I think the reason I was advocating just tilting down straight to the TIE jumping into frame from the nebula and cutting EVERYTHING Mustafar earlier in the thread, was because of the key problem any Mustafar edit will have, that you just crystallized for me in your post: Your urge is 100 percent correct that there needs to be some lead into the Mustafar scene. But the problem is there’s simply no footage that puts us on that planet as Kylo arrives.
I read a post at the JWFan boards awhile back (they’ve been piecing together score sheets and doing their own sleuthing as to what the film looked like at various points based on what music Williams wrote and scored) that suggested there WAS a cut of the opening reel at one point that just got rid of EVERYTHING Mustafar, and one of the cues actually lines up PERFECTLY with there being a tilt down to Kylo’s ship jumping into frame. At some point they decided against that cut for some reason, and decided instead to speedrun the Mustafar business as much as possible before sending him to Exogol. And unfortunately, that meant “Cut the landing, cut the establishing shot, cut the oracle, cut the castle, etc.”
Yeah I saw that too. It’s interesting to consider. I guess my dark secret here is I don’t think the opening as is is so awful that it’s in desperate need of fixing in the way other aspects of the movie are. I can actually see the arguments for why JJ and co. might have left it in.
For example, it does add to the build up to Palpatine’s reveal. His return is a big what the f moment, ideally you pique the interest in the crawl and the next couple of minutes you wonder “what’s he looking for exactly?” before you get the whammy. Actually it’s kind of surprising once they added Palpatine to the crawl that they didn’t do the Exegol beginning. But there were other reasons, I think jumping into a montage, while untraditional for the series, does give a sense of the passage of time, and a suggestion of what Kylo’s been up to. Not to mention showing that there’s a challenge to get to Exegol, considering how much runtime is devoted to our heroes trying to reach it.
That’s not to say I’m not considering starting with Exegol, but it’s not the slam dunk choice for me that it is for some.
…That’s basically the sequence you need to get to Mustafar and make everything else that blips by make sense. But it has to be made out of already used footage and completely new VFX, because Abrams & Co. didn’t give it to us anywhere else.
I get where you’re coming from, but I think there’s probably a middle ground between that and what the film gave us, where you’re still dropping into the battle with some build up (but not making it a whole sequence).