Really? I always thought she was being sarcastic as she comes from nowhere and she is a no one and it’s pretty obvious that BB-8 would notice it.
Yeah. The one thing I would not do with any of these films is cut anything done/said by Daisy Ridley, except for her brief exchange with Maz after the saber-vision in TFA. But that’s just me.
What if the beginning of this movie was excised entirely?
Begin the film with an opening crawl informing us that the First Order has found the Resistance and chased them across the galaxy, Ren has completed his training with Snoke, and Snoke wants Leia alive in order to find the Last Jedi. Then go to the scene of Rey on the island and imply through those scenes that it is some time before we meet the rest of our heroes again.
You could cut out the Resistance escape and Poe’s hothead moves, Rose’s sister’s sacrifice, Snoke’s first scene with Ren, Finn waking up, Rose meeting Finn, all that. The first scene of the Resistance could be on Canto Bight. It would be assumed that Finn is on some secret mission with another member of the Resistance, and I think they even explain their mission while there (which was unnecessary in the film originally, but would make more sense here). We can assume that Finn and Rose have had a longer-term relationship than what we’ve seen, which might help with the awkward kiss at the end. And we already know that Poe is a hothead, so his first scene is somewhat superfluous anyway.
Is there anything that we simply can’t lose from the beginning of the Resistance plot? I have still only seen this once, so my memory is fuzzy.
I mean, if I had my way the whole movie would have been about Rey, Kylo, and Luke.
They should have just made Rose both the hacker and the engineer. She gets Finn on board the Supremacy and instead of sneaking around the casino they sneak around the ship. The ship was cool, why not spend more time there? No need for a BDT character, and leave BB-8 out of the whole thing.
Canto Bight, Maz Kanata, the excessive BB-8 (in both TFA and TLJ, in the OT nobody actually cared all that much about droids)…they’re all so…Disney. If Disney wanted these films to be regarded as appealing solely for their quality and not just for their ability to tick all of the Disney max-market boxes they could have been truly special. It’s starting to kill me that they’ve gone in the direction they’ve gone in, because, imo, Rey and Kylo as interesting and great of characters as any in the OT.
I wonder how much of the schlocky stuff was Disney breathing down Johnson’s neck. The serious stuff feels more in line with his work, but the flat jokes, the children and the animals…that all screams Disney.
Those were my thoughts exactly! It really feels like he tried to make the movie he wanted to make but Disney corporate wouldn’t let him. Disney characters like Maz Kanata, the kids (you can be a jedi too, kids! just buy Disney products!), and the over-the-top cartoony/cutesy animals and creatures…that’s all Disney.
I think the best way to solve the lack of introduction is to keep Maz’s transmission and end the scene when Rose and Finn give each other that “look” after Maz implies that her and the code break have been intimate. Then cut straight to the radar blip, stolen ship etc. That way in can be implied that DJ is who they are looking for. It will also fit with expectations/ reality theme of the film…
Yeah, I think meeting DJ for the first time on the stolen ship might not be too jarring after all.
For example, they left out how Rey got off the Supremacy entirely, and it doesn’t seem too out of place to never have addressed that. Kylo comes to and she’s just gone.
I’m also really looking forward to seeing TLJ again to see how much of Deus Ex BB-8 in the hangar can be removed…I’d really just like to have Finn “kill” Phasma (I don’t think she’s dead) and then have his next scene be the shuttle crashing on Crait.
It’s a shame the writers had to come up with the Canto Bight sequence. You’d think the Resistance, being a rebel group, would have their own slicers? The whole sequence just feels so tacked-on, and in a movie that, imo, ran for 30 minutes too long anyways. (Apologies to the people that liked it).
Could you specify more on the “transmission ends” and “radar blip” moment? I’m very curious what ways people have to remove Canto Bight entirely. My main gripe would be that we never see DJ introduced as a character.
Yeah messing with Canto Bight is so hard. Rose saving Finn at the end appears to come from out of nowhere without it; it’s less believable without seeing them spend more time together.
After Maz’s transmission - which I am definitely cutting - ends, I believe someone says something like “Right, we’re going to go to Canto Bight and look for the codebreaker wearing the blue flower lapel,” or whatever. The next scene concerning this plot is a radar blip on one of the screens on the bridge [Holdo: “what was that?” Officer: “It’s nothing”]. After that the next scene I will include from this plot will be the stolen ship. I realize that that’s not a great introduction to DJ, but for me at least, I think it solves the Canto Bight issue in the easiest way possible. We can assume that DJ was the codebreaker that they were looking for all along.
That’s not to say that it’s the best way to do it. I will definitely try to salvage the first introduction to DJ and and the escape from the cell if I can.
It occurred to me that since we don’t see how Rey gets off the Supremacy it doesn’t really matter if we don’t see how Finn and Rose get off it, either, i.e., that it should be possible to cut Deus Ex BB-8 without interrupting the story too much.
I’ve also decided on scrapping all of Canto Bight. Transmission ends - > radar blip - > Finn, Rose, and BDT aboard the stolen ship.
Doing all of that should cut the film down by 30 minutes, which it should’ve been already.
I’m starting to think I’ll do one of the TFA too (I know there are some good ones out there) that minimizes Maz as much as possible and then combine it with the TLJ edit.
It’s a relief to think that these two movies are actually salvageable.
30 minutes of TLJ is prequels bad, 1 hour is solid, and another hour is pure gold.
You’ll probably hate it but, imo, THE fight is worth the price of admission. Pick a matinee show if you don’t want to feel too cheated.
I thought TFA was good, but not great. I watched it again after TLJ and found myself really liking it, probably because TLJ made me care about the characters more than I used to.
Solid list of cuts. I have a hard disagree on the humor. I will be cutting nearly all of it and I think it will be the easiest thing to cut for sure. After seeing the film again, I could tell how easy and seamless it would be to edit out basically every joke if I want to.
That’s good to hear and definitely something I will be looking for when I go see it again.
Why oh why did they make some of the decisions they made with this film? The good parts are so, so good. They deserve better.
Just discovered this site. What TLJ got right it got so right to me, but what it got wrong it got so wrong. Still, I thought the positives outweighed the negatives. I thought the movie was about 20-30 minutes too long to begin with and is just begging for a fan edit, here’s what I intend to do when I do mine:
I think it’s simply to hard too remove a lot of the humor without seriously disrupting the flow of the film, so the jokes will have to stay.
My only other major gripe about the movie is that there is not enough Rey! I really hope the deleted scenes will show more training and that it will be possible to work them in without disrupting the flow too much.
Disney should really have their directors shoot two versions of these films: one for the kids and one for adults. That would fix a lot of the problems.