The Prequel Radical Redux Ideas Thread — Page 272

IsanRido said:

Transfer all of Anakin’s anger from Obi-Wan to Mace Windu. For instance, his response to Padme’s “you are more mature now” could easily be edited to “Master Windu manages not to see it”. Cut his rant. This could tie with Windu’s distrust of Anakin in the first film, and would pay off when he gets his hand chopped off. This way you can retain a good friendship with Obi-Wan and frustration with the Council.

Very good idea, actually. If you consider TCW to be canon, Anakin has even more reason to dislike Windu.

An old member named SSWR had some similar ideas years ago - trying to turn Mace Windu into a sort of Snape character, who was a sort of tragic hero. Sadly he closed his youtube account a while back so some of his videos are lost - but there are some here -

AOTC COUNCIL
ROTS WINDU
ROTS ANAKIN’S TURN

A lot was achieved with adding different context to various head turns and grumpy expressions. He had a bunch of other videos, including a brilliant ending to ROTS that was never recovered.

I really miss SSWR and the idea of putting Anakin’s main gripes with Windu is a great idea.

ben_danger said:

He had a bunch of other videos, including a brilliant ending to ROTS that was never recovered.

Just curious ben_danger, but can you describe a rough idea of what he came up with for his ending at the time?

It wouldn’t be hard to re-edit.

As far as I remember -

• Mustafar duel ends when the gantry collapses, Obi Wan rises to his feet on the lava bank, and just observes Anakin’s burnt crushed body under the gantry wreckage as he walks away.
• Padme gives birth on Alderaan - but you only see one child.
• Obi-Wan reluctantly takes the child (I think it was implied he was stealing him), and flies away into space in Grevious’ fighter.

And that’s it - open ended ending. It felt like an actual film, instead of a prequel spoon feeding the audience into IV.

That sounds pretty awesome. I’m really not a fan of edits that remove Darth Vader’s “construction”, as I’ve never seen one that does it in a way where it isn’t still painfully obvious it’s Anakin in the OT, so I’d personally keep that in, but I’d still like to see somebody resurrect that edit idea.

My issue with the construction, is its placement in the film. Other Star Wars films don’t really have ‘destination’ endings like ROTS does - they just conclude the plots of their individual movie, and we have the set up for the following film in the crawl.

It does just come down to what agenda you want you perfect PT to have. For me, I’d like equally ambiguous sequential films that run I-VI, and just pretend they were planned and made in that order. ROTS in reality was created with the Vader payoff in mind.

I don’t know. I guess my problem with removing it is just that it’s a cool scene that’s usually just removed for the sake of trying to preserve the reveal that Vader is Anakin, rather than to actually make ROTS better on its own, but it never really works anyways, since Ben’s dialogue in ANH makes it painfully obvious.

I do see what you’re saying about the ambiguous endings though. It is pretty much the only episodic film that ends in a really obvious shoehorned set up for the next film. Maybe one could leave it so it seems as though Anakin dies, then later (after the twins are born or something) cut back to the Emperor’s ship landing on Mustafar and that close up shot of his robotic hand crawling out of the lava. I think that could be a cool way of alluding to the future without being so ham-fisted with the “birth of vader”.

The crawling hand almost has ‘post-credits’ scene potential really. If an editor was to explore that.

Mithrandir said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pilqN-Q_2Vw

I’ll leave this here.

Regarding SSWR’s old edit, great ideas and out of the box thinking with dialogue. Especially the refurbishing of Palpatine’s line now being used as sarcasm towards windu.

^THAT!

I think if you’re going to have Padme give birth, it should be Luke she gives birth only in ROTS, then edit it to where we see Yoda, Bail and Obi-wan sitting down talking, but have them mention just the boy.

If you wanted too, you could do a flashback to Padme giving birth to Leia, when Luke finds out from Obi-wan that Leia is his sister, with a voice over by Sir Alec Guinness.

[Showing Leia being born] "The other, Yoda spoke of, is your twin sister…to protect you both from the Emperor…you were hidden… [showing Bail Organa with his wife on Alderaan.] “That’s why your sister remains safely anonymous.”

I also wouldn’t show her death in ROTS, I would have left her in a coma and sent her to Alderaan with Bail Organa and Leia. She could be like sleeping beauty in a chamber and her daughter could see her, but that’s it.

I would like to see somebody do this in a edit for Return of the Jedi, or at least just that scene.

EyeShotFirst said:

Rogue One had a lot of great imagery that could be pulled from for a prequel edit.

And you mean… Mustafar ? 😉

Bingowings said:

Yoda isn’t interested in Luke confronting Vader as a military target.
He wan’ts Luke to confront his fear and conquer it. His fear is he will become Vader and he almost does by following Ben’s line of thinking. Instead (going by the sequels) he becomes Ben which is a bit of a shame.

Again, what does that mean? If he’s just confronting his fear of becoming Vader then that does not require any actual confrontation with Vader himself.

The Episode 3 Mustafar duel is one of the best sequences in the prequels and is already competently made when edited, as several people have already done. If there’s anything left to be done, I agree that removing even more of Anakin’s dialogue would be nice.
I think resources could be better spent elsewhere.

Edezio Enk’or Valorum said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O84zsjLvOfk

Wow, a lot of those new effects look decent, but that Mustafar battle looks excellent. Luckily the uploader seems to be still active on Youtube, so anyone who’s interested could try to contact him and ask how he did it.