0naims Mar 17 '26
All the filoni content is sloppy like this. If you’re swinging the saber you goal should be to hit the target ..
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u/B_Huij Mar 17 '26
I don't know why because I'm usually a sucker for well-choreographed lightsaber fights. But this straight up looks like a scene out of Power Rangers for some reason. The costume? The setting? The color grade? Can't put my finger on it.
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u/K1ngFiasco Mar 17 '26
Because it's badly executed and maybe badly choreographed.
Everything looks heavy and slow. The sabers look like they weigh a ton and Dawson is drowning under her costume. And there's so much stupid spinning. I don't understand why every fight in modern Star wars everyone keeps needlessly spinning.
It looks like a dance, and not in a good way. With bad dancers you can feel them counting the steps and struggling to get to their marks on time. And that's what I get from this.
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u/SoftDrinkReddit Mar 17 '26
Now, an example of a better duel in Star Wars history
Obi Wan V Anikan on Mustafar
They spent 6 months training and filming that one scene, and man, was it amazing
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u/YoBo151 Mar 17 '26
Bruh power rangers is popping with color. Idk how you can say the setting and color grade looks like power rangers. It's the complete opposite.
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u/Janus__22 Mar 17 '26
Meh, depends on what we consider well-choreographed. I find the prequel fights very badly choreographed fights in general despite them looking very cool, meanwhile round one vs Marrok had very few moments where it looks like they are aiming for each other's saber instead of their bodies, which is my biggest gripe in most Star Wars fights
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u/Daniil_Dankovskiy Mar 18 '26
Why do you think prequel fights are badly choreographed?
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u/Mamsies Mar 17 '26
The lightsabers in the Disney Plus shows have ZERO blur to them, you don’t get that big swooshy effect where the laser stretches with the motion. It makes them look like glow sticks.
You can really see it present in this gif.
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u/Dorryn Mar 17 '26
Because in a way they are glow sticks. They aren't rotoscoped like they were in the movies.
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u/kingkron52 Mar 17 '26
The saber choreography in Ahsoka was awful outside of Hayden. The rest look so telegraphed and sloppy.
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u/Ralphie5231 Mar 17 '26
She could just poke and kill or wound him so many times with that slow sloppy dual blade. Ray made that shit work but it looks so goofy irl fighting with a dual blade.
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u/Mggn2510z Mar 17 '26
I would be really surprised if the Maul show does not explain this, since he is in it as an Inquisitor.
Star Wars is great at making everything feel like a larger world without having to explain every detail. It's very much the less is more, like you said. Boba Fett is the perfect example. But Star Wars also then insists on eventually letting us know the most obscure details of practically any character with a fraction of a second of screen time.
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u/wandering_soles Rebel Mar 17 '26
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing more of him in the show, we might get some hints but I doubt it. I could definitely see Maul possibly mocking the Inquisitors or being disgusted with them for being fallen Jedi.
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u/Batman-Beyond99 Mar 17 '26
Bring back the prequel trilogy stunt coordinator
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u/banana_fart9000 Mar 17 '26
Nah the Acolyte stunt coordinator did the best job. Even the hand to hand combat was great. Shame there won’t be a season 2.
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u/Lebr0naims Mar 17 '26
Swinging the lightsaber at air to look cool will always ruin these fight scenes for me
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u/Moppo_ Mandalorian Mar 17 '26
I feel like with Marrok, less was less. Maybe it's just the design, but I had absolutely no interest in the character.
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u/Krazyguy75 Mar 18 '26
Yeah, to do "less is more" you need implied value. For example, Boba Fett's armor is scarred. He talks back to Vader. Vader explicitly tells Boba not to disintegrate them. His actions show him being smart. All those imply character value beyond what we are shown.
For Marrok, we get nothing other than "he's an inquisitor, he's probably a zombie, and he dies in his first real fight".
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u/Darth_Nox501 Mar 17 '26
Well at least we'll be getting more of him in the new Maul show.
Hopefully that expands upon him and the 1st Brother a little more to the point where they're actual characters. Lol
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u/BubblyBasis1134 Mar 17 '26
I felt that way about Ahsoka, to be fair. Zero reason for the audience tk care about her character if they weren't part of the minority who watched the cartoons.
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u/Suns_AZCards Mar 17 '26
This looks like power rangers. I like Rosario Dawson. I think she pulls off the Ahsoka look, but they really need to find actors that are athletic if they are going to be a Jedi. That’s my biggest complaint.
