It's really hard to explain without giving huge detail and I want you all to have surprises. The plot is reworked, threads are pulled, rewoven and rewritten.
I'm not removing the beginning of the third movie, so much as being REALLY REALLY creative with it.
My goal is to preserve as much that's useful as possible. Too much gutting can really make a movie feel rushed/jerky. So I'm trying to leave all steps that make sense in the progression of the plot.
That means I needed to edit together a plausable explaination on how the crew got from the Neb to the Hammer and survived. I was going to have the Neb blow up and then the Hammer rescues them. But I realized it wouldn't be believable that the squids would toss a bomb, yet leave survivors going it on foot. It may not be the most professional editing job, but it doesn't suck either.

Edit: Oh yeah. The Zion battle. Honestly a lot of that edit is going to be on the fly. I hated most of it. It felt more like a dirty gritty war film, not at all what I wanted to see. I'm going to cut A LOT of it. I do want to keep enough to show that there is a battle, and I want to keep a bunch of the fighting robot things because they are so damn cool.