Hey JoyOfEditing (JOE),
I really like what you’ve done with the final battle! Especially chopping out all of the Gungan fighting. The overall pacing is soooo much better. There are still a few things that kinda bug me though. I made some edits of a few scenes and am curious what you think?
Hey! I’d be happy to take a look, but those links require permission to view, so if you switch it to “anyone with the link”, I’ll take a wee peek. I’m gonna warn ya though, that in most every case I would probably stick with what I’ve got. I’ve tried a bunch of the edits that you’re suggesting, and while many of them work in isolation they cut against the flow or logic of the scenes that they take place in as a whole. I done about. . . I dunno 20-30 full editing passes on that sequence (The only scene I spent more time on was the opening/closing of RotS), so what you saw is pretty much a lock for me.
Basically, the short answer is: Many of the changes you’re suggesting could be successfully made if you sat down and recut the end battle from scratch and repaced it to accommodate those ideas. My cut is quite fast (on purpose) so a lot of the bits that annoy you are where I intentionally allowed it to drag a bit to reset the flow, so that the pace wouldn’t outrun the audience’s ability to keep up with the action. Everybody has different tastes, and I quite like a lot of the changes you’re suggesting. The bottom line is: there’s no perfect way to cut a scene, only balanced and unbalanced ways. My end scene is balanced against itself and my entire recut of the Phantom Menace (the overall pacing and flow/how all the characters were reworked). I really like your ideas, and I think they could totally work in different cut, but systematically I couldn’t use them in my cut. Make sense?