Johnny Ringo said:Yes, The Bingowings you listen...
My personal feeling is that 3 hours and 38 minutes is far too long to ask of an audience in a single sitting, Primarily I'd be suggesting ways to cut this down to a fair and reasonable runtime. I'm also making notes in general. I should say right here that this may come across as overly negative but I'll try to be as costructive as possible. [I wont be watching this in a single sitting]
* This is probably an encoding error but the aspect ratio seems WAY wrong. Is it meant to be Anamorphic?
Prologue //
maybe it would have been best to start with the Ian McDiarmid speech? It sums things up better [and quicker] than a vague quote and a scene with 3 random guys fighting. - Random from the POV of a first time viewer.
If you want to show the "great despair" - maybe showcase elements from several battles where the "bad guys" have the upper hand [or high ground if you will.], then the focus would seem to be on the emphasis of the opening qoute and tie in nicely with Ian's Monologue.
The only way I'd see the opening duel having significance is if we saw it again later in an expanded fashion, but it already seems expanded here, Honestly [and this is only my opinion] almost all of the fight just seems like a detraction from the story rather than a setup.
I would strongly suggest using the scenes following the main title logo as a Prologue of sorts [or cold opening] before the main titles.
Are you planning on including subtitles for the Nemoidians? - It's a long time to watch their back and forth without having any idea of what they are saying or implying, which basically makes their talky scenes boring AND pointless - since we don't learn anything the plot sort of stumbles for a bit. - I fail to seen the point in redubbing them if the scenes still play out in the same fashion - redubbing would allow freedom and flexibility i would think, and that opportunity is kind of wasted here.
Again it feels like there is much padding here between the scenes that matter to the plot. You don't explicitly show the Queen travel to Coruscant - she is in one place, then we see a ship arrive, and we see her in another place. Would it be simpler to simply imply she is already on Couscant - and trim her out of the "occupation of Naboo" scenes?
I like the idea of cutting back to the Naboo politicians conferring before the senate meeting.
* I notice that the colours during certain scenes [flashbacks?] bleed out into the black bars quite a bit.
When we first see Anakin we also see a lot here featuring Quigon, Who already died in the Prologue - this makes things a bit disjointed - and this is NOT presented as a flashback as you've set up a style to denote that, which is NOT present here.
* looks to be some sort of error on the Maul reveal shot - there's a flicker of his face, close up as the doors are opening..
Again we haven't really met Darth Maul [as the sith apprentice they make refernce to] before we see him here. So he's kind of just a face.
Why are we seeing studio logos 24 minutes into the movie? - that's a bit out of pace isn't it?
The cuts between time periods are also beginning to get quite jarring, imo.
That's all I've got right now, I need to take a break.
Thanks for the suggestions! They are highly appreciated. The prologue will be cut down and the jarry editing will be fixed. The prologue will only be featured as a bonus feature on the DVD for people who still wanna see some TPM scenes but as I mentioned before I'm going to start including them anyways so the prologue will just be there as a kind of deleted material in the special features.