I love seeing the storyboards. Interesting, but I agree the “force kick” seems like an editing error rather than an intentional demonstration of a new force ability. If this was in the prequels I’d expect a dramatic gesture and focus on the action with some kind of sound effect to emphasize it, rather than it just kind of happening during a confusing quick scene of lots of action while something else is drawing focus in the background. Thanks for sharing though!
I gotta say having Lando just die in the explosion of the Death Star as the Falcon flies out of it would have been pretty dumb and disappointing. Plus, if you show a reaction shot of Han looking sad, the audience might think he’s just mourning the loss of his ship. If you’re going to kill off a character like that, and give them no death scene, you don’t do it after what is essentially the very end of the movie. It’s like having the movie end with the Ewoks freezing to death from nuclear winter after the bonfires die down. Okay for a novel or something, terrible for this movie. Having Han Solo die in the carbonite would have been similarly silly and anticlimactic in ESB (even if that’s what Harrison Ford supposedly wanted all along… or worse, what if after Leia defrosts him in ROTJ he just falls to the ground… dead. I can almost hear the trombone playing! Sorry for the snark there).
Like Boba Fett crawling out of the Sarlaac (“canon” now because of Disney’s the Book of Boba Fett) it’s one of those things that sounds good at first until you think about how it would actually look. It’s not like we can just go back and re-film the scene make it dramatically flow properly as if it were intended all along. Another one I think of is Darth Vader’s “armor” collapsing and Anakin’s body disappearing during the bonfire scene. I mean someone could probably do it, but would it really look good, and not just come across as really jarring to the whole mood and sense flow of the film at that point?
Compare this to something like dubbing in audio of Luke screaming “Biggs!” over the radio when his friend blows up during the trench run of ANH. That worked and it was for a character that dies anyway.
As a side rant I sometimes wonder if some of the scene Lucas did re-edit with CGI in the OT over the years were done in complete isolation from the rest of the movie and he didn’t sit down and actually watch it with the new stuff beginning to end, with an audience to see how it actually came across. Instead they’re just like little clips, and viewing those out of context tends to give a different impression. Maybe Lowry Digital had the same problem, otherwise they would have caught more of their restoration gaffes (or maybe they did and it was too late, the budget had run out, and they just committed to releasing it hoping few would notice).