NeverarGreat

DominicCobb said:

Just add the sand crawler shot beforehand. Should work fine.

Indeed.

Hal 9000 said:

If the Falcon chess scene is moved to the end of the movie, it gives something of a tangle with Klaud.

Either the earlier scene begins with “hey Klaud hows that air conditioner coming,” or with the better starting point of Poe in the cockpit directing things. The shot of the Falcon heading toward the iceberg could be extended to serve as the longer, take a breath establishing shot that the hyperspace shot used to provide. Without that initial intro of Klaud or his continued presence in the lightspeed skipping sequence which I will not feature, he’d be too weird to have just in what’s left. I guess he could still appear at the end as a weird rando for Merry to hug, though.

I mentioned in the other thread how the chess scene could possibly be split in two, keeping a bit of the scene at the beginning and paying off the joke at the end. I think there’s actually several ways to do this, for example you could keep Chewie perusing the board and Poe getting impatient, then the proximity indicator and them turning off the board anyway (cut all talk of him cheating). Then at the end have the accusation of cheating and the argument when the Falcon has already landed on Tatooine.

krausfadr said:

This is the ST so just give Hux boobs.

Buxom Hux

stevepaynter said:

snooker said:

https://streamable.com/cekikp

This edit helps cement the idea that these people are a family now, instead of Rey being completely alone on a desert planet at the end. Her friends are there waiting for her : )

It also helps explain why BB-8 is there, he’s just a curious little friend : )

I like how you can still hear Poe, Finn and Chewie still arguing as Rey leaves the Falcon. This is great…well done.

It is wonderful, though perhaps the sounds of arguing should stop before the wide shot of the Falcon.

For this idea, would you be keeping the very end of this scene in the beginning of the film? You might be able to re-use the shot of Chewie looking intently at the game board, then the sound of the proximity indicator, ‘We won’t turn it off’, and run the rest of the scene from there to establish the ‘cheating’ joke in reverse.

It’s a classic.

Hal 9000 said:

Oh, boy, a truther…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEPazLTGceI

First of all, thanks for reading it all! I’m actually surprised you managed to keep up with my scatterbrained third act 😉

But it’s been great, really rewarding to finish a story and give some real closure to these characters. The work’s not done of course, I want to do a final novel-style version with quite a few changes, but even if this is what I saw onscreen in December I would have been quite happy.

The biggest issue I still have with the story is that Ben’s death and redemption has never felt quite right, especially in light of my later decision to have him be the vessel for the Sith spirit. If he were to die and the Sith with him, the Force should return to balance and the Sith should not return. However, being vanquished in the first act without Rey even knowing about them is a massive miss, so I brought them back in the final act. On a related note, if Ben were to die then Rey should lose her power before she could bring him back.

As you can see, although it’s an interesting and crucial set of scenes they are fraught with complication and contradiction. After a lot of thought I have an idea for fixing them though: The mission of the Resistance is to capture the Supreme Leader and win the war. When this goes wrong, Rey tries to save Kylo after his attempted assassination but she cannot as he is already too weak. She makes the decision to put him into some sort of carbon freeze while she goes to the Knights of Ren to plead for their help in reviving him. The doctors are horrified at this as carbon freeze will keep him suffering as he slowly dies, but Rey knows that if his power dies hers will as well. So it is done. Kylo can still commune with Rey through the Force while his body is in stasis, and over the course of act 2 their power will weaken until he finally ‘dies’ at the end of act 2. It is at this point that he has the reunion with the Force ghosts and the spirit of the Sith flees from his mind.

Rey awakens in a pirate brig, a sinister voice inside her head…

That’s one of the new ideas I’m playing with right now.

Other ideas include turning Gramelon from a primordial fantasy forest into a primordial fantasy hellscape to better match the look of the Knights of Ren in Rey’s TFA Force vision.

Speaking of the Knights of Ren, I plan to have her actually beseech the gathered knights in their castle before the arrival of Hux since the knights are definitely underwritten right now.

The Jedi texts disappear from the story after act 1, so that feels like it should be more important going forward.

Thrawn’s master plan is still not worthy of a military genius, but this is a good time to plan something better, though I don’t know what right now.

There are a good dozen other things but you get the idea 😃 What I’m really interested in knowing is what you think of it in its broad strokes. Is there some big aspect of plot or character that is off base for you? If you were to write an Episode 9, what would you have done? What is the one thing that you would have really liked to see happen in a Star Wars saga episode?

It’s been proven that a station the size of a small moon can’t generate enough heat to melt the crust of an m-class planet.

