This may be totally impossible, but I’m just spitballing. If we cut around the “Hux is a spy” stuff, would it be possible to imply that Pryde kills Hux in order to merge the First Order with the Final Order on Palpatine’s…er, orders? So it’s like Pryde is staging a coup, as a Palpatine cultist, in order to bring the First Order resources to Exegol?
Not sure if there’s enough footage to effectively portray this, but I thought it was an intriguing angle. The Spy stuff can almost definitely be removed; I have an edit of the Poe’s return/“What did you do to the Falcon?” scene somewhere that I made as a proof of concept.
Removing the spy plot thread would be a really complicated matter which would remove several portions of the film. Imo not worth removing as it would make the pacing even more quick.
I think it would’ve been cool if that had happened originally, but I do think it might be too tricky to pull off a full restructure like that. It was more of a hypothetical idea I had than a “necessary change.”
To be fair though - the spy subplot encompasses two lines of dialogue in the intel pickup scene, a couple of lines in the Poe Return scene, and 90 seconds at best during the Destroyer escape sequence? I’d hardly call it consequential.
Even in the original ROTS, that is Palpatines real look. It’s just not implied very well in the film because Palpatine is purposely making it look like he is being injured, even though he isn’t. It was a manipulation tactic done by himself against Anakin (and the galaxy as well).
Don’t we literally see his face melting in the original cut? That doesn’t imply “Palpatine’s real look” to me.