I believe they claimed that the reason they made Rey’s appearance so similar to TFA is for the sake of the reused footage of Leia. But I’m not sure why they couldn’t just use more CGI to make changes possible. As for the Resistance, we are planning on changing Zorri’s dialogue on Kijimi so that it’s clear the people there are rebelling against the First Order ever since Skywalker’s sacrifice. This would help explain why the Resistance is larger than at the end of TLJ.
I did read that but it doesn’t make sense, Any scenes of Rey interacting with Leia are shot with a body double and Leia’s face out of frame. It just looks like more of Abrams regreting skipping the middle film. The Kijimi stuff would make sense, the FO moving into a Resistance cell looks clear.
We are currently discussing an idea like this on Nev’s TROS thread. The idea is to maintain Rey’s parents as nobodies because that was the crux of TLJ’s reveal. Rey was only claimed to be a nobody by association in that film. So Rey can be a clone of Palpatine, similar to how Omega is a female clone of Jango Fett, and this way the reveal isn’t retreading ESB and is more pivotal for Rey’s character since she was quite literally created to be a vessel for Palpatine and take the Sith throne. Rey’s parents are nobodies that adopted/rescued her from a Sith cult, similar to how she will be adopted by the Skywalkers at the end of the film. The reason Rey doesn’t see her parents in the mirror cave of TLJ is because she doesn’t have any, biologically speaking - the long line of identical Rey’s is a hint at her nature of being a clone. And the reason Palpatine always wanted her dead is because he was paranoid that one of his clones could take all of his followers or simply have enough power to kill him as Rey eventually does.
I like that pattern. Considering how Bad Batch and Mandalorian seem to be moving into the cloning lore, Rey being the clone and not one of her perents is a smart move that won’t isolate this edit from the larger franchise in a way that ‘Rey Nobody’ would.
The above change I mentioned should make it less stupid that he’s telling her his exact plan. Again, if Rey’s sole reason for existence is exactly what he’s describing, it may fill Rey with enough dread and hopelessness to consider actually doing it.
One thing the ST (and specifically the edits I chose) does is show how necessery the Jedi Order searching for children is. Rey goes for the darker, easier path every time and finding out that being nothing more than a fresh clone plays on everything that’s built up so far so much more than the raw film or this version of this edit.