I truly believe this movie was maybe 2 more drafts away from being very good. The worst thing that happened to it was trying to hit the December release date. If they had given them 6 months longer to get it right, we’d be having very different conversations about it. There’s a ton of good ideas in it, but none of them really quite land.

Frankly I’m not sure why they didn’t borrow more from the Duel of the Fates script they already had (more than they already borrowed from it, that is). There were some elements in there that didn’t jive well, like the embracing-darkness “grey jedi” stuff, and of course Leia’s material would need to be minimized, but overall it did a much better job paying off character arcs and plot threads. And not just the threads of previous movies, but its own too; for example, TROS borrowed Lando’s thousand-ship-fleet and the life-essence-transfer stuff from DotF, but didn’t even try to set them up in a natural way (which DotF did). It’s all very baffling.

Anyways, for a final cut, I wonder if there’s a more subtle audio track you could use for Kylo’s moment on the Death Star. The Force Theme in your clip feels a bit… whimsical? Something a little more thematically specific to the scene might be ideal; maybe there’s something quieter from Rey & Kylo’s scenes together in TLJ, or an appropriate moment from “Ben’s theme” (the different-key Kylo’s Theme) if one exists. The little bit that plays during his death (around one minute into the track “Farewell”) comes to mind, especially since an angrier version of Kylo’s theme plays earlier in the Death Star scene. It’d be reusing music from the same movie, but it could be acceptable since the Death Star scene is, in a way, “Kylo Ren’s death scene.”