Idea: Thoughts on a VERY crude 'The Rise of Skywalker' edit.

Hi everyone.

So, since the announcement of the home release and the confirmation that we weren’t going to be getting any deletd scenes, I - like many here have given up hope that a better movie can be cobbled together from it’s omitted pieces and so instead, I’ve settled into a certain amount of ‘acceptance’ and instead I’ve recently been watching TROS more and more, primarily to really familiarise myself with it and scrutinise it to try and get an understanding on what lies within the movie that can be je-shuffled, removed and re-jigged to improve it.

Now, I have very little technical prowess, so I’ll never be able to pull off some of the feats that the likes of Hal and Poppasketti can, but despite lacking the skills to deliver an edit that’s actually watchable, I do have ideas.

As I’ve mentioned above, as I start to get increasingly familiar with the intricacies of the movie I’ve started to notice where some improvements can be made and so I wondered if there was any interest within the community in me putting together a REALLY scrappy workprint.

What I mean by that, is an edit which will have ZERO refinement, simply cuts and reshuffles, completely ignoring wipes, fades, transitions and most importantly sound mixing.

The idea is that hopefully I can give the community some ideas in a ‘show don’t tell’ format, and hopefully give those with the skills some ideas to explore?

I could just as well ‘discuss’ what shots and sequences I was moving and/or removing, but I figured that could get messy or lack overall context, so I thought this was an idea to get real time feed back and hopefully inspire those with the skills to explore the ideas and see if they could work on a technical level?

If there is any interest, I’ll get to work on it.

If there’s not, there’s probably little point, as anything I make will be so scrappy and unwatchable that if noone wanted to take a look at the ideas and maybe use them ‘for real’ in their own edits it would just be a dead end notion.

I know there’s no guarantee’s my ideas will be of interest anyway, but if the community was at least prepared to take a look, I’m happy to at least donate them and then let the chips fall where they may?

Yeah, Pearce, just go for it! I think you definitely could provide an interesting perspective when it come to editing this film. I would like to see you discuss what big picture ideas you might have, or rough test clips for more specific changes you have in mind.

Dear all,

Thanks for the encouragement!

I’ll have a go.

I’m just trying to pump out a base file to edit from now.

So ROGUE, my base thoughts on the edit is to eliminate as much of the WTF moments as well as the plot threads that are either under served or outright dead ends.

• Most/all of Finn’s ‘Rey I’ve got something to tell you’ stuff.

I think I might keep his moments of feeling and intuition and let the audience determine that he is becoming force sensitive, but all of his ‘I have something to tell you’ stuff muddies the waters and was never very clear that that was where it was going.

• I’m going to see if I can cut Lando’s first appearance on Pasaana.

I don’t feel it really brings anything to the table that I can’t work around aside from revealing the location of Ochi’s ship.

You could argue it sets up his appearance later after Leia’s death but once again there’s nothing that can’t be interpreted that Poe just knows him from historic interactions that have occurred off screen.

• See how far I can go in removing Ochi as an ‘important’ character, for someone who has such a big role to the plot and Rey’s history he is hugely under served and so I’m going to see what I can do to cut around it.

• Reshuffle the reveal that Chewie is alive.

• I want to do something with Hux, but I don’t know what, there’s so little to work with here that I might have to leave it aside from reordering some of the scenes that he is in.

• My ‘big’ change is the importance of the Sith Dagger.

My intention is to end it’s journey/inclusion once Rey realises it was used to murder her parents and Threepio has translated it.

I’m aiming to completely omit the ‘Indiana Jones’ moment where the notches on the dagger so conveniently line up with the DS2 wreckage on Kef Bir.

I personally feel that the movie really jumps the shark in this moment and so I’m going to try and settle it that Threepio’s translation directs them to Kef Bir and after that it’s just Rey’s skill and intuition that guides her to the wayfinder.

I’m also looking to just reshuffle a few shots here and there across the entire movie. Just some nips and tucks as I’ve noticed some absolute howlers, that if they were just cut away or re-ordered the flow of the scene would be better.

What I’m not aiming to do is cut away any of the fun.

I personally like the ‘Light speed skipping’ and ‘they fly now’ sequences, as controversial as that may be?

