All of your points are well taken and I appreciate the extensive feedback!
Airconditioning-inc said:
first I think you forgot to remove a scene because all of roses scenes are removed except the one where finn asks her if she wants to come along and thats the only time she appears in the movie so I don’t know why you left it in
Actually she has 2 other scenes with dialog later in the film so its not totally out of place. I left it in for pacing and it sets up the fact that she is “…studying the specs of old destroyers, so we can stop the fleet…” implying that the emperors fleet are old imperial ships, which I like.
also for the scene with luke and leia I think it would have been Better if you had it take place at night with the moonlight illuminating them, that way the vfx would be less distracting because its darker you would’nt be able to see them as clearly and would also hid the rotoscope errors. And this way it would fix the weird lighting when luke arrives (because it doesn’t look like they were in the same place) and just in general they would fit in a bit more because the lighting would be closer to how it was in the original scene.
Agreed. I’m currently working on improving this scene, so I’ll see how it looks with a nighttime setting. Probably will work better.
I would also have kept at the very least the start of the resistance storyline from last Jedi where Finn wakes up since last time we saw finn he was unconscious and in critical condition so it would probably be better to still pay that off.
I could do this, but I think it would make the film worse overall. The main problem is there is nothing for Finn to do for the first half of the film, so just having him wake up at the beginning and then disappear for an hour wouldn’t be good. Instead, I think it makes sense that he has healed up because considerable time has passed since the end of TFA.
I would also put all of the Palpatine stuff after ben kills Snoke since putting it before kinda doesn’t make sense and it ruins the scene where he kills Snoke for me
I’m curious how it ruins the scene for you personally. It definitely changes the implications, but I think it’s more interesting because now Kylo knows Snoke is a puppet of the emperor and he decides to kill him anyway, defying the emperor in the process. So it’s trying to tie the two characters together. I originally had it the other way but got suggestions on fanedit.org to change it this way and I think its better. It also improves the pacing by getting that exposition scene out of the way earlier.
and the only other thing I feel like writing about would be that you should have added ether a body hitting the floor sound or a neck snap when Ben is choking Hux so his disappearance from the rest of the movie is now clear to the audience
Good idea, i’ll try this.
also I don’t know if removing the force heal was a good idea since now Ben’s arc feels unfinished and this combined with removed Rey being Palpatines granddaughter makes Palpatines plan make absolutely no sense
One way to view my edit is as a “what if?” scenario, where force healing doesn’t exist. Then Ben would have just died on the death star, wouldn’t have been redeemed and couldn’t be there to save Rey at the end. Which makes his death even more tragic, because we know what we lost. The conclusion of Ben’s arc is his tragic death.
I agree that Palpatine’s plan makes no sense but that was equally true in the theatrical cut. Palpatine’s plan is still pretty much the same in my edit (“kill the girl!.. wait actually bring her here so I can make her the emperor… OR if that doesn’t work, I’ll just suck out her life force instead” -Palpatine). I tried to improve it by cutting some dialog where he explains his plans outright.
and I think that you should have kept the scene where Rey tries to exile herself since now that she killed Ben its more justified, and her getting Leia’s saber from Luke answers the question on why she isn’t using it at all
True, this would be nice, but it doesn’t work because Luke is not dead yet in my edit.
and I understand added the orange eyes when Rey kills Palpatine but it creates a massive plot hole where she kills Palpatine in anger like he wanted yet his essence doesn’t enter her and I think you could have kept the voices of the other jedi helping Rey since it gave the scene a little more something
The orange eyes are tricky, because it’s open to a million interpretations. My intention was to show that she is using the dark side and the light side together, which is the only thing that can defeat the emperor once and for all. So she uses her anger but she doesn’t let it consume her like Palpatine thought it would.
Also importantly, I removed the line where Palpatine explains “my spirit will pass into you”. So it can be seen more as simply a sith ritual where he is trying to turn her to the dark side by using her anger, instead of an actual spirit transfer which has never happened in star wars up to this point.
other problems I have would probably be harder to fix like now the knights of Ren and captain Phasma now being Mia and Finn getting no real story arc at all and that one old general just showing up out of nowhere.
Personally I’m not a fan of the Knights of Ren and Captain Phasma so I don’t miss them much. The general does kind of pop out of nowhere, but he has hardly anything to do in my edit anyway.
In my edit Poe and Finn are unfortunately reduced to minor characters, because their arcs don’t fit into my story. I resolve Finn’s stormtrooper arc by having him talk with Janna about stormtrooper life and why he believes in the force now (that was his only real character moment in ROS anyway). And Poe and Finn get together at the end so that’s my token of good will to them as characters. I was even contemplating throwing in a funny slideshow at the end… “Poe and Finn go on to get married and start a family together, and move to Jakku to settle down.”
its still very well done and I couldn’t do better it just creates too many flaws for me to say its the definitive way to watch them
I agree that it might not work as a “definitive cut” for most people because of how much it cuts, but I think it definitely presents some new ideas and hopefully it’s a fun watch!
Thanks for your thoughts!
Holy Yoda this is a long post! haha