The music transition IS really good.
Quick corrections: There’s no H in “Jon Favreau” and (I just looked this up) he didn’t direct any of the Mandalorian’s episodes. I knew he was the executive producer and the primary showrunner - but he never did direct any of the Mandalorian’s episodes.
The Guardians of the Whills suite is so gooooood.
People don’t talk a lot about Giacchino’s score for that movie but it’s really one of my favorites.
I almost put down “The Spark” for TLJ but while that’s my favorite musical bit in that movie I don’t think you could call it the movie’s theme. Same with Asteroid Field and ESB.
I also really like The Droid March as it was heard in Attack of the Clones. That piece could have been the PT’s “Imperial March” - I guess it kind of is, but it could have been MORE so. But that would have necessitated writing the droid army completely differently, I think.
Johnson just seemed bent on the angle of “I’m going to shake up the Star Wars franchise and turn it on it’s ear”. Where did he get off deciding the franchise needed shaking up? What it needs are great characters and stories.
Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. See: The Empire Strikes Back.
He didn’t “get off” anywhere, I don’t think? Not looking at all the behind-the-scenes footage and interviews, at least. It seems like the “angle” he was bent on WAS “great characters and stories.” If that happened to “shake up” people who watched it, all the better, but the idea he superficially went in to trash Lucasfilm’s hotel room seems weird and unfounded to me. He’s not Josh Trank or anything, LOL.
But it seemed like a fairly traditional Star Wars movie to me in most aspects. For as controversial as the film’s since become, there isn’t much in it that you can’t source back to earlier films setting precedent.
Anyway, the themes of the Star Wars movies are:
The Throne Room
The Imperial March
The Forest Battle
Duel of the Fates
Across the Stars
Battle of the Heroes
The Scavenger
The Resistance is Reborn
We Go Together
Special mention to The Asteroid Field, TIE Fighter Attack, Luke & Leia, and Han Solo & the Princess.
I think if the visual is too subtle only nerdy forum geeks like us will pick it up.
Who do you think is going to be watching this, LOL.
Seriously though, it’s kind of a jump to describe the suggestion as being too subtle for a thing I’m comparing to the V-hold on a TV being broken. That’s not a subtle thing. It’s just not constant
I’m not saying the effect, as-is, is bad. It looks very good, especially considering it’s placed right next to the professionally done effect that is Kylo’s saber, and it blends right in. But I’m saying maybe it shouldn’t look exactly like Kylo’s saber - it should be broken in a slightly different manner. Maybe not as constantly noisy and crackly, but more of a rolling, wave-like fluctuation.
Looking at the effect, I think maybe it could/should be a little more subtle? In keeping with the audio mix also being more subtle. Maybe less of a constant crackle? Not only would this be less work (from a practical standpoint) but if you choose which shots should have the blade sort of shimmer/undulate with energy every now and again, it’d make it obvious that the reforged blade isn’t fully whole, but not as in-turmoil or disturbed as Kylo’s is.
Right now, it looks like its’ effectively the same energy moving through both blades, and the idea here is, from what I’ve gathered, that Rey’s blade is SIMILAR, but not exactly the same on that note. She did a better job fixing the blade that was broken (LOTR, I know, but still) and I think the best way to get that across is by only subtly manipulating the image - essentially, every 5-10 seconds or so there’s a ripple of unstable energy that crackles and rolls from hilt to point and back again.
LOL, I just realized that the effect I’m kind of describing is (and this is for the old-folks here) a faulty vertical hold on a tube tv. Not EXACTLY that same effect, but something along those lines. The picture is mostly stable, but it jitters some, and every now and again it just ROLLS before settling back down.
Finally saw The Bold One!
There is definitely a tendency to over-correct that pops up here and there. There’s also some scenes where it almost looks like a slightly-off HDR-to-SDR conversion in the highlights. It seems to mostly happen in the scene where Han meets Q’ira again.
