Speaking of pacing, one thing I noticed with the beginning is how there’s little connection between the opening scene with Vader, and then with R2 and 3PO approaching Jabba’s palace and the rest of the Tatooine sequence. With ANH and ESB, I think the audience can feel this plot baton being passed along from one scene to the next. Sure, we do cut back and forth between our heroes and our villains, but by that point their stories had already been connected in the narrative. I think something that helped this problem originally in ROTJ was the deleted scene of Vader trying to commune with Luke on Tatooine. I assume this scene was cut because they felt his introduction was better served during his entrance to Jabba’s palace, but I do think there are some benefits to restoring it. But obviously an issue with using the deleted scene is the quality not being super great. This wouldn’t be an issue as much for an edit using something like '83 Grindhouse or Puggo Grande (which I’m personally planning to do), but not might work as something that could be shared with other editors wanting to keep the material they use consistent.

What if we just skipped Vader’s scene and went straight from the crawl to Tatooine? I think that would probably flow much better. That scene always felt so tangential thrown in at the start like that. Maybe put it back in later before Dagobah or something.