MTHaslett said:
Very impressed! Love the effect of the new scenes on Tatooine and, particularly, the juxtaposition of Luke's mechanical hand wound with Vader. The connection between Luke and Vader is so much stronger in this edit and the movie is so much the better for it.
I was hoping to see two ideas that didn't make it-- the assembly of the lightsaber on Degobah and the convo with Ben Kenobi outside the Imperial shuttle. I may have missed reading posts that explain why these had to be cut, but they seemed like excellent ideas and I missed them.
So, that seems unfair as I type it, but it may be another way of saying that the Degobah and "Leia, you're my sister" scenes seem like my least favorite still in this much improved edit. I think you had good fixes in the above ideas, so if there's a chance of making them work, I urge that.
The restaging of the battle on Endor with the lost footage and the additional battle footage is an awesome thing. My instinct creatively is that it's taken a little far and that less would be more. The Death Star commander gets more screen time here than feels warranted. So, I love the idea, but could love it more.
I loved some of the additions to the final battle. It's a very tough finale to pull off well. I have found that my favorite version is in the Spence Edit where Palpatine is on the Executor and the Vader/Luke saber fight is cut into one long battle. At this point, marrying much of what you've accomplished here with Vader and Luke to the Spence Edit would create my preferred version.
I feel these notes are sub-par. I will watch again for more specific ideas and read the thread more carefully. I congratulate you on this. My qualms feel small compared to all you successfully pull off!
Thanks for the review. Appreciated.
Re: assembling the lightsaber on Dagobah and Ben's chat by the shuttle. Those were ideas bounced around in this thread and elsewhere, but I haven't edited those scenes. Constructing the lightsaber on Dagobah I like as a concept although I think it works fine on Tatooine, but the Ben scene IMO is deadweight and best cut from the movie.
I agree that the Jerjerrod scene runs a little long, but I'm not sure what you could cut, other than just ditching the whole scene: the ground battle is chaos... he orders in the TIE bombers... boom! I'm not married to the scene though, so might just ditch it. At the very least the music needs reworking.
Editing the Luke/Vader fight into one long scene is an idea that Ator also advocated. Ator found a way to also cut the Luke/Leia sibling subplot seemlessly, which is something I'd like to do. The only concern for me is that the movie would be even shorter than it is now. Taking out the Luke/Leia stuff would take the edit under 1 hour 50 minutes, and it starts to feel too short for a SW movie.