If the Bold One’s… boldness, LOL… could be tamed just a smidge, it’d be perfect. I think as a guideline for what Chase is trying to do, it’s a good one. It serves as a good example of just how much color information is still there under all that low-contrast imagery, and how much the movie can pop with a few solid adjustments. It also serves as an example of what going just a bit too far can look like.
Honestly, someone could probably do a general full-movie adjustment of Bold One that reduces some of the blue and green, pulls the contrast down just a smidgen, maybe ups the brightness just a touch, and turns down the saturation mildly, and it would fit RIGHT in next to Empire Strikes Back, Rogue One, or The Last Jedi in terms of visual appearance.
(edit: Although applying an adjustment to “The Bold One” in its release form would probably be not great as there are quite a few compression artifacts going on with that file. It wasn’t encoded as well as it could have been, I don’t think)
I think it might be the settings on whatever you’re viewing the rips with? I’m doing an A-B and the first cap isn’t just noisier, it’s blurrier and darker, too. Granted, it’s Laserdisc - there’s only so much detail to be found, but I don’t think the dynamic range of the image is lacking. The Phantom Menace is a pretty contrasty disc, and I’ve seen it on some monitors/TVs where the shadow detail DOES get lost and crushed. But in this case, if that’s happening, it looks like it’d be more likely to happen in Cap A than in Cap B.
For example, take a look at the difference between the shadows playing across Qui-Gon’s eyes and brow. In Cap A, they’re not only darker, but there are wrinkles under the eyes and at the corner of his mouth that get lost completely in the shadows being cast. In Cap B, you can see, even in the shadows, those wrinkles.
Cut Moff Gideon survival reveal scene and added as post credits scene.
doesn’t this sort of blow the whole “classic Star Wars” vibe you’re going for all by itself?
It seems sort of jarring to adhere so strongly to main saga convention and then make a Marvel gimmick the last thing anyone sees.
I don’t think that line needs to be cut - it makes sense as a reaction. Honestly, a lot of people when they first heard Palpatine was going to be in this movie reacted the same way, even though he’s right there laughing in the trailer.
“Wait, do we believe this” fits perfectly.
Bumping for a pair of questions:
Right, fingering was all they got to.
wait, wasn’t that Alien Covenant?
Well, with Reylo the goalposts for consummation were always on wheels. Before TROS, Reylo was said to be unequivocal fact because they touched fingers in the rain, and that was as good as consummated, because “in Star Wars, kissing is like sex, and touching is like kissing, so ergo, vis a vis, concordantly…”
But still, that snark aside - the climax is a mess of “cool” ideas implemented poorly. Leia should have disappeared as soon as Ben was either healed, or just after he talked to his dad. Ben should have resurrected/healed Rey before Rey’s final fight with the Emperor. Both of them should have been voices (or ghosts) in her final fight. It wouldn’t have been hard. But the filmmakers seized on the cool idea of having them both disappear at the same time, and chose the wrong dramatic moment for that disappearing to happen. It’s like they wanted to maximize emotion, and decided the best emotion to maximize was actually “dissatisfaction.”
Hmm… can’t say I’m a fan of Rey killing Leia. Interesting idea but not for me
Maz Kanata says: “to reach her son will take all the strength she has left”. So it’s clear Leia wasn’t coming out of it alive. Rey didn’t kill her.
I like the cruel irony of it, but I don’t know if the rest of the film supports it.
All of this. Rey killing Leia is a moment with no support on either side of it. In an odd way that makes it seem plausible for an Abrams movie, because the rest of TROS is also filled with cool-sounding moments that don’t have any real setup or effort put into their execution. But there’s no need to come up with another reason to make Rey feel guilty in that moment, much less having it be that reason. It makes the breeziness of Luke’s hangout with her on Ahch-To even weirder and slighter now. “Oh, you accidentally killed her? It’s alright, she was cool w/ you. Check it out, here’s her lightsaber, take it!”
