Absolutely no hate to Ross Beadman or the people who got him to participate, and I respect that it’s probably a done-deal for the edit by now. But… man I just cannot stand the padawan boy speaking to Rey in the final ghost part, I’m sorry.
It has always taken me out of the scene, no matter how many times I give it a watch over. It’s the way he’s mixed in, which sounds disconnected from the scene, to me. Everyone’s voices are very intimately mixed in, almost ASMR-like intimacy. The movie has super high quality recordings (obviously, it’s a movie) compared to what we recorded Ross with. The timbre and texture doesn’t match with how everyone else sounds there, to my ear.
It also sounds like his voice is just placed there, front and centre. It feels like it’s on top of everyone and everything else, even though I can tell we’ve tried to soften it. His voice stands out in the centre channel similarly to how Luke’s does to cap the scene out, signifying that Luke (and Leia) are almost leading the charge. It’s just not good to take Luke and Leia’s thunder, in a way. It is too important of a scene for all of this… distraction for me.
I totally get it, he adds in an additional totally unrecognized voice, showing that even Jedi we don’t recognize are all here with her. Makes it feel like a bigger universe and all that, I appreciate that so much in theory. I don’t mind the line he says too. But it just feels unnecessary for us to add.
It feels like if this was a fun-fact about the real movie that we learned a few months after release, we’d all be groaning at it. “Oh… they even got the murdered padawan boy from episode 3? Eugh… Disney is so desperate.” Again, no disrespect, and I think that point has been made here before. I was interested in this when we got someone from the actual movies involved, but it just hasn’t panned out for me. And i’ve been thinking about it for a while and thought to finally get it off my chest here, lol.
Maybe all it needs is to be more softened, see-through, echoey, ghostly somehow. Maybe a more intense ghostly pan from ear to ear.