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Dom's (Possibly) Useful TROS Edit (WIP) — Page 2

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RogueLeader said:

It would GREAT if instead of Rey getting a pep talk from Jedi she doesn’t know, Rey and Finn’s minds connect through the Force, and Finn, the person she actually knows, gives her that encouragement. It would sort of pay off all that build up, and Rey would realize Finn has the Force without him having to say anything.

I don’t think this is necessary. All the dead Jedi talking to Rey is the only thing that makes this movie feel like the conclusion of a saga, and we already got a confirmation of Finn’s force sensitivity with his “a feeling” moment during the final battle. It seems like a lot of work for neutral or even negative payoff.

My preferred Skywalker Saga experience:
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX

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Wouldn’t say it is negative, but I get what you’re saying. And you would basically be trading one pay off for another. A part of me wishes the Force ghosts played a bigger role in the end than they do.

It is just too bad there isn’t any pay off to the Force sensitive Finn stuff. If you cut out those references, and Poe being a spice runner (can’t recall if Dom is doing this), it ends up cutting quite a bit of Finn, Poe and Rey’s interactions.

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RogueLeader said:

It would GREAT if instead of Rey getting a pep talk from Jedi she doesn’t know, Rey and Finn’s minds connect through the Force, and Finn, the person she actually knows, gives her that encouragement to get up. It would sort of pay off all that build up, and Rey would realize Finn has the Force without him having to say anything.

And there it is.

The perfect solution.

You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)

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Hal 9000 said:

I love almost all the ideas you outline here. I don’t know why you insist on calling your project useless, and hope you’ll execute these ideas.

Ha! You’ll notice this one actually says “Useful.”

I think “my” project would benefit greatly from your help with some of these. (“My” in quotes because it’ll be tough for me to spend any length of time on editing, given my life situation now.)

Certainly having another edit to look at will help you see how you like concepts in action.

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 (Edited)

RogueLeader said:

It would GREAT if instead of Rey getting a pep talk from Jedi she doesn’t know, Rey and Finn’s minds connect through the Force, and Finn, the person she actually knows, gives her that encouragement to get up. It would sort of pay off all that build up, and Rey would realize Finn has the Force without him having to say anything.

I like this, but what if it’s the the DOTF climax, where she connects in the force with everyone? I’d love that (and had hoped we’d get something like this in the movie before it came out). Not sure how to accomplish (maybe it’s tied in with the fleet arriving?) but I like it. It have a nice meaning to it, she says “Be with me,” but she still doesn’t hear the voices of the Jedi, she hears her friends, and the people of the galaxy. That’s what the future Jedi need, not just the people of the past, but the present.

A third option might be Rey hears the voices of the Jedi and connects with Finn.

RogueLeader said:

It is just too bad there isn’t any pay off to the Force sensitive Finn stuff. If you cut out those references, and Poe being a spice runner (can’t recall if Dom is doing this), it ends up cutting quite a bit of Finn, Poe and Rey’s interactions.

I’m really not a fan of the spice runner story, but I won’t be cutting it just because I don’t think I really can, that being one of the reasons.

I will say Finn will definitely be force sensitive, regardless. The question is just if I’m cutting the “I never told you Rey!” stuff.

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Jenny Nicholson had a similar idea, where she hears the voices of her friends rather than the Jedi. It might be hard to pull of the Finn connecting with Rey, thing, because there might not be an appropriate shot of Finn that we could into that. But considering that whole sequence is basically all voiceover, it leaves a lot of room to play around with, whether you keep the Jedi voices but alter them slightly, or do something entirely different.

Regarding the spice runner stuff, I’ve really only had two ideas about how to improve it without removing it. Maybe Zori could say, that he was a spice runner “before he left to join the Republic” rather than “Resistance”, since the canon made it clear Poe was a Republic pilot before he joined the Resistance. This could help make it seem like this is something he did in his late teens or early twenties. A long time ago basically.

Or, either Zori or Poe could say that he was simply undercover, working for the Republic. This would help explain why Zori is so hostile and wants to kill him so bad. The tricky part would be finding Oscar or Kerri lines that would fit.

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Hal 9000 said:

lol, okay you got me with the title. Did you change it or was it always like that?

