DominicCobb said:
Exegol is supposed to be a new, unknown factor for both parties. If Kylo just waltzes up at the start of the movie it raises all sorts of new confusions.

Disagree, sorry. I don’t think starting the movie with him already at Exegol is confusing, much less confusing in any “new” way that the movie itself doesn’t already have baked into its very premise.

You’re putting a lot of weight on images of him flying through space junk. Watching his ship go through all that stuff doesn’t really change anything our heroes are doing later, or highlight how much harder it is for them. The two things aren’t really connected, and the effort to connect Kylo’s difficulties finding Exegol to Rey’s later difficulties doesn’t really pay off in any version of the story. Neverar just succinctly summed up what I’m getting at:

Whether or not Kylo finds Exegol immediately or two minutes into the movie, the fact remains that this supposedly legendary and remote world is now ‘found’ in the context of this film.

Basically, what I’m saying is that Exegol being found is introduced so early on that trying to preserve any aspect of it as a dramatic payoff is rendered inert immediately. It only has utility as a setup, so it’s probably best to just make that setup as clean as possible. I’m not against Kylo flying through all that debris, or making the Mustafar Minute coherent through added VFX! But that’s a different approach than this one.

Also, I hope this isn’t coming across as “heated” at all! I’m not angry or annoyed by the conversation, and hopefully nobody else is feeling that way. Definitely not the intention, just trying to talk through the intended meanings of these scenes in the context of the film’s (and any edit’s) larger purpose, and figuring out what works, what doesn’t, and why.