A lot of Star Wars opinions seem straightforward—the originals are “good,” the prequels are “bad,” the sequels are “disastrous, except for The Last Jedi which is perfect in every way”—but there’s actually more nuance in there than the average person might expect. Some people, for example, actually prefer the unfettered George Lucas-ness of The Phantom Menace and Attack Of The Clones to the melodrama and huge narrative leaps of Revenge Of The Sith.
One thing we can all probably agree on, though, is that the final lightsaber battle in Revenge Of The Sith—which, in our minds, takes up about a third of its runtime—is very cool and exciting. Regardless of whether you want to tear down the entire premise of this news story by disagreeing, we do at least know that Hayden Christensen himself agrees with us on this. In a “Memory Lane” video posted on the Twitter account for Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series (which reunites with Christensen with Ewan McGregor), Christensen says that the “most fun” part of working on Star Wars was his lightsaber duel with Obi-Wan.
The video also has some behind-the-scenes clips of Christensen and McGregor practicing with regular sticks (because real lightsabers would be too dangerous, of course), and paired with actual footage from the movie, it does seem like the elaborate choreography needed for the fight scene would be a lot of fun to master. It’s basically a dance sequence that just happens to end with one of the dancers getting the high ground and chopping off the other dancer’s legs, with the now-legless dancer screaming “I hate you” as the other one leaves him to burn to death. Fun!
Naturally, Christensen’s fondness for what is arguably the best scene in the prequels (get your meme-y “Darth Plagueis” or “I hate sand” shit out of here) makes perfect sense, given the fact that he celebrated getting cast in Attack Of The Clones 20 years ago by having an imaginary lightsaber fight with his roommate—an event that he recently referred to as “a very exciting time for me.”
That’s for sure, since playing with lightsabers is always fun. Hell, if someone ever got in a real lightsaber fight with a real risk of dismemberment, they would probably still say it was a highlight of their life.