But beyond all that, it just doesn’t work. The whole point of resurrecting Carrie Fisher through deleted scenes was essentially to have her make that sacrifice to save Ben during the duel. They wanted to do that, and worked backwards from what they had in order to achieve that goal. There was no way anyone involved ever thought or meant for that to be read as “so, Rey accidentally kills her.” It’s just a side-effect of bad decisionmaking and execution of their already misguided idea. I can understand why people would believe that’s what happened considering all the other misguided empty-headed decisions for the sake of “COOL” happening, that viewers might want to latch onto something that seems like it COULD be substantial, even if it was an accident. But everything else in the movie is pointing to and underlining the idea that Leia’s whole purpose in TROS is to sacrifice herself to save her son. It’s the only thing she has to do as a character. Re-editing it so she doesn’t even do that makes the whole deleted-scenes endeavor of Fisher’s “performance” even emptier than it was before.
The bigger problem is that she saves her son and then they just cover her with a sheet for the next half-hour of the movie so they can get the disappearing body effect to twin (another example of a cool idea executed poorly and with no real thought behind it). If she’s sacrificing herself there, she should disappear there. Either after Han’s memory, or just after Rey has revived him (you could, potentially through cross-cutting, make it seem like her force is flowing through Rey). But no, they just turn her into furniture for Maz to sit in front of until Reylo is consummated.
The other bad part of deciding to cover her with a sheet until after Ben disappears is now she can’t show up in the “All the Jedi” segment, which she should. If anything, she should be the primary Jedi. The movie was created with the idea of using Carrie Fisher/Princess Leia as a symbol, and then nobody involved actually did anything symbolic with her image. When she does show up as a ghost at the very end, the focus is still on Luke, visually.
If Ben had died resurrecting Rey earlier in the Palpatine fight (and disappeared without them kissing - or without Rey even knowing he’d saved her) you could have both Ben AND Leia in the Ghost lineup behind her.
It’s just a mess.
It’s not even that deep: Deleted Scenes are mostly boring, inconsequential garbage, and the DVD era bore that out pretty clearly.
Nobody really cares about Deleted Scenes because once the curiosity factor of them being easily available on discs dried up in the 2000s, people basically recognized them as not much more than what they ended up almost always being: one-time-watch fluff used to pad out the “bonus features” listing on the back of the box. The only people who still consider them to be items of note ARE fan-editors because they’re the one niche audience that still NEEDS them for their own projects.
Documentaries, gag reels, commentaries (maybe) - that stuff still carries some weight with viewers/consumers. Not so much Deleted Scenes. I don’t think it’s a reflection or referendum of “Disney oversaturation” or anything like that. It’s probably just a combination of “people don’t really care a lot about these so much” and “these deleted scenes are so far removed from what the movie ended up being it’d just be confusing and weird to plop these on the disc, unfinished and without context.”
Good news! It’s also an audio drama!
Acknowledging that there are bad fan-edits (and a lot of them) isn’t cynicism, nor is it lack of imagination or “belief in possibilities.” It’s just… how it is. There are bad fan-edits. There are great ones too. And many of those great ones were concieved of and executed right here on this forum. And a lot of the “amazingly great” leaps in VFX and sound also happened here, and are happening almost daily anymore. That has nothing to do with my belief system or my imagination (or lack thereof) either.
Anyway: there’s no secret cut of The Rise of Skywalker. Never has been. And if there are deleted scenes, there’s no guarantee (until we see them) that they’ll be good, or usable, and even if they are, it’s up to whoever is making the new edit to implement them well.
The idea that fan-editors are somehow infallible or not susceptible to the same sort of bad decisionmaking professional filmmakers are just as prone to doesn’t make any sense to me. Fan-editors can get lost down rabbit-holes and lose the forest for the trees and make bad calls based on poor instincts just as easily as any of the people who turned out Rise of Skywalker or Batman v. Superman.