It’s more of a writing-stage set of ideas than something that could be accomplished in an edit, I think. The whole issue with Rey being tempted by the Dark Side is that there’s no temptation, especially after using dark powers seemed to kill Chewie.

A potential direction would be to lean on the idea that Rey is a feral Force user who can’t distinguish what her power actually comes from. In that case when she confronts Sheev it is the first time her power is being put to the test, so it isn’t if she can defeat him but whether she can do it using only the light side that counts.

Huh, that had never occurred to me, but actually makes sense.

That was a good video.

Across the galaxy, the spark of hope lives on. To quell the growing unrest, the tyrannical First Order deploys its forces to any system threatening rebellion.

In a race against time, the wounded General Leia Organa dispatches her brave agents ever farther across the stars to fan the flames of RESISTANCE.

With his forces spread thin, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren has traveled to Mustafar in search of a legendary Imperial fleet which could assure his victory once and for all…

^It’s miserable when that happens. In the early days of the internet I was so hyped for the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie and when it arrived it was quite a disappointment. But at least with these adaptations you still have the original material, with Star Wars there really is no story other than what’s up there on the screen or earlier scripts.

idir_hh said:

Just curious, when finished will you be releasing it in script format?
I read the first act and I enjoyed it very much, I’d rather read it in full when your completely done with it.

Glad you enjoyed what you read!

I’m thinking about the final draft being more of a novel format since there’s no chance of it ever seeing the screen. It will still move at a fast clip but will at least have all the dialogue and maybe some illustrations 😉 There are already so many big changes for this final draft that it will feel entirely different, but hopefully in a very good way.

StarkillerAG said:

krausfadr said:

It’s ok it’s just a movie. You have to stop this wallowing in despair now or forever will it dominate your destiny.

Consume you it will! As it did the people on Twitter and Reddit.

In all seriousness though, I agree. I’m not the biggest fan of the ST, but I’m not depressed and miserable about it like Neverar seems to be.

Depressed and miserable implies investment. I’m invested in this community, which at the moment is talking about TROS so I feel obliged to contribute to the discussion both here and in the fanedit section. I’m invested in the ST as well, these characters and their stories. But for me this is the first Star Wars movie that I can definitively say isn’t part of my personal canon. I always thought such a concept was rather silly until this point, but now I get it. So I apologize if I come across as miserable or biting when talking about TROS, it’s just that I can’t pretend like there’s something secretly good or even interesting that this movie is trying to say. If you find something about it to enjoy I’m genuinely happy for you, but for me there’s just nothing there.

Oddly enough, I’m actually pretty pleased with one aspect of these events because it’s given me an excuse to set aside fanediting and return to writing in order to complete the saga to my satisfaction. The Shattered Sword is the longest complete story I’ve written in years (50 pages) and it’s really a blast. I’m having endless fun working on the final draft as well but that’s in the scriptwriting section of the forum, not the most trafficked area.

So, since I’ve nothing nice to say here I’ll endeavor to say nothing at all on the subject from now on, and just stick to mostly writing quietly in the corner.

That’s the eternal refrain for the ST, isn’t it? It’s astounding that there was just no plan.

It also helps that there was at least a rough plan for the prequels, regardless of their eventual execution. Anakin’s fraught relationship with Obi-wan, the loss of his mother, the forbidden love…these storytelling decisions are in service to his character and in the hands of a better director they could have been realized brilliantly. On the other hand, the storytelling decisions of TROS act in opposition to Rey’s character and actively undermine it.

One caveat however - Anakin’s murder of the Tuskens does turn Anakin from sympathetically flawed to ‘bad apple’, but at least it’s not the cornerstone of the story like Rey Palpatine. That puts AOTC above TROS for me, if only slightly.

Hal 9000 said:

This is NOT intended to represent a reservation I have about using the Falcon ending shot. This is such a nerdy thing to say that it would have rightfully been shouted down by people if this had been in the movie.

But…

The Falcon leaping right into hyperspace within a few seconds of taking off makes Han’s efforts to escape from Mos Eisley in ANH seem overly cautionary. (Doesn’t seem like entering hyperspace from within an atmosphere or planet’s gravity would normally be a good idea.)

BUT, it’s a perfect visual ending for the story. Just felt obliged to throw a neckbeard comment in for devil’s advocacy.

“From inside the atmosphere, is that even possible?”
“I never ask that question until after I’ve tried it.”

In this case I wouldn’t sweat the details since it’s actually in character for Han’s ship at this point. And as was said above, the limiting factor in the Mos Eisley escape was the Hyperspace calculation, something that isn’t at issue here.

I prefer the movement of poppasketti’s take but I prefer the model work of your take, snooker.