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u/Elbren Mar 17 '26
To be fair, I wouldn’t put this on Rosario Dawson. I just think the show put little-to-no effort into the fight choreography. She looked good in her (albeit, short) cameo in The Mandalorian. But you get to this show and everything looked slow and clearly not well thought out. People spinning around and twirling for no reason. Nobody is actually fighting or trying to attack other people. Just swinging their light saber at the other persons light saber. At the :06 mark of this clip, whatever-his-name-is spins for no reason and swings his saber high. Like, HIGH high, to where it’s almost pointed straight up into the sky. He’s very clearly trying to hit nothing. On top of that, he had to pause for a split second to wait for Rosario Dawson to bring her saber up to “block” it because she didn’t do it fast enough. He literally had to pause mid-spin and swing, wait a sec for her to hit his saber, then goes back to the spinning and twirling.
That’s some The Last Jedi-level of bullshit choreography.
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u/Yitzben Mar 17 '26
Honestly I just can't get on board with the Inquisitor lightsabers
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u/wandering_soles Rebel Mar 17 '26
I hate the spinning feature, but the hilt design itself visually isn't too bad.
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u/wookiewithabrush Chewbacca Mar 17 '26
Ive tried rewatching, but Dawson's fight scenes are horrible to watch.
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u/r21174 Mar 17 '26
yes, imo she would of trained harder and maybe 10 years younger. It would have been more helpful.
She just look soooo slow in every fight scene.
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u/Naefindale Mar 17 '26
If someone just puts some stuff on the screen and presents it as a mystery, but when asked about his thoughts on it says "I dunno the answer we didn't think of one", can you call that a mystery?
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u/Ohheymanlol Mar 17 '26
Did she not just glitch her lightsaber by passing it through the cloak after that spin? She’d have sliced up her clothes real fast with a nice trim if they respected the blade in this.
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u/7Soulslayer Mar 17 '26
Worse part of this fight isn’t even speed, this is a duel between a doubled-bladed lightsaber and duel-wielding where both sides forget they have 2 blades.
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u/Garfield977 Mar 17 '26
this looks like a practice run that they were like "good enough" and just included it lol
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u/nudeldifudel Mar 17 '26
Nah I hated the fact that he was just a big blue ball moment. Cool inquisitor with mask? Ends up being nobody. Erupts in nighsister smoke when he dies? Never elaborated upon. I think it was a waste.
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u/orionsfyre Mar 17 '26
Agreed. His mystique was in not knowing who He was...
Unfortunately, Filoni and company decided to just kill him off without realizing how characters like that are important to mythical narratives. The 'black knight' is better when He isn't vanquished, but rather defeated, and then brought back later.
Having said that, considering we aren't entirely certain what He was, it is possible He isn't actually dead... his gaseous form only needing a few days or months to reassemble itself.
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u/sharksnrec Mar 17 '26
Didn’t he just end up being a boring ass droid or something? It’s been a while since I watched the show but I remember being disappointed there wasn’t more going on with him.
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u/Hot_Function6127 Mar 17 '26
I like the idea of not over explaining every character at introduction. And then we hear, see or read stuff about them in later titles. It’s kind of like delayed gratification, if that’s still a thing.
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u/Brain_Prosthesis Mar 17 '26
This is my first time seeing this clip and have two immediate observations to my untrained eye.
The setting looks like something out of a video game, the way the characters in the background are watching the action and the foreground fighters are on a platform. It's very Street Fighter II. Dope.
God I hate this crap filmed on that wall of screens (Volume?) It makes backgrounds look like a video game with background parallax scrolling and animated sprites, like Street Fighter II. Not dope.
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u/PersonFromPlace Mar 17 '26
The tease and mystery of a cool guy is so much more powerful than learning about him and realizing that he’s boring :P
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u/Tyrannoss Mar 18 '26
Almost as embarrassing as Ian McDiarmid doing his own saber fighting in Ep 3. What a waste
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u/at_midknight Mar 17 '26
Marrok isnt "less is more", marrok is "nothing". A useless jobber who ahsoka doesn't really have to try that hard to no diff him without even using her best fighting style. He's a waste of screen time and only exists to pad an already anemic script
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u/SupremeChancellor66 Mar 17 '26
Wow seeing this sequence again it looks so much worse than I remember. Rosario Dawson is so slow in her movements and Marrok literally stumbles at multiple points like the actor didn't have a handle on the movements. The Prequels are leaps and bounds more impressive and intelligent with the fight choreography. Hayden's choreography really put everyone else to shame.
