If you guys are rating fight scenes on the basis of plot advancement and emotion alone, well then I've nothing more to say. We can cut out the entirety of fight scenes, thus saving lots of unnecessary expense, for HBO series style "battles" - ten minutes of dramatic buildup, one minute of clashing swords, and twenty minutes of denouement where the (surviving) actors wax lyrical about all the awesome stuff that went on during the battle, with EMOTION! and PATHOS!
Mass battles - like the opener for Saving Private Ryan - serve different visual purposes than duels - like the one between the two snipers during the climax of that film.
Oh hey, that just about describes Obi-wan vs Maul 2.0, and Obi-wan vs Vader 2.0. Except the 2nd Maul fight was actually over in 5 seconds, after 30 seconds of very emotional fierce glaring and posing.
It was their fourth fight, possibly fifth, most of which I think you would enjoy - they tend to have a lot of lightsabers flickering around. One even had half a dozen Jedi, space pirates blasting stuff, and Maul's brother(?), most of which end up dead or maimed.
Luke does indeed go apeshit feral - and that's what the Emperor wants. That's Luke coming to the Dark Side. Obi-Wan is indeed more restrained. That's because right after his Big No, you can see him visibly curb his emotion and gird himself for the fight. Yet when he's finally unleashed, he still fights with more passion than when he started, like Qui-Gon did. Night and day? Dark and Light.
NOOOOOOO... I'd forgotten that TPM actually HAD that cliche.
But 'unleashed' Kenobi fights exactly the same as regular Kenobi. He doesn't even swing any harder, or show any effort! He has no
emotion, and gives us nothing to hook onto to WANT him to win except for the fact that he's fighting a guy with devil horns and black skin.
If anything, it's the ending of the fight that's lame. Because we have like a minute of Obi-wan hanging there while Maul glares at him, and then it ends in like 5 seconds in a single cut...
...oh wait. That's exactly how it went in Rebels too.
And their last duel ends like their first. An interesting notion - intentional callback? - that I hadn't considered, probably because I was too bored by the glowstick rave to really care that much about how the fight ended. NTSNTSNTSWUBWUBWUB. Someone needs to replace Duel of Fates with dubstep.
In all seriousness, though, that's a bit of art there, if it was intentionally done. And that was suspense. We knew that Kenobi would win - he lives to Episode 4 - but we didn't know HOW. How would he do it? What could he do, dangling there, completely at Maul's mercy?
*watches it again* Well, that is pretty stupid, and a fitting end to the dumbness of the duel. Did Maul forget that Force users can jump real high, or how to swing his glowstick when Kenobi goes rocketing past him? For some reason I thought it was something like the lightsaber ignition in The Last Jedi, when Kylo assassinates Snoke. My mistake, thought it might have actually had some depth to it!
But... I don't know how to bridge the gulf between us here. Are Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich favorites of yours? If you don't know the latter name, he produced the 1997 Godzilla, Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, 2012...
Plainly there are people who like that sort of thing - there's a unfortunate reason that Michael Bay is rich! - but I can't understand it. I'm just completely incapable of grasping how someone could enjoy something like the Transformers movie, or five minutes of glowsticks being twiddled around by stuntmen pretending to be real actors on blatantly fake CG sets. But YOU like what you like, and dislike what you dislike; I can't stop you from doing so. I can just explain why I, personally, don't, and hope to persuade you at least a little.
But it is wasted effort. There's a gulf between us, and it's a gulf that I've never been able to bridge in past arguments with other people. I can't
understand why people enjoy splashing through the cinema equivalent of shallow puddles when they could be diving deep beneath the ocean or whitewater rafting, and the reverse has always been true.
So I think this conversation is over. We're just coming at this from such different points of view that it's like we didn't even watch the same movie.
Aaaand now I'm thinking about Rashoumon. ******, I'd call myself a cinema snob if I hadn't just watched Dracula: Dead and Loving It day before yesterday. :D