They add some much needed excitement, levity and character interaction so I can forgive some of the silliness in these areas.

There is scope for some trims to both sequences, but I wasn’t planning on deleting them entirely.

The stuff I would like to delete though is silly/comedic dialogue that will ‘age’ or ‘date’ the movie. Such as most of the Stormtroopers talking to each other

ie:-

‘Knights of Ren’

‘Cool!’ etc

Anyhow.

I THINK I’ve got a bit of a road map in my head, but until I get in there on a scene by scene basis and really delve in, it’s hard to know exactly what I can trim away before I break it or start leaving unbridgeable holes.

I’m not looking to radically change the movie. I’ve always said that the problem isn’t what is in the movie, but what ISN’T, so I was really holding out hope for deleted scenes.

Since they aren’t going to be forthcoming, I’m very cautious to start taking away more from a movie that is already trying to rush itself to the finish line.

BUT if I can just try and simplify it by cutting around the plot threads that were seemingly abandoned and get rid of some of the leaps in logic, I think it’s possible to at least have a tighter, more focused movie?

However, my primary issue is taking it back to what I said about the sound mixing or VFX coninuity.

It’s all well and good if I can get the narrative in check, but it’s the technical issues I can’t account for, because I’ve got no idea whether I’ll create issues that can’t be fixed on the technical side (musical jumps, sound mix etc) so my ignorance in this regard means I’m sort of working blind as I’ve got no idea what can or can’t be repaired by re-laying in fresh score or sound.

Anyhow, HAL:-

Absolutely, there’s no sense in me laying down the entire movie, and expecting people to watch for the changes, so as you say, I’ll go for clips and at the most extreme end of the scale, scenes.

Thanks once again guys

Sounds like an interesting cut list. I like your idea about removing Lando from Pasaana - if you can cut around that and still have the movie make sense, that’d be great. I think for a lot of people that’s around the point where the frantic pacing begins to become confusing, and in the cinema I never picked up on why Lando happened to be there; it just felt like an even more egregious version of Han showing up in TFA. Saving Lando for Poe’s moment of doubt would make it a lot more powerful, and IIRC that scene is even structured such that Lando’s arrival from the shadows is something of a ‘reveal’, especially if you could add in Poe saying “General!” or similar. He says ‘General Calrissian’ when they meet on Pasaana but it’s not in quite the right tone of voice.

smpearce1981 said:

‘Knights of Ren’

‘Cool!’ etc

I also heard this in the theatre, but the subtitles claim it’s “Ghouls.”.

Edit: I’ve read online it’s a reference to this. I feel like we can vastly improve TROS by redubbing masked Kylo with lines from this movie as often as possible.

idir_hh said:

Even worse, its actually “goals”.

This is genuinely HILARIOUS!!

If this wasn’t Star Wars, I’d almost be prepared to do a complete 180 and keep it 😄!!

oojason said:

Dammit - ‘ghouls’? not ‘goals’?

I was going to insert a dad-joke along the lines of… no wonder stormtroopers have issues hitting the target if they no goals to aim for!

Now it is ruined - RUINED I TELL YOU!!! Well, thank you very much, TROS!
 

Idea!

It’s pretty easy to modify the subs.

If the line stays, the subs to this fan-edit WILL change to ‘goals’

Hence, the dad joke remains relevant.

As a dad myself. I approve and support terrible comedy 😃

Not a father, but into the dad jokes!

Stu, I like your ideas and glad you started a thread. Excited to see what you put together to share!

poppasketti said:

Not a father, but into the dad jokes!

Stu, I like your ideas and glad you started a thread. Excited to see what you put together to share!

Thanks Poppa,

That means an awful lot from you! 😃

It’s going to be sooooo rough. But I’m hoping it can serve as a proof of concept for some, and if not helps me realise a bit more of the potential hidden within it, not because it will be a viable replacement (like yours - in which case Rekindles was sooo much more than a replacement - as it exceeded the original cut by a country mile) but I’d like to just see a ‘what could have been’ cut.

That said, who’s to say if any of my ideas will actually work once we get into it, so I guess we’ll see 😃

Cheers, brother

Stu