All potentially good ideas, y’all.
JEDIT: That’s a nice line from Leia! I may stick that in and see how it works 😃
I’ve just personally tried to distance myself from using visions as a way to solve problems in an edit since the vision-heavy early days of Starlight, since to me it now feels somewhat artificial, like the hand of the editor is reaching through the screen to tell the viewer what to think and feel rather than allowing the story to unfold naturally. Often, when it feels like we need a vision to explain something, that may mean that this thing should have been established earlier but it wasn’t. An ounce of prevention and all of that.
So it feels like Han’s voice comes out of nowhere in this fight, and it does. Can we foreshadow this earlier in the film?
Possibly. We have already established that Palpatine is ‘every voice’ inside Ben’s head. Later he communes with Vader’s helmet and Palpatine again speaks to him, urging him to kill Rey.
But since Kylo has already been told that Palpatine is every voice in his head, why would he bother trying to commune with the helmet again? It could be that he desperately wants to hear a voice from his family, only for Palpatine to say something like “Vader cannot help you. From the beginning, your only teacher was me.”
Or even, what if he put his hand on the mask and had no visions, but rather heard only Palpatine’s mocking laughter? That way he reforges the mask out of despair of hearing any other voice in his head, all the way until he is about to kill Rey, then realizes that there is another voice in there, one not bound by the Force or visions. It is merely his memory of his father that gets to him, something that Palpatine can never silence. For this, I think it would make sense for Kylo to have no visions of Han prior to this in the film, but for Palpatine to continue saying that there can be no other voices in Kylo’s head but his own.
Just some stream of consciousnesses thoughts about this post.
Could we reuse the scene of Palpatine threatening to turn his fleet on Kylo after failing to capture Rey, and instead have Kylo be hearing/recollecting the conversation he had with his father in TFA?
“Take off that mask”
“-using you for your power.”
“When he gets what he wants he’ll crush you.”
“You know it’s true.”
Or, perhaps we could intercut these lines with the existing lines from Palpatine. The idea being Han is the voice of Ben’s conscience, and it is trying to break through Palpatine’s influence. It could be subtle maybe.
Having a moment of Kylo feeling “The pull to the light” would be a nice juxtaposition to the scene immediately preceding this one, where Rey says, “I’m going to find Palpatine, and DESTROY him”, especially if you have a version of the hangar/duel convo where Kylo basically says something like, “You need Palpatine’s power to save your friends, so you will kill him and take his power.” Finn gets bad vibes from Rey saying she’s gonna destroy Palpatine, so maybe Rey’s starting to accept the temptation at this point, as Kylo is on the flip side of things.