Collaboration, anyone?

Now that is beautiful! I don’t really have anything else to say other than based on every source I’ve seen that just looks ‘right’.

Spoiler alert:

https://i.imgur.com/wbHELqp.mp4

krausfadr said:

The Jedi spirits could really clog up those Star Destroyer super cannons and the thousand ships could Holdo manure the Sith colosseum.

Ghost Yoda could really do some damage with his Storm ability.

Hal 9000 said:

Jedi spirits show up to help Poe, and a fleet of ships to help Rey.

Is it weird that I can see this actually being more effective?

StarkillerAG said:

I guess since I’m one of the few people on this website who doesn’t hate TROS, I should just shut up. But I recommend that a lot of the hardcore haters should try and watch it again. If you’ve already watched it twice or more, but still hate it, then I understand.

I saw it twice in theaters. The first time struck me as so bad it was good and as I kept thinking about it that night it became more and more hilarious. Literal side-shaking laughter for a good hour that night.

The second time really just cemented the impression from the first time except that it was less funny.

I was on record here in saying that I would have counted this movie as a win as long as we got an adventure with the entire crew for the first time, and the trailers were a cause for hope. There they all were in the Falcon, there they were in the desert, and for the record that’s the best part of the movie for me. On a surface level their banter is fun and it checks all the boxes for an adventure. The problem is that the entire exercise is tangential to the plot and, crucially, doesn’t move Finn, Poe, Chewie, or Threepio forward as characters. The main plot would have been entirely unaffected had Rey gone alone. So even the sure thing of the group adventure was ultimately a failure. Add to that Rey Palpatine, Sheev again, and the Dumb Sith Fleet and the movie becomes a complete waste of time.

StarkillerAG said:

NeverarGreat said:

StarkillerAG said:

NeverarGreat said:

DominicCobb said:

It’s truly mind boggling to me that someone could have two problems with this movie, and one of them is that a specific kind of TIE fighter doesn’t have hyperdrive. Like, you realize how ridiculous that sounds right?

The Space Shuttle Atlantis uncouples from the ISS at the conclusion of another successful mission. On the other side of the space station, a VW Beetle from Russia fires its retro rockets on approach.

Not the same thing. Star Wars isn’t real life, and you don’t need to read an obscure EU book to know that a VW Beetle can’t fly in space. I’m not bothered by it at all, and I love the imagery of an X-Wing and a TIE fighter parked next to each other. It really helps illustrate Rey and Kylo coming together.

Obi-wan says that this TIE fighter is specifically short range in the original movie, no EU required.

But that implies there are also long range fighters. It was only the EU that established none of the Imperial fighters can jump to lightspeed, so I don’t see the problem. And like I said before, I think the idea of “plot holes” as an objective measure of quality is dumb in general.

Obi-wan was commenting on the size of the fighter as a measure of its range. The EU established that Vader’s larger TIE variant could go to Hyperspace, so it’s not a question of type but of size.

Regardless, your overall point is correct. Plot holes don’t make a movie bad. Sometimes they can even help obscure problems in a movie. It’s something I’ve realized on my fanedit of TFA, that the more I fix the logical problems, the more the underlying soul of the movie comes to the surface. In a good film this can be a good thing, like in Adywan’s edits of the OT. In TFA however, the more I fix things the more a viewer can only focus on the core of the story, and there really isn’t much there. Once the superficial problems are gone the true inner hideousness is allowed to shine through.

We could endlessly argue about whether or not a TIE fighter could make it across the galaxy, but this discussion is only a distraction from the fact that the entire Rey/Kylo dynamic of the film is utter trash.

Douglas Adams summed up this style of movie-making far better in SLATFATF:

“In other words - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxywide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.”

StarkillerAG said:

NeverarGreat said:

DominicCobb said:

It’s truly mind boggling to me that someone could have two problems with this movie, and one of them is that a specific kind of TIE fighter doesn’t have hyperdrive. Like, you realize how ridiculous that sounds right?

The Space Shuttle Atlantis uncouples from the ISS at the conclusion of another successful mission. On the other side of the space station, a VW Beetle from Russia fires its retro rockets on approach.

Not the same thing. Star Wars isn’t real life, and you don’t need to read an obscure EU book to know that a VW Beetle can’t fly in space. I’m not bothered by it at all, and I love the imagery of an X-Wing and a TIE fighter parked next to each other. It really helps illustrate Rey and Kylo coming together.

Obi-wan says that this TIE fighter is specifically short range in the original movie, no EU required. It’s like they chose the one ship that would make the least sense for the scene. Any other TIE variant and you could handwave it.