Right, here’s a quick mockup of just the Gungan scenes from the final battle, aggregated. I’ll follow this up with the remainder.
This is VERY ROUGH, with absolutely minimal audio smoothing, just to get a feel for how it’d play out in isolation and show what shots are available. This is very rough and as far as I can take it with my audio editing skills! I’ve trimmed almost all of Jar Jar’s goofy antics and kept all the rest, though I shifted a couple of shots - (1) we see the Gungans charge on horseback BEFORE we see them fall, and (2) I’ve shifted the shot of the droidekas appearing and firing to immediately before a shot hits the shield generator, as if that was the plan.
The Gungan plan is to present their largest possible army to draw the droid army out, and to hold out as long as possible before losing the shield, at which point they’ll flee to the swamps. (Ideally, they only did all this to enable the sneaking into the city.)
The Droid plan is to test the shield, then when confirmed they can’t bombard it, to send in ground troops as cover for the droidekas, at which point their overwhelming forces can cause some quick chaos and force surrender. (We should really drop the ‘wipe them out’ angle in order to achieve this, since it isn’t what the droids do, though I left those lines in.)
The one thing I think isn’t great about this angle is that the battle ends very quickly. Jar Jar lands on his arse (as he does in the original) and then it’s pretty much done - when we return we see them being rounded up. Cut like this, I think we go from Jar Jar landing on his arse after chaos to them being rounded up a little too quickly.
I think the best solution here is to intercut just a little in order to give that rounding up scene time to get established - and I think the most elegant place to put it would be just after the ships fly out of the hangar and one crashes down on the plains. So it’d flow like this:
- Gungans march, put up shields, and prepare
- Droid tanks stop within range and test shields with a brief bombardment
- Battle droids activate and march on the shield
- Skirmish begins, first footsoldiers, then Gungan horses
- Droidekas enter shield and shoot down shield generator, triggering retreat
- Chaos, Gungans are overrun, Jar Jar escapes with Tarpals but they get shot down and Jar Jar lands on his arse
- Begin the other endings - Padmé and Qui-Gon breach the city and the hangar
- Pilots are freed, Anakin gets in a ship, pilots mount up and leave the hangar
- One pilot is shot down (in that sweeping shot downwards to the plains)
- The Gungans surrender
- The other pilots head to space
- Maul appears, and the three remaining plots continue from here