Hey all, I’ve thought of more potential changes! Woo hoo! (Hal’s gonna have me banned, I’m sure of it.) I’ve provided mock ups.

Removed Poe saying that destroying the Nav Tower will trap the First/Final Order on Exegol “for just minutes.” It directly contradicts how the battle is only won because the command ship is destroyed. (“The fleet is stuck here! They’re toast! We don’t have to worry about them ever again!”) J.J. and Chris hinged the outcome of the entire war on this plot point, and they messed it up. I mean, Jesus Christ…
Recut Leia’s Death March - Why does she hobble away leaning on Billie Lourd for support? Why is she so weak and feeble? She hasn’t even done anything yet! Can’t Leia’s final moments be a show of strength?
- Plus, it removes Maz looking directly at the camera and telling us, “Leia’s about to kill herself. Just FYI!” If we can remove more unnecessarily overt dialogue, I’m all for that.
- This is also our last time seeing Leia’s actual face; and now the whole scene is focused around her… Instead of Maz? A character that has never even been in the same shot as Carrie Fisher? That’s…meaningful, I guess?
Reworked the Resistance arriving on Exegol so that Pryde doesn’t switch over the Nav Tower controls.
- This section admittedly involves a lot of recutting, but that fact does give us more room to play around with, if you want to reorder some of the scenes from how I’ve laid them out here.

There are a number of reasons for doing this change:

If the movie is going to establish that the Nav Tower control can be switched to different towers, why not just switch it to a different one after the command ship goes kablooey? If we can imply that there’s only one usable Nav Tower, we can eliminate one of the 63,398 plot contrivances surrounding the Exegol Battle.
With Pryde no longer busy playing hot potato with his navigation signal, it feels instead like he’s ready to deploy the fleet at any moment, raising the tension and the stakes of the battle.
Switching the Towers willy-nilly is the “culmination” of the “Force-sensitive Finn” “story “arc”” which has been cut from Ascendant up to this point. It feels strange to leave in the last piece of that underdeveloped trash heap without the rest of it. (It felt strange with the rest of it included too. It’s just strange.)
Minor gripe - in the wide shot (before the binocular zoom), the Nav Tower is visibly firing ion shots at the Resistance fighters. This is either another visual continuity error, or another plot contrivance - why doesn’t the tower have any defenses when the Resistance is right on top of it? Seriously, what the heck is this?

This movie is going to kill me. 😄