Anakin Starkiller, regarding the final battle, I think the key point here is the difference between story and narrative. The story of the ending - all four concurrent plotlines - makes perfect logical sense, as you say. But narrative is how a given story is told, and it’s about guiding the audience through the story via its presentation. And that’s about managing more nebulous things like cognitive load, information delivery ordering, emotional response, and high and low energy levels. A story can be conveyed by a wikipedia article, but narrative is how the production team convey feeling as you watch the movie.
The issue with the ending that these recent attempts sought to address was primarily that of cognitive load. While it’s easy for us that have watched the movie a dozen times to understand that each storyline makes sense, the hypothetical first-time viewer would be having to hold the ‘present state’ of each plotline in their head at the same time, and wouldn’t necessarily have room to focus on things like where the tension and hope were, which characters were our emotional investment characters, and so on. It sounds like something a brain should have no trouble with, but when in motion, it can have a real impact on how a movie feels. These recent explorations weren’t an attempt to clarify a confusing plotline so much as present the story in a narrative that burdened the viewer the least, and then within that, to try to find a natural flow of energy peaks and troughs.
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Anyway, I feel I should clarify a couple of things regarding my intentions for Jar Jar:
I have no intentions for Jar Jar.
The purpose of creating those clips was not to present any new ideas that I sincerely thought might be included in future edits; it was only to illustrate to participants in this thread that I’ve made a tool which I think makes editing Jar Jar as easy as it can be, so that anyone can explore changing Jar Jar. Some of the concepts I introduced in those clips were even mutually exclusive with each other.
Regarding your point about Jar Jar’s character growth: I don’t think he has any, at least any that you could reasonably expect an audience to invest in. Other than light confidence boosting and perhaps a small growth in respect over the movie, I don’t think anyone would really argue that he has a character arc. But he doesn’t need an arc! I think it’s almost certain that he’ll always remain some degree of idiot and that that can’t be changed, but I do think that the new voice lines in the tool afford us the possibility to give him agency, as Starkiller AG says, which is something that all active characters need in film, and that Jar Jar is sorely lacking. I have a feeling that, if Jar Jar can be shown to actually care about events, it could really improve his character, even if he remains a buffoon.
I don’t currently have any plans for Jar Jar. I think some of the possibilities in the new lines have potential - especially his many lines about Queens, and being able to replace some of his more annoying speech traits with less annoying ones. Making him already a Junior Representative is an idea that really appeals to me too, but that’s something that’s much more radical and not something I’d fold in with regular improvement.
That said, I would love it if we here could iterate on Jar Jar together. I’d really like to see people play with the tool and for us to collectively test some explorations. Or even just suggest some ideas for how we could improve Jar Jar beyond trimming his more offensive scenes. But that’s up to the community, and the direction people want to take this thread!
I suppose, by way of encouraging discussion, I’ll leave us with a question: Is making Jar Jar a representative, and/or their deliberate contact, a step too far?