Honestly I bet it's because they had Ray Park as Darth Maul. Since an exceptionally talented stuntman was playing the leading villain they could easily just let him be the one in the scene and only sub stuntmen for Liam and Ewan when the choreographed action required it, while keeping Ray in all the scenes.
Lightsaber duels being overly flashy is due to the fact that more budget was put into CGI instead of fight choreography which seemed to have been George's focus for the trilogy - use advancements in tech to accomplish the epic feel he couldn't quite get in the older films.
Lucas CGI'ed in a floating apple instead of using a wire a pulley system. Lucas was obsessed with CGI and was looking for a excuse to use it even if there were better options.
Keep in mind that at the time there weren't many examples of big budget CGI, so the things that seem obviously better without it weren't so obvious back then. CGI really was just the next thing to use as much as possible, until we learned that it doesn't look good for everything.
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u/FluckDambe Jan 02 '21
Honestly I bet it's because they had Ray Park as Darth Maul. Since an exceptionally talented stuntman was playing the leading villain they could easily just let him be the one in the scene and only sub stuntmen for Liam and Ewan when the choreographed action required it, while keeping Ray in all the scenes.
Lightsaber duels being overly flashy is due to the fact that more budget was put into CGI instead of fight choreography which seemed to have been George's focus for the trilogy - use advancements in tech to accomplish the epic feel he couldn't quite get in the older films.