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Post #1158447

Author
Daxtreme
Parent topic
The Last Jedi : a Fan Edit Ideas thread
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1158447/action/topic#1158447
Date created
15-Jan-2018, 7:30 PM

Has anyone here tried looking into a radical edit that would invert the structure of TLJ? It was first proposed by Detective on fanedit.org, I simply went into more details and fixed the incoherences. Btw I absolutely agree with everyone here concerning the editing. It’s atrocious and my main negative with the movie. Definitely something to fix.

Anyway, like I said the edit is radical so bear with me until the end here. It’s also quite unique.

It would go like this, and it would require some minor TFA editing as well:

  • We would open with an action setpiece – Hoth 2.0 – along with a suitable crawl. No Finn, no Rey, rest is the same (except no rocks blocking them). Luke projects and the Resistance escapes.

  • The rest of the movie begins to play-out as it does right now. The First Order are chasing Resistance ships, which is quite logical since they literally just got saved by Luke and the First Order is running after them. Trim the non-essential stuff, the jokes mainly (basically what everyone in here is saying to cut).

  • Cut mary poppins Leia and go with her being injured, or just remove it altogether and have her being fine (something lots of people have discussed here so far).

  • No more reluctant Luke. He trains Rey willingly since he just used the Force to save everyone. No “cut out of the Force either”. He’s just a bit grumpy which is understandable given Kylo’s backstory which he will explain to Rey, in time. There’s also another reason which I will cover later.

  • Now for this whole timeline to make sense, and to give time for Hoth 2.0 to happen, TFA must end on Rey leaving. She finds Luke here in this movie, not the end of TFA. Fortunately, this edit has already been done. Thank you DigiModification, and others. 😃

  • The movie also cuts the Casino sequence and most of the Resistance stuff since it doesn’t really matter to the overall story if Hoth 2.0 happens at the beginning. Blow it out of the sky. We’ll see how feasible that is with the blu-ray release, but Finn and Roses’s sideplot is of no consequence to the Throne Room Sequence. Which brings me to…

The single most important point of all this restructuring –

  • The movie ends on the epic Throne Room climax, and on an emotional climax and pay-off too since it’s a huge moment for both Kylo and Rey, the actual main characters of the story!

A huge problem with the theatrical TLJ is they that they seem to forget who the main characters are, especially Rey. She basically disappears for 10 minutes in the climax of the story… how did that get past editing?

Think about it, the Throne Room Sequence is the only way this movie should ever have ended, it’s the real ending to the main characters’ arcs in this story. The rest of the original ending (Crait), although hauntingly beautiful, has little to do with the actual main protagonist and is, thus, misplaced in this story.

  • Now that leaves one last problem: Luke’s death.

Since they decided to go forward with this, we don’t have a choice – he has to die. Might as well make the most of out of it, and make this edit work, since I believe it’s the only way to make this whole ending thing work out.

The events of TLJ don’t really prevent us from having Luke train Rey while being… dead this whole time! It would also explain why he disappeared in TFA’s crawl. He died! Kylo Ren killed him, during the flashback when the temple collapsed on him. IMPORTANT: Remove the part where Luke even THINKS about killing Kylo. Kylo simply killed him by making the temple fall on him (intentionally or not), period. Luckily some posters here seem to have already figured that part out, kudos to you guys!

I mean, going forward with this saga, Luke is dead no matter what, might as well make it a nice twist, and make Kylo Ren even more threatening in the process since he killed Luke… and Snoke now! Would give more gravitas to it all. It would also mirror Snoke’s weird death by having Luke die the same kind of death. Both masters are now dead.

Luke’s force ghost would explain all of this to Rey, like he does in the movie. His character arc of transferring the fate of the Jedi to Rey in the theatrical stays pretty much the same, but sadly, Yoda will have to be cut because it makes no sense in this edit. The little ins and outs of Luke’s motivations would have to be worked out on a scene-by-scene basis, whether he is a little bit reluctant at first or not at all. Depends what works best.

So the projection on Hoth 2.0 was his force ghost all along, and so is the rest of the movie. He’s projecting his living self to train Rey, so no VFX required, or minimal (remove silly scenes like the tittie-milk though). What’s not said directly (but heavily implied visually) is that Luke trained in this for years post-ROTJ, and even surpassed Master Yoda and Obi-Wan in that aspect: he can make himself look real, even as a force ghost! He still can’t interact with objects, hence hal9000’s cut proposed in this thread about making the box he sits on NOT move, and remove every shot where he interacts with real stuff

Or there could be a faint Force Ghost effect VFX added to him, which shows that he decides how he appears (for continuity with IX).

Obviously Leia knew all along, which would require a small line of hers to be removed in TFA (Leia saying “Luke…” when they complete the map) That would also explain why she seems so defeated/sad since TFA – Luke is dead, Ben Solo went to the Dark Side… huge blow 😦

It would make their reunion at the beginning on Hoth 2.0 also more bittersweet as she knows by then that Luke is dead. She’s still happy to see his ghost though, which is awesome.

But don’t forget, the main PURPOSE of this edit is to switch the Throne Room sequence at the end while still going with what they established so far in canon.

I actually think that by the time IX comes out, this kind of edit will make even more sense in retrospect since this next movie will probably be all about Rey and Kylo Ren (again with a strong supporting performance by dead-Luke), so TLJ should, too, have been only about Rey and Kylo Ren, hence this edit. Hell, combining this edit with IX might even be possible.

Sorry for the huge wall of text, I am just a huge fan with lots of ideas and who watches lots of fan edits 😛 I’m also a decent screenwriter so I could actually rework TLJ’s script (taken from Disney when they release it) to make the skeleton for this edit, if need be.

What do you think? Possible, not possible? I’ll watch TLJ a lot more when it comes out so for now I go mainly from memory.