You have some great ideas and I’m looking forward to stealing some of your edits for my own eventual cuts of this trilogy.

I’d question your decision to make Palpatine another clone. It doesn’t really add anything - I for one am okay with the explanation that Sith cultists partially reanimated Palpatine’s corpse using the dark side (it seems to me it’s not just the original Sidious possessing that corpse, because he definitely hasn’t been ‘all the Sith’ this whole time, has he?) - but it does raise the question of there being more clones on top of the the one Rey explodes in this movie. Endless Sidiouses!

I’m not sure if cutting Kijimi would be more trouble than it’s worth. AEing Zorii out of the entire film is going to be a lot of work for little payoff. Personally I’m hoping for an extended edition to improve the pacing, but some others here are thinking of digitally extending shots with slowmo or freeze frames or masking out the backgrounds of shots and retiming them etc. If I were you I’d wait and see what can be done on that front before attempting to excise the entire planet. It’s unfortunate, because I agree that, focusing exclusively on the main plot, having Threepio just give the information when he first reads the dagger seems like an easy dubbing edit and a good streamline, but Zorii and the business with the force bond and rescuing Chewie really complicate the issue.

Do you reckon the GPS tower or whatever can be cut from the movie? It immediately becomes irrelevant because Pryde decides to move the navigation to his ship anyway. Also, do you think it would be feasible to keep the ‘Final Order’ as the ‘First Order’? It’s just so horrendously cheesy, and also worsens the feeling of TFA and TLJ being irrelevant.