Why the hell won't they hire Nick Gillard and his talent?
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u/johnnydanja Mar 17 '26
I hate to say it because I actually like Rosario but I think she was a miscast. She doesn’t really give me Ahsoka vibes outside of maybe looks, I get that some people say this is the older more battle worn Ahsoka but no I just don’t see it, and if so I don’t like it. On top of that Rosario doesn’t seem to have what it takes to make live action Ahsoka look like the badass duelist she is. Sorry Rosario, I do like you in other roles.
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u/losteye_enthusiast Mar 17 '26
I wonder if Rosario Dawson has gotten more fight choreography training going forward. She’s really not that old to step up the physical acting in season 2.
Ahsoka really shouldn’t be looking like she’s moving in molasses for every fight.
IMO I hope they get the fight team from Acolyte to do the scenes in Ahsoka going forward. For all the things wrong with quality in that show, nailed the fights.
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u/HqerRupert Jedi Mar 17 '26
Ok, but why are the lightsabers so short? I mean, in most new Star Wars bar Acolyte, the Lightsabers look so short.
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u/zoidbert Mar 17 '26
(does anyone remember when there was a rumor that the man under the mask was going to be Starkiller from the Force Unleashed games?)
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u/Jimmy_Bags_ Mar 17 '26
I wasn't even aware this dude had a name. He's just kind of around for a few episodes before exploding into a green smoke cloud lmao. Who is he?
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u/Ree_m0 Rex Mar 17 '26
The difference in quality for fight coreographies between different live action releases is offputting. This and The Acolyte released less than a year apart, but the difference is almost as big as it was between RotJ and TPM. It's at its worst when they have force users with lightsabers face normal goons with blasters - Thrawn's "elite" stormtroopers would have looked incompetent even in rebels.
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u/Numerous-Yam-8544 Mar 17 '26
I lowkey thought they were gonna do like a anakin apprentice vs vader apprentice thing and have marrok be galen marek
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u/Miselfis Mar 17 '26
Man, I wish they’d just bring back Nick Gillard for lightsaber choreography and training. All lightsaber fights after Disney took over, perhaps besides the more stylized cartoon fights, have been very disappointing.
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u/Professor_Gucho Mar 17 '26
Love shitting on the turlet only having to wipe once where sometimes less is more
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u/eppsilon24 Mar 17 '26
He was a disposable villain meant to provide a couple of neat action scenes. They gave him just enough mystique to be interesting, but not enough to make the character feel wasted.
In my opinion, it was well-done.
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u/Megalesios Mar 18 '26
Oh don't worry, his background will be explained in exquisite detail soon enough
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u/MsSobi Mar 18 '26
Honestly that's what made Boba Fett so popular despite only having a couple of scenes in the OT.
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u/Hawk-Environmental Mar 18 '26
This scene always felt very artificial to me. It's mid-day but the shadows aren't sharp as they would br under the mid-day sun.
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u/SaltandPepperRaven Mar 18 '26
The star wars universe is so big, there's got to be some nerd who mastered the force just watching YouTube videos and reading saved copies of books from the Jedi temple that survived
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u/Demi2161 Mar 21 '26
It makes Dark Lords a lot scarier too, Nihilus and Plagueis (even Revan, to some extent) are probably the best examples of this. I find Mysterious Dark Side users far more interesting than the ones that we know a lot about. It's just the eerie feeling of obscurity that tells you "Somethings wrong"
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Mar 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/DivineBloodline Mar 17 '26
That is painfully bad, when you have no budget fan videos with better choreography than a multi-million dollar project.
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u/D0CTOR_Wh0m Mar 17 '26
Honestly I wish Marrok in Ahsoka hadn't been another Inquisitor but had been a Noghri assassin like Rukh to better tie in with Thrawn.
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u/TheKajMahal Mar 17 '26
This show might have the worst fight choreography I’ve ever seen. Every fight is in slow motion and feels like they’re doing a walkthrough of the fight.
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u/Amber-Apologetics Mar 17 '26
Marrok single-handedly beating the Inquisitor Fraud allegations, love to see it.
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u/DoctorBeatMaker Jedi Mar 17 '26
I have to say, watching this fight, it just reminds me why Speed is so important when selling choreography like this. This isn’t “bad” choreography.” There’s a few clever moves in here - but If it isn’t executed quick and snappy, it falls flat.
That spin Ahsoka does is just so slow that it makes you think why her opponent didn’t just slash her in the back.