This a fanedit I ended a while ago and have been watching over to see if it was good enough, so here goes nothing.
I liked a lot of the worldbuilding in R1, however the characters where lacking, the first 20 minutes were too jumpy and the fanservice was too much. So with that in mind the movie now plays out like this:
- Prologue
- Jyn in cell
- Cassian introduction (Defector, planet killer)
- Bodi and Extremist
- Death Star & Tarkin’s intro
- Jyn’s rescue
- Cut Draven’s “We’ll just put you back were we found you” to make Jyn’s actions more of an option rather than the only way out. After Mon Mothma’s propostion we cut to…
- MOVED UP: Saw’s first scene to…
- Take off in Yavin (Now that the audience has seen the danger that both Saw and the empire represents, them leaving for the mission feels hopefully more heroic or at least more impactful)
- Repurposed establishing shot of Jedha from earlier that leads into Bor Gullet.
- Cut out “One tends to loose one’s mind” because, well, he never did.
- Dream sequence and Jedha’s arrival
- Cut K2’s “That doesn’t sound so bad to me”
- Cut Ponda and the doctor.
- Cut Jyn’s plea to Saw “Come with us” to slightly strenghten the reasoning for unnecesarry self sacrifice.
- Trimmed Saw’s cheesy removal of the tube right before his death. (Sorry Saw but the movie didn’t give us enough reason to care about you or your pointless death)
- Cut Jyn telling Cassian that he must tell the Alliance about the plans on Scarif and his response of not being able to because they’re in Imperial territory. Now the reason for Cassian not telling the Alliance is because he doesn’t believe in Jyn’s story and so now they must get Galen to corroborate her story. This way, the detour to Eadu feels a lot less pointless and the growth between Jyn and Cassian subtetly more pronounced. Furthermore this makes it so we don’t already know everything we need to for the third act to take place.
- Cut K2’s spelling out Bodi’s character moment. “You’re a rebel now!”
- Cut “You can’t talk your way around this” " I don’t have to" in order to end the conversation in a stronger place “Some of us just decided to do something about it” Next scene we see of Jyn is her ‘doing something about it’
- Replaced Vader’s pun with dialogue borrowed from SW Rebels. “The Emperor expects you tomorrow to account for your failure”. This way we feel like Krennic’s, who’s ambition has always been to be in the Emeperor’s good graces, is moving up the ladder and accomplishing something as a character and also makes the Vader scene less pointless. Of course Krennic never gets to meet the Emeperor cuz he dies in Scarif.
- Trimmed Baze’s “Good luck, little sister” to just “Good luck”
- Cut R2 and 3PO’s cameo.
I believe that is all. THE EDIT IS ALL DONE AND READY IN A GOOGLE DRIVE. If anyone’s interested shoot me a PM and I’ll send you the link.
Enjoy!
EDIT:
Here are some sample clips in order for people to get the idea of how I’m restructuring the first act and how it flows:
Here’s the replaced Vader line which makes Krennic a more active antagonist.
Password for all: fanedit.org