My wish list for Jedi.
- Leia remembers Padme…but how? One easy fix could be that when she refers to “images” she produces a locket with a picture of her mother and gives it Luke, something regal that Bail Organa may have given her when she was a little girl. If it fell out while Palpatine was zapping Luke, seeing it and Luke in pain may add a bit more umph to his Return to the light side (just an idea). A variation on the same idea is that Leia gets a strong mental image of Padme when she holds a mysterious pendant that used to belong to her (in ROTS we see Padme with the pendant in her coffin but perhaps she wasn’t buried with it. Now that would have a serious impact on Vader if he saw it). The less labour intensive option would be having the line edited to _“No, just images really, feelings.” It would retcon Leia’s knowledge of her mother to something even more vague without revealing when she died.
That would be perfect. Although Padmé’s death could have been handled better in Revenge of the Sith (e.g., cutting the line, “She has lost the will to live”), I believe that the death of the love interest is an emotional necessity in a tragedy. I thought it was poetic that Padmé died the moment Anakin was reborn as Darth Vader, and Padmé’s funeral was one of the most emotional scenes in the prequel trilogy in my opinion. I would hate for the scene to be cut merely to reconcile the film with Return of the Jedi.
I suppose that the alternative would be to redub the medical droid and hire Ewan Mcgregor and Natalie Portman to film an additional scene in which Obi-Wan tells an emotionally distraught Padmé that the twins must be separated for their own safety. But unless you film an entirely new scene explaining why Padmé abandoned Luke, any attempt to remove Padmé’s death from Revenge of the Sith would only create more problems in my opinion. It would be much easier to simply edit the conversation in Return of the Jedi.