For similar reasons (that I’ve touched on elsewhere before) I think the Vader scene should be moved, as it’s placement in the theatrical is kind of a non sequitur.
That’s an interesting idea. I was just imagining how it would play back to back with Rey’s Dream (they both feature a helmet from a deceased warrior), but of course it wouldn’t work there. Were you thinking it should be closer to the final confrontation in order to bring his conflict to the fore?
Well in my mind hopefully the Falcon scene would do that. You can’t move the Vader scene too far back or it just slows things down too much.
The main issue is just that it’s placement as is doesn’t connect to what comes before or after (in this case Maz’s bar), so it’s a bit hard emotionally to feel the connection in Kylo’s psychology with the rest of his story (hope I’m explaining this right, logically it’s easy to make sense of the connection but in terms of the actual effect it’s lacking the way it’s sequenced).
I basically see three different possibilities -
- Right after Snoke’s “we shall see”, so we follow up Snoke’s skepticism with Kylo’s own, which enforces it
- Immediately before “the end of the Republic” - this probably doesn’t work Starkiller restructruring, but I love the shots of Kylo looking at the super laser and I think it’d add a layer if we know he’s just asked Vader to show him the power of the darkness and he has this in his mind while he’s watching (note: this is essentially what the film is trying to do but by putting all the Maz stuff in between the effect is gone almost completely)
- After Leia’s “you’re his father” - this is the latest I think the scene could go (and it’d probably require a bit of restructuring to get just right), but the idea here would be that we’re connecting more closely Kylo’s call to the light with Han and Leia trying to get him back
I haven’t seen how any of them look in practice so I can’t say which works the best, but they all seem like they could be good alternatives to the way it’s placed in the actual film.