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ClanVizsla

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18-Jul-2021
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14-Sep-2023
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Post
#1445326
Topic
Star Wars: <strong>The Rise Of Skywalker</strong> Redux Ideas thread
Time

sade1212 said:

Here’s an attempt to shuffle the dyad revelation to be what causes the big swell. I also rejiggered the rest of the scene to try to fill in the void left by the dyad lines with… something.

My main issue with this is that the premise of this scene is Kylo telling Rey why Palpatine wanted her dead as a child, so there’s kind of two options here: a) have Kylo just answer with “he knew what you would become” and then keep “what Palpatine doesn’t know is…” before the dyad reveal, but this seems a bit like he’s suddenly changing subject without a satisfactory explanation, or b) what I’ve done in this mockup, where I’ve sort of implied the dyad is part of the answer to the question - but this does require some tweaking later to establish that Palpatine isn’t only just then finding out about the dyad.

Then again, the theatrical movie’s lines here aren’t exactly a satisfactory explanation of why Palpatine wanted Rey dead either: the elaboration Kylo gives originally is that Palps took issue with her having “his power” by being a Force-sensitive blood relation of his, but there’s no reasoning given as to why that necessitates death (and we do find out later that he didn’t actually want to kill her when she was a child at all!).

I’m trying to use lines that aren’t super crucial elsewhere. Most of their conversation of Pasaana is just exchanging unrelated jabs at each other so it’s reasonably easy to pick from there, for instance (I can definitely live without the line “I’m going to find you, and I’m going to turn you to the Dark Side!”).

Lurker chiming in here, but as a Rey Nobody proponent, I like this a lot. I think it could work to just let the audience assume that these two characters who have both studied the Force (whether through Luke’s aborted academy or independently studying the ancient Jedi texts) would know there is BIG SIGNIFICANCE to the idea that a Dyad would exist. Treat it similarly to The Prophecy in the prequels – use the term and react to it without feeling the need to explain it.

One suggestion along that line: after Kylo says “I’ve been in your head. Such pain in you, such anger. The Dark Side,” is there a way to change the pronoun in the next line to “you know who we are”? That may underscore that being half of The Dyad is what is dragging her to the dark side…letting the audience piece together that The Dyad is not only a long-prophesized thing but also a force (sorry) of evil. (I’m an audience member and not an editor, so apologies if that’s not an easy change to make, especially in a line with music swelling behind it…but it stood out as a possible tweak.)

One last thing: I think it would help a bunch if the third act on Exegol could be edited in a way where Palpatine always knew of the Dyad (but, perhaps, didn’t know how much power he could get from it). The whiplash of Palpy’s plans is one of the least successful elements of a movie with many less successful elements.

Post
#1442575
Topic
George Lucas's Sequel Trilogy
Time

NeverarGreat said:
This is so strange to me. Are aliens and clones not people to George? Besides, what about everyone Luke blew up with the Death Star? I guess as long as we don’t see their faces, their death doesn’t count. And what about the good dozen Rebels gunned down by Stormtroopers in the first scene, or Captain Antilles who had his neck crushed, or crispy Owen and Beru…

Like, I don’t want to say this flippantly, but this seems like an artist in willful denial of the content of his art.

Long delayed response but only just saw the thread (and new to the forum in general) – but I wonder if it’s possible that when George was saying “we” only killed humans once, he was talking about the good guys. Yes, the Empire (especially Tarkin and Vader in the first movie) leave behind a huge body count…but they are evil. That’s kinda their thing. The good guys, however, should be more thoughtful about taking another life.

Or this is another example of his memory, um, evolving over time, and he now thinks that good guys don’t kill humans and never, ever shoot first.

As for the topic: it’s a good point that there have been a few divergent yet all definitive summaries of George’s ideas for the sequels. Yet, as noted in the thread already, the sketches of what we got are evident in the summaries of his ideas or the concept art done before he sold Lucasfilm to Disney. I think the biggest things that tripped up the execution of these ideas was the reactive stance Abrams and company took to the prequels. It seems strange now given the state of Star Wars discourse, but in 2013-2014, the prequels were still super toxic…and all the general public wanted from the sequels was a return to “real” Star Wars. As many have noted, the first spoken line of the trilogy carries weight here: “This will begin to make things right.”

Because of that, they shied away from key details and contexts necessary to understand the state of the galaxy 30 years after ROTJ: they tried to avoid galactic politics at all costs. The belief was rampant that the Senate scenes were not only dumb but an affront to the saga. So instead of a clear setup like “Leia is still building the Republic, there are remnant Imperials fighting like ISIS, and there is a criminal/dark-side faction consolidating power”…we have a Nü-Empire that no one thinks matters but also is clearly ready to take power, we have a Republic we see for ten seconds before it is blown up, and a Resistance that is resisting the Republic but also working with the Republic but not really because the Republic who won’t resist against the First Order.

Which, uh…huh? There are like four lines in TFA that try to get all this across. And, ultimately, they really just wanted to reset the galaxy back to where it was in A New Hope because “scrappy Rebels vs big bad Empire” is the only “real” Star Wars story they could think to tell. Now, I’m in the camp that TLJ rescued a bunch of the vague threads left out by TFA and set up the sequels to become its own interesting story that echoes the other movies without just repeating them. But then TROS…well…liked that repeating idea instead.

All of this is to say: would George’s version of these stories be better? Well, it would be more cohesive and thoughtful, for sure. But the execution might have been shakier. And I think that it’s good that people have come back around to embracing George and his approach to Star Wars in the wake of the sequels…but we should remember that Lucas was persona non grata to much of the public in the early 2010s after the prequels and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Instead of thinking “actual sequel trilogy vs. George’s,” the actual options were probably “actual sequel trilogy vs no more Skywalker saga.”