Always. The reason I use “Useless” for my PT edits is because it’s been so many years since they came out and there are a million other edits out there with a million great ideas. But I figure I’ll probably be one of the first on this one and so my ideas might be useful for others.

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 (Edited)

I’ve thought about it quite a bit and I think I’m going to move the Falcon’s mission to after Rey’s intro, training, and pep talk with Leia (“Never underestimate a droid”). I like how focused things get once we finally see Rey in the film so I’d hate to break up the Ajan Kloss scenes, but I think the very beginning is where the fast pacing hurts the most, and the lightspeed skipping scene is the prime culprit.

This way, you start the film with Kylo’s journey, Palpatine mentions Rey, we cut to Rey and see her train, see Kylo connect with her, see her have a quiet moment with Leia, then we finally get to the Falcon, and right after we see the Falcon return to the Resistance base. Besides this being a more streamlined sequence of events (that I believe was the original sequencing anyway), this will also help pacing because you won’t get one crazy planet hopping scene (Kylo going to Exegol) followed by another (the lightspeed skipping). I’m hoping between that, reediting Kylo’s interruption to Rey’s training, and slightly extending the lightspeed skipping scene, I can make the first act feel significantly less hyperactive. I’m still weighing in my head the concept of cutting out Mustafar or not. I’m not confident whether if it’d help or hurt the pace honestly, so I’d be curious to see it in action.

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This sounds good. I think you could at least play around with starting the film with Kylo already on his way to Exegol. Either starting with the shot of Kylo’s ship flying to the edge of the nebula, or pan down to the nebula as Kylo jumps out of it and flies towards the surface of Exegol.

The fact that we don’t have any extra deleted scenes of Mustafar, or the fact it doesn’t even look like Mustafar, makes me lean toward just removing it and allows the film to not start on an action scene for a change.

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RogueLeader said:

This sounds good. I think you could at least play around with starting the film with Kylo already on his way to Exegol. Either starting with the shot of Kylo’s ship flying to the edge of the nebula, or pan down to the nebula as Kylo jumps out of it and flies towards the surface of Exegol.

The fact that we don’t have any extra deleted scenes of Mustafar, or the fact it doesn’t even look like Mustafar, makes me lean toward just removing it and allows the film to not start on an action scene for a change.

I was really hoping we’d get the Hux/Pryde and Oracle scenes for Mustafar to flesh out that section (so that you could hypothetically push Exegol and Palpatine to later on as in earlier cuts of the film). Now I’m not quite sure what to do. I’m reticent to cut too much out of a film that already feels cut to the bone, and especially in a sequence that feels particularly that way. I also feel like they didn’t really want to start with an action scene either, so that’s why we get this sort of montage-y bit (that in my mind gives the sensation of a larger montage where we see him searching and conquering other planets that we just don’t see) where it’s not really about the action. I fear just starting out the film on Exegol because Palpatine’s entrance is such a big whammy you really need to build up to it (plus finding Exegol is the plot of the movie so I think it needs to seem somewhat challenging to get to). That’s why putting him in the crawl feels so weird. Now that I think about it I almost wonder if there needs to be a more overt tease in the crawl like saying “dark secret” or some such.

Personally I don’t really mind that it doesn’t look like Mustafar, just because it’s not mentioned at all, so it almost doesn’t matter. I keep trying to think of a way to just start the movie with Kylo on the bridge of a star destroyer (from the TLJ deleted scenes), then someone says off camera his ship is ready, then we see his TIE flying to Vader’s castle (using RO footage). My problem is, besides the tough VFX work, what happens once he gets there? Ideally you’d just have him go in and take the wayfinder, but when he gets the wayfinder in TROS he’s outside and all dirty and shit, so that footage wouldn’t work.

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DominicCobb said:
I will say Finn will definitely be force sensitive, regardless. The question is just if I’m cutting the “I never told you Rey!” stuff.

The whole not-telling-thing needs to go but making Finn force-sensitive or implying it seems to go a bit far for my liking.

stevepaynter said:

Also, what is everyone feeling about the lesbian kiss at the celebration near the end of the movie? Is this something that will be on the cut list? Did it feel forced and out of place for a Star Wars movie?

No its perfectly fine and we do not need to follow censorship rules in Singapore and the whatnot. Let everyone kiss whomever they want.

