Eddie - I generally try and retain as much as possible, especially with TPM, which as you said yourself can easily get edited down significantly shorter than all the other SW movies if you’re not careful. So anywhere it could theoretically be retained, I’m trying to probe for a way to do it (then, people have greater flexibility with what changes they want to include, and how much of the runtime it bites out of the movie). I agree that the scenes are hardly necessary, especially in this new version of events.
That makes a lot of sense. Worthy probing! I also fall on the side of preserving as much as possible, so it feels like a Star Wars movie in length. The more I watch TPM, which I’ve done a few times this month, the more I think there’s genuinely a decent core there. I feel like it needs four main fixes:
- Focus. Seriously, give the audience something exciting to hook onto. There’s good stuff in there - highlight it.
- The opening. Same as point 1, get it started with a bang. The middle section’s all pretty good (give or take the usual trims), and the ending delivers nicely, so get the momentum high and keep it going till you hit the decent worldbuilding and character work of the Tattooine content. I think this mainly means keeping the characters in focus and with clear motivations, and thinking about pacing and the drip-feed of information. (So trimming the start might be one of very few actual ommissions of scenes I’d propose.)
- Jar Jar. Specifically (now I’ve thought about it a lot) treating his passivity as his biggest failing. Make him at least seem to care. But tighten up the idiocy while we’re at it.
- The structure of the ending. It has to deliver the lowest lows followed by the highest highs, which is mainly an issue of ordering. (And personally I’d treat the Gungans as the least important plot there, so maybe cutting that down would be my second major trim.)
Of course, that’s on top of the usual trims to common frustrations, which includes a bunch of more subjective tweaks, but by and large a hundred editors have shown us how to smoothly cut around them. I feel like TPM had so many obvious issues (exemplified by Jar Jar smelling a fart, how funny), that it distracted from a few of the more fundamental ones. But now that it’s been edited to death, and by and large there are solutions to all of those cringes, it clears a path for us to think a bit more clearly about some of the underlying stuff. (That’s not to say that other editors haven’t tackled the core, though, of course they have.)
The youtube video posted earlier, “How Star Wars was saved in the edit”, feels like the right approach to take here - preserve what you can, structuring it in the most compelling way and with the best context.