It’s what makes the successes (of which there’s been many) that we see here that much more enjoyable. If it was so easy to do, and so regularly done, it wouldn’t be as exciting and rewarding to watch a good one get made. That’s appreciating imagination, not evidence of lacking it.
I don’t think Justice League has actually changed any games at all. It’s an exception, and probably one that won’t pay off the way WB hopes, either.
Whatever unfinished scenes got cut from The Rise of Skywalker would likely need fans to do a lot of heavy lifting on the VFX and sound side of things - which is fine (fans have gotten amazingly great at that in the past 20 years) but there’s a huge, huge difference in someone saying “there’s a secret cut they’re not letting you see” and “there’s probably semi-usable odds & ends on the cutting room floor that fans could incorporate into their homemade projects.”
That’s a huge gulf. And as many a fan edit has proven, just because fans CAN edit stuff back into a movie doesn’t mean they should, or that they did it well. Plenty of fan-edits have just as many bad decisions put into them as the original films do.
George Lucas got involved, multiple endings were shot, even internet fan theories were on the table, etc. It sounded like a mess, which is completely antithetical to what we saw in that documentary The Skywalker Legacy released by the studio. Regardless, I’d love to see all that deleted/alternate footage.
George Lucas didn’t “get involved,” and multiple endings weren’t shot. Multiple versions of the same ending were shot, (multiple takes, really. Again - just normal everyday moviemaking stuff) but the ending was always essentially the same. It’s a thing with Star Wars - a ton of the trivia everyone “knows” about Star Wars is basically just guesswork and rumor repeated enough that everyone accepts it because it’s easier to win online arguments that way.
The multiple endings thing especially - that was some guy on Twitter incorrectly reporting a story he saw via some other guy on Twitter, IIRC. Or Reddit, probably. Part of why it’s so easy for all this to become a YouTube scam for ad money is because even the “upstanding insiders” or whatever are just faking-it-til-they-make-it. People want to believe they know something other people don’t, it makes all the time spent chasing this stuff feel sort of worthwile, and at that point it’s just a matter of figuring out which flavor of fandom you prefer, the angry stuff or the blindly hopeful stuff. If you’re starting with a story pre-tainted with misinformation because the people volunteering for their insider “job” - however well-intentioned they might be - don’t know how to do it, it’s really easy to then further twist that misinformation to fit your chosen grift. Once everyone involved tacitly agrees facts don’t really matter, the game is on!
Knowing what actually happened is almost always secondary to attaining the feeling of knowing what happened. This isn’t just a Star Wars thing, either. But as with all things fandom, you see it in Star Wars “communities” because that same phenomenon happens in places where it’s actually important, too. This is just the safer, less consequential version of it.
edit: Apple News didn’t publish that. Apple News aggregated a MovieWeb post that is, itself, nothing more than some poor employee having to make a post out of Doomcock’s video. It’s all part of the same scam, basically. Nobody involved is doing their jobs correctly. An algorithm is posting something it thinks you’d like based on your history, and it served up a poorly written post that exists just to gather clicks off the headline that describes the content of a complete sham of a YouTube channel. The point isn’t to educate you on anything. That’s why it literally doesn’t matter to anyone involved if what they’re saying is true or not.
“The Snyder Cut” is so ephemeral at this point nobody even knows if it’s going to be a movie. It’s still up in the air as to whether it’s going to be a miniseries.
There is no secret cut. He put out exactly what he wanted to put out. Nobody made him edit the movie the way he did. He did that on his own.
Source?
JJ Abrams?
The fact there are movies that were “meddled in” (again - movies having turbulent production is a fact of movies. Was Empire Strikes Back “Meddled with?” Or just MADE?) doesn’t mean JJ’s was. I’m taking the history of the production (which is very public) and plenty of their own words (just as public) and also taking into account the man’s larger filmography, of which this is very consistent.