For seventeen years the renegade Pfhor scoutship jumped between the closely packed stars of the galactic core. And all over the ship, dancing through the wreckage of the Pfhor computer core, Durandal was laughing…

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DominicCobb said:

I’ve thought about it quite a bit and I think I’m going to move the Falcon’s mission to after Rey’s intro, training, and pep talk with Leia (“Never underestimate a droid”).

This is a great idea! I made a quick personal edit and it plays pretty well. Since we haven’t been introduced to the falcon yet in this cut, I feel like it’s (unfortunately) helpful to cut out Connix’s line with Leia if you go this route.

LOVE that it transitions from Palpatine to Rey rather than the crew on the Falcon.

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 (Edited)

AbramPT said:

DominicCobb said:

I’ve thought about it quite a bit and I think I’m going to move the Falcon’s mission to after Rey’s intro, training, and pep talk with Leia (“Never underestimate a droid”).

This is a great idea! I made a quick personal edit and it plays pretty well. Since we haven’t been introduced to the falcon yet in this cut, I feel like it’s (unfortunately) helpful to cut out Connix’s line with Leia if you go this route.

What’s the line again? Isn’t it like they haven’t reported back yet? Maybe doesn’t make the most sense but arguably it makes going from that scene to the Falcon feel natural (again, I’m pretty sure this is where the scene was originally placed).

LOVE that it transitions from Palpatine to Rey rather than the crew on the Falcon.

Yeah I feel like that’s important. In a film like Star Wars you have to be careful in how you transition from storyline to storyline. How the first act of TLJ is structured is a good example to look at. Going from Palpatine to Rey right after Rey is mentioned just makes more sense in terms of flow and keeps things focused on that main conflict to start out. I only worry about how the literal transition will work (in terms of music and visuals).

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DominicCobb said:
Personally I don’t really mind that it doesn’t look like Mustafar, just because it’s not mentioned at all, so it almost doesn’t matter. I keep trying to think of a way to just start the movie with Kylo on the bridge of a star destroyer (from the TLJ deleted scenes), then someone says off camera his ship is ready, then we see his TIE flying to Vader’s castle (using RO footage). My problem is, besides the tough VFX work, what happens once he gets there? Ideally you’d just have him go in and take the wayfinder, but when he gets the wayfinder in TROS he’s outside and all dirty and shit, so that footage wouldn’t work.

You can have Kylo’s Tie fly by Vaders’ castle and then cut to him slaughtering the settlers.

Peace is a lie
There is only passion…

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idir_hh said:

DominicCobb said:
Personally I don’t really mind that it doesn’t look like Mustafar, just because it’s not mentioned at all, so it almost doesn’t matter. I keep trying to think of a way to just start the movie with Kylo on the bridge of a star destroyer (from the TLJ deleted scenes), then someone says off camera his ship is ready, then we see his TIE flying to Vader’s castle (using RO footage). My problem is, besides the tough VFX work, what happens once he gets there? Ideally you’d just have him go in and take the wayfinder, but when he gets the wayfinder in TROS he’s outside and all dirty and shit, so that footage wouldn’t work.

You can have Kylo’s Tie fly by Vaders’ castle and then cut to him slaughtering the settlers.

I worry though that in that case the difference in the look of Mustafar would be stark if you put them together.

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I think it would be fine, Mustafar in rogue one is quite calm and cool compared to the hot mess it was in EP3, also you can just assume Kylo is far from the the castle in a different region with a different environment.

Peace is a lie
There is only passion…

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I do think you could go straight from the crawl, tilt down to the nebula, and then Kylo jumping in. (I know when LFL released that scene early, there’s a cleaner open to that scene than what’s in the movie, so there should be a few more seconds of silence/starfield to use, too. All that wayfinder stuff doesn’t even really matter ultimately, and you get a more direct echo to Return of the Jedi where the movie opens directly on one villain flying to the big villain base, where the big bad resides for the rest of the movie. Poetry, rhyming, yadda yadda, but I think it’s much more clean to pan down from the scroll to the starfield/nebula, and have someone pop in from lightspeed and we track them to the planet. It’s much, much cleaner than what’s happening in the theatrical cut, and once you get rid of the oracle, you might as well get rid of the rest of it, there’s nothing else in those scenes that is “explained” any further than just seeing the weird thing plugged into the ship and realizing it’s steering him. It’s pretty self-explanatory (The theatrical crawl basically sets it up in one line anyway).

