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This is my edit of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker that condenses the film into a 1-hour, score-only version with subtitles. The film’s music hasn’t been released in full unlike all of the other SW scores. So this allowed me to get creative with spots where the corresponding music was not available and instead edit very appropriate cues in. Some benefits of this are that it allows for more musical focus overall as it uses more of the original themes for the film instead of constantly relying on cues from the other films. Most prominent from the soundtrack here include “The Rise of Skywalker” and “Anthem of Evil.”
The original film felt a bit cheap with how it used familiar themes at times (though musically speaking, they are still fantastic) and I wanted to have a better sense of intention with the selections of motifs. Additionally, there was a lot of music that was released but not actually used in the film so it was really exciting to place it into contexts that felt appropriate. The sources of which are from the FYC Soundtrack and the official release.
The required cutdown meant I got to remove extraneous elements and slightly adjust narrative details without compromising the general structure of the story. With the use of subtitles, here are some changes:
-Kijimi, Chewy’s “death”, and 3PO’s memory wipe are all gone with just more emphasis on Rey’s internal struggle.
-Taking a page out of Hal9000’s Ascendant Rey Nobody cut, made Rey unrelated to Palpatine and rather had her struggle with her hatred and a fear of becoming a Sith.
-Personally always disliked Palatine’s inclusion but obviously could not remove him. So what I opted to do was just vaguely reference him as a nameless Sith Lord. Doesn’t necessarily contradict nor change anything, but thought it helped with it not being acknowledged.
-General silly stuff and extra characters removed such as Babu Frik, D-O, Hux, and Zori Bliss. Just to help keep things tighter and music wasn’t really available to accommodate those plot elements.
-Some dialogue is condensed/adjusted to account for the new pace of this cut, which means it may not always lip-sync. However, most of it pulled directly from the film with some sillier stuff removed.
This general tighter focus also makes the tone seem more even and things more dire, which I think helps. Additionally, these changes make it slightly more consistent with the other two movies (which was more of an inadvertent benefit). The film itself being so weirdly edited, as if it was a trailer house version of Star Wars, it lends itself well to this condensed format. Considering how passionate about the SW soundtracks I am, this seemed like a really fun and unique angle for a fan edit that I don’t think I’ve really seen anywhere. Here’s a link to a small trailer below and If you are interested, I’ll send a link. Thanks!