There is no “secret cut” - the question of one is clickbait from conspiracist YouTubers who are scumming for subscribes. It gains traction because people think the act of making movies is much more clandestine and covert than it really is, and they’re not familiar (despite watching hours upon hours of behind the scenes footage they’ve since mythologized) with things like “Assembly Cuts” so when they hear about a film having an Assembly Cut, they “report” it to their breathless subscribers as some sort of secret hidden cut that’s being withheld from the TRUE FANS.
Unless you’re trying to gain subscribers for Google ad money, there’s nothing in it for anyone to perpetuate any idea beyond “JJ Abrams made a bad movie.” He made a bad movie full of bad decisions. He’s done it before. So has George Lucas. Star Wars fans should, at this point, have come to terms with the fact it’s a 50/50 shot their movie is going to be ok when it comes out. There’s no real point in searching for excuses when it doesn’t, because it happens so frequently it shouldn’t be a surprise or a Miss Marple Mystery to dig into as to WHY it happened.
Abrams did this to himself. Dunno why anyone would think otherwise. All the evidence is out in the open and offered up freely. He’s not a beleagured artist being oppressed by suits. He IS the suits. If there was corporate meddling, he IS that meddling. He was called in to “fix” the movie, and this is what his fix looked like. He blew it, and that’s on him. It’s not really any more complicated than that. There’s no secret cut of this movie.
The problem with usenet is just that people just don’t upload to it with any regularity/reliability. It all gets trapped inside THE SPLEEN and that’s where it slowly digests for over 1000 years.
The sharing system at The Star Wars Trilogy dot com is a lot friendlier/easier, but I think new registrations are capped because their site hosting is on some sort of shared CPU thing (??) and the site has grown quite a bit in the past few years due to the amount of work (and the very high quality of it) so it’s causing the CPU to overheat/overload and it brings the site down. At least that’s what it seemed like had happened last time.
Most fan-producers of restorations don’t seem to have a problem with their projects being upped to other torrent trackers once it’s stashed safely on THE SPLEEN, and often all you need to do is find out the torrent file name of the version you’re searching for and plug that into google, and more often than not you’ll find a public tracker that’s got it available.
The cut that was released was his cut.
There is no secret cut. He put out exactly what he wanted to put out. Nobody made him edit the movie the way he did. He did that on his own.
Almost every movie ever made has a 3-4 hr cut at one point. It’s usually referred to as the Assembly Cut, and then there are cuts past that point that are sometimes almost as long as that initial Assembly Cut. And all “Assembly Cut” means is “Everything we shot, put it in the edit, and then we can see what we don’t need.”
The same logic that YouTube liars and grifters use to con viewers into subscribing to their channels (“There’s an ORIGINAL cut THEY’RE HIDING FROM YOU”) could have been applied to basically every movie you’ve ever loved. Jaws. Star Wars. Jurassic Park. Back to the Future. They all had super-long initial cuts that had a bunch of story elements that got deleted along the way. It’s not a conspiracy, or evidence of meddling executives. It’s just editing. That’s how stories are told and movies are made.
Sometimes they’re good, and sometimes they’re bad.
haha, I just saw this thread get re-upped and had come in here to mention you did those! And here you are!
Thank you for doing that work!
FWIW, I’d recommend the Rogue One style opening. ALTAIAGFFA card, then cut to an opening shot. I don’t imagine backstory or exposition via text would be any more useful for a movie adaptation than it was(n’t) for the original show.
This is the thinking I had too, you just summed it up much more succinctly. Even with the way it’s edited currently, I don’t think a crawl actually adds anything that can’t be picked up almost immediately through context as the story unfolds. It’s actually more engrossing that way.
(FWIW I don’t know that the most recent cut that makes the crawl “necessary” is itself, necessary. I think the previous version of the edit with all that stuff intact worked better)
Also, on a technical level: The title treatment with the Mandalorian logo as the meat in the Star Wars sandwich looks very off, and the font/text of the crawl itself isn’t right