Plus I think the big wham of Palpatine being there, ends up having more impact if there’s basically no lead in to it at all. He’s already the first spoken voice in the movie.

I also think that you could end the movie completely wordlessly, and maybe it should end that way. cutting the woman out should be pretty easy, and if the whole scene is wordless, Luke and Leia showing up could be cut together in a way where Rey doesn’t even really see them - you could arrange the scene so that she’s already turned to the sunset or something, and Luke and Leia appear and approve of what she’s done without her really knowing, or acknowledging, that they’re there and have given their blessing. Depending on how the music is mixed and chosen there, it could end up being a little more poetic/poignant that way.

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Also, I like the idea of, if you’re going to use tracked/older music, finding alternate variations on that music as performed by other orchestras. It kind of neutralizes the sort of “pulled out of it” aspect that tracked music can lend to an edit. “Oh, that’s just music from X movie” becomes “hey…wow, wait a minute.”

Also, I believe someone’s posted a version of the Death Star duel that has the concert version of Duel of the Fates mixed in and it works REALLY well. I can’t remember where I saw it here though. Maybe there are alternate performances of it that could work just as well, or maybe better due to it not being so immediately recognizable to fans.

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Agreed about your opening thoughts. I almost feel we’re misdiagnosing the problem with the opening. It moved so fast it felt like whiplash, so we feel it needs to be improved by extending it. Yes, having Mustafar deleted scenes would have helped, but since we don’t have any I think keeping that Mustafar opening is just a detriment to the film. I think it feels like whiplash because we get an information overload within a short period of time. Palpatine is revealed to be back in the opening crawl, with no build up whatsoever. Then we pan down to a planet, then immediately jump to the surface, no ship transition, which is normal for literally every other Star Wars movie. We are there for 30 seconds, then we transition back to space. It’s just a lot.

I agree that starting with Kylo already in possession of the wayfinder would probably work better. Either with him flying into frame from left to right, heading toward the nebula as he starts his journey through it, or pan down to that nebula with Kylo jumping out of hyperspace. The crawl could set up a little mystery, maybe that the Wayfinder belonged to Snoke (which makes much more sense that Vader having it).

I sympathize with wanting to delay Palpatine’s reveal a little, but it seems the filmmakers decided to push it forward because they felt that the stakes needed to be introduced early on in the film. With no deleted material to play around with, I think it would be better to stick with that approach.

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Here’s the thing about the opening, I get what you’re all saying. My thought is I’d like to see it in action. I can see why cutting out scene jumping would improve the pacing even though it’s reducing the runtime. I’m just not entirely confident that’d for sure be the case without seeing it first.

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Agreed, we’ll have to see how all options work in action to really decide.

Peace is a lie
There is only passion…

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Broom Kid said:

Also, I like the idea of, if you’re going to use tracked/older music, finding alternate variations on that music as performed by other orchestras. It kind of neutralizes the sort of “pulled out of it” aspect that tracked music can lend to an edit. “Oh, that’s just music from X movie” becomes “hey…wow, wait a minute.”

I understand where you’re coming from completely. Thing is, TROS already has a LOT of music in it that was tracked from other films, most of the time in places people wouldn’t even notice. My plans for music additions should be pretty subtle stuff, I think.

Also, I believe someone’s posted a version of the Death Star duel that has the concert version of Duel of the Fates mixed in and it works REALLY well. I can’t remember where I saw it here though. Maybe there are alternate performances of it that could work just as well, or maybe better due to it not being so immediately recognizable to fans.

Yeah, this one?

R2Poodoo said:

I loved the tv spot that used Duel of the Fates so I took a stab at recutting the song to fit the first section of Rey and Kylo’s Duel. Did some color correction as well.

https://vimeo.com/397732003

Password: fanedit

It’s quite good so I’m definitely considering it. These were my thoughts from that thread: “I was against this but I actually think this works pretty well. I’d be worried about it seeming like it comes out of nowhere in context, but maybe you could tease it in the preceding scene (and maybe even the Force duel as well). One thing I’d do personally to differentiate it is use the instrumental only version, especially as choral pieces are less common in the ST scores.”