I just had an idea for a somewhat-major change that could be made to the ending.
One thing that bugs me about this movie’s finale is that the two battles happening (the one in the sky, and the one with Palpatine) don’t really line up in terms of tension. When Palpatine drains Ben and Rey, it seems like our heroes are at their lowest point, and this is reinforced by the cut back to Poe seeing his friend Wexley die. Then Lando & co. arrive, and the music switches to the main Star Wars theme, to indicate that we’re back on the light side of things, but then we cut back to Palpatine, who “kills” Ben and electrocutes the entire fleet, leaving Rey, seemingly alone, to hear the voices of Jedi past and gain the strength to face Palpatine.
Basically, the movie tries to give us two cathartic, portals-esque moments, the first of which is kind of invalidated by the second. The way I see it, the night should be darkest just before the dawn.
So what if the not-navy arrived AFTER Palpatine started zapping?
Picture this: Palpatine drains Rey and Ben. Above, Wexley dies. How can this get any worse? Palpatine “kills” Ben and starts electrocuting the rest of the rebels. Rey sees this from below and sheds a single tear. Poe delivers his line about how he “thought we had a shot,” just as the Tantive IV, the very ship that appeared in the opening shot of SW77 as a symbol of the underdog rebellion, is destroyed. So is it the end? **** no, because that’s when Rey starts hearing the voices of all the Jedi that came before her. When she stands up and ignites her lightsaber, prompting Palpatine to stop zapping, a random voice over Poe’s radio says something along the lines of “The sky is clear, now is the time!” That’s when Poe looks up to see Lando, along with thousands of resistance sympathizers, having come to the help. Things proceed as normal from there, possibly with the addition of Jonh’s ghosts.
Most of this would just require color correction, as well as one or two additional lines of dialogue. The only trouble I’m running into is that a lot of the shots of ships falling include ships that came with Lando, so I would have to either remove those shots or find a way to remove those ships in particular from them.
Whaddya think?