Oh, you definitely should! The leaks just summarize what the edit was shaping up to be before rewrites and reshoots, and his later update explains some of the changes that were made. So you won’t be able to pull lines verbatim like you can with the DOTF scripts, but it could give you an outline that you could potentially follow. In a way, your book edit could essentially follow what was, at one point, an earlier version of the film. As if Rae Carson had just written her novel based on the original script, and not the final cut. I personally prefer the leaks’ depiction of the Palpatine plot and the Dyad stuff. It felt more like the manipulative Palpatine we saw in the prequels, trying to groom our protagonist(s) and appearing weaker than he actually is to gain sympathy and catch his enemies off guard.
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Thank you! I’ll have a read.
Yeah, I’m thinking a lot on the same lines as you. Maybe the book depicts it better, but I worry about the audience really believing that Rey could become more evil than Palpatine. It’s not like when she shoots lightning she actually enjoys the power she feels. She’s terrified of it. The movie shows that the dark side is in her, but not that she really is seduced by its power at all.
And I understand wanting the Dyad stuff to be a part of the reveal to Rey. I still think it would be nice to hint at how Kylo found out what a Dyad even is, though.
In the book, it’s a lot more plausible that she would feel genuinely worried that she might - she does a few ethically dubious things (eg. Jedi-mind-tricking Finn) that she doesn’t like how easily she can justify to herself.
It would be good to get some idea of how Kylo found out about the Dyad, yeah. Not vital, but I’d like it better than “a good question for another time.”
I want to avoid the stuff about killing him = he can possess you, since I don’t really see the logical connection between the two things. It’s something I found distracting when I watched the movie for the first time - it feels like a pair of unconnected events.
I’m not sure if I understand. So how are you planning to do the climax when Rey confronts Palpatine?
It works fine without it - and much easier to follow what’s going on, in my opinion.
What I’m planning to lean more into is the personal ethics side of it, building on the earlier parts where Rey does things she believes are wrong but justifies it in the name of doing the right thing overall. (And capitalising on the themes of choice in Finn’s side story.)
One of my changes is trying to make the Force feel more mystical and intangible, like it did back in ANH; especially in TROS, it’s a very nuts-and-bolts tool that they use, and I like the previous version better. I think it’s well known how the original idea of the Force drew on a melange of eastern religious beliefs combined with 70s Age of Aquarius-y spiritualism, which I’m trying to re-inject to the text.
I’m considering having her conversation with Luke include something along the lines of the Dark Side not being some evil external entity out there which pulls you towards it, but rather it’s created internally by our choices. Resisting the Dark Side isn’t about struggling against some bad monster, it’s about making the choice between what is right and what is easy. Luke would intend this to be reassuring - she’s the one who consciously decides whether she falls to the Dark Side or not, she doesn’t need to fret about accidentally tripping and falling into it. But it’s a double-edged sword, because that also means it is entirely on her shoulders to make those choices.
So when she goes into the confrontation with Palpatine, she doesn’t want to be a cold-blooded murderer, killing an unarmed old man on a life support thing. She could justify it to herself, but that’s even worse - then she’d be a murderer who can justify when it’s okay for her personally to murder. It’s why Palpatine was so delighted when Anakin killed Dooku, and why he goaded Luke into attacking him - it’s a slippery slope to the Dark Side.
Luke ended up using nonviolence and inaction in a Zen sense to resolve this issue; it allowed his father to realise he loved him, and Vader killed the Emperor, saving Luke’s soul as well as his life in a sense. He avoided becoming what he sought to destroy. But as Palpatine tells Rey, she has no father to sacrifice himself for her. So what’s the resolution here?
I think it’s one of balancing abstract ideology with praxis. The Empire in the OT were stand-ins for the Nazis from WWII movies; the First Order (particularly in TFA) were analogous with Neo-Nazis, keeping the parallel contemporaneous. So I think the resolution, instead of being Age-of-Aquarius “love your enemies” stuff, is being able to say “fighting is wrong, however, fighting to stop genocide is not the same as fighting to cause it; thus there is not an issue about becoming what you seek to destroy.”
It feels a bit similar to ROTJ, but I think it’s different enough in its context and resolution that they don’t tread on each other’s toes. Instead, as George said, it’s like poetry, they rhyme.