2015-12-19

The Phantom Menace will expected never be anyone’s favorite Star Wars movie (and if it is, greatfully explain because in a comments — we unequivocally wanna know). But it does reason a eminence of introducing a many detested and the many dear prequel sense into George Lucas’s far, distant divided galaxy. In one corner, we have Jar Jar Binks, a Gungan goofball who continues to be hold adult as the print child for all that’s wrong with Episodes I-III. But his awfulness is offset by a awesomeness that is Darth Maul, a Sith Lord who serves as a lightsaber-wielding enforcer for suggested Menace, soon-to-be czar Palpatine, a.k.a. Darth Sidious. Although his sum volume of shade time in a film clocks in during only underneath 15 minutes, Darth Maul achieves some of a same seismic impact that another Darth — as in Vader — done during his first-ever onscreen appearance, striding aboard a Tantive IV to constraint Princess Leia in a strange Star Wars. Maul’s shade also looms vast over a subsequent era of Star Wars baddies like Kylo Ren and Captain Phasma who will be introduced in The Force Awakens, that blasts into theaters Thursday night.

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Just like Darth Vader, Darth Maul’s entrance has a lot to do with his popularity. In place of Vader’s samurai-and-Nazi inspired look, Phantom Menace engineer Iain McCaig has said that drew on his fear of clowns in formulating Maul’s immediately eye-catching red-and-black facepaint. His choice of arms — a double-bladed red lightsaber — is another partial of his appeal, floating people’s minds from a impulse he double-tapped a activation timber in a earliest Menace teaser trailer. Maul’s change ego, martial artist Ray Park, provides a final square of a puzzle. Star Wars legend has it that Benicio Del Toro was creatively going to play a part, though incited it down after his discourse was embellished to a bone. Meanwhile, Park had been brought on as a stuntman, though reportedly done such an sense on Lucas that he got promoted to featured player. Park’s outspoken chops apparently weren’t adult to snuff, however. Just as James Earl Jones dubbed over David Prowse’s Darth Vader dialogue, British actor Peter Serafinowicz was tapped to utter Maul’s 3 lines of dialogue. (Serafinowicz common his less-than-fond memories of that knowledge on a podcast behind in October.)

Related: Darth Maul Voice Actor on a Crushing Disappointment of ‘Phantom Menace’

Given a wooden discourse that pervades The Phantom Menace — and a prequel trilogy as a whole — a only as good that Darth Maul expresses himself by movement rather than words. Park’s physicality is miraculous to watch, a tellurian contrariety to a bluescreen-heavy movement function around him. And his fighting astuteness final that his co-stars lift their diversion as well; a climactic Jedi vs. Sith conflict that pits Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon and Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan opposite Maul is arguably a excellent lightsaber duel in any of a Star Wars movies to date, some-more energetic and liquid than a father-and-son battles from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of a Jedi. Throughout a scarcely five-minute sequence, a overmatched twin of McGregor and Neeson are clearly fighting to only keep adult with Park, creation it one of a singular instances where we honestly trust a good guys competence lose. (And, in fact, one of them does.)

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Watch partial of a duel:

Maul insanity didn’t moderate with a character’s apparent genocide during a finish of Phantom Menace. Instantly embraced by fans, a sense found his approach into novels and comic books that flashed behind to his early years as a Sith-in-training, and he also popped up in a Clone Wars cartoon series, where it’s suggested that he survived being forged in dual by Obi-Wan’s single-bladed lightsaber and transposed his reduce half with a set of cyborg legs. Not for nothing, though given Clone Wars is still deliberate stream canon — distinct many subordinate Star Wars tales, it survived a Disney transition — that means he’s still technically in play for any destiny Episodes or, improved still, an installment of the Star Wars anthology series that Disney is rising with Rogue One in 2016. At this year’s Star Wars Celebration, Park said that he was raring to enclose a red-and-black make-up again, with a few additional enhancements this time. “If Darth Maul [is] entrance back, he should be topless, tattooed, bigger horns, robotic legs!” That would make him a Force to be reckoned with.

Watch Darth Maul in action:

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