DominicCobb

OutboundFlight said:

Snoke’s death was cool and shocking in TLJ, but I think we can all agree it had some serious consequences on the ST as a whole.

Well certainly. The problem is there are some of us who think that it was great because it meant they’d be forced to do something different, and those who think it was bad because they were forced to bring back Palpatine so they could do something the same.

OutboundFlight said:

RogueLeader said:

Maybe if they didn’t waste so much time reintroducing Palpatine they wouldn’t have needed two parts!

??? They don’t spend any time introducing him. They instantly bring him into the plot, don’t give any time for the characters to reflect on his arrival, and expect you to watch a fortnite clip to understand.

I don’t think RL literally means that they wasted time on his reintroduction. Just that the fact that he was reintroduced meant they wasted a lot of time on him. I mean, honestly the whole plot is based on the fact that he is back. Instead of just following up and concluding what they set up in the last film(s), they decided to graft on a whole additional story.

And, personally, I think the complaints of the Fortnite clip are silly. I listened to it, it doesn’t tell you anything. More likely than not it was either a deleted moment that got cut out because is was unnecessary, or it was created separate from the film as purely a piece of marketing.

Broom Kid said:

Not sure how to make you understand, I guess. None of those other things are happening in a vaccuum with regards to the story. Starting with Carrie’s footage needing to be repurposed, and further deciding to make her self-sacrifice the reason he turns as the justification for keeping Carrie’s footage is just that: The start. That’s the foundation the rest of the story (and most of the decisions afterward) follow from. Those are the first two cards pinned to the board, and they never came off.

Obviously each scene necessarily effects the others. I guess what I’m saying those is I don’t see how the problematic aspects of the story are affected by this one aspect. I feel like there are a lot of different things they could have done while keeping this aspect intact. Obviously if you don’t like this aspect I can see how it’d be the “start” of the problems for you. But for me, the problems seem unrelated and avoidable, even with these scenes ‘locked in.’

I also don’t understand why you’re giving them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to “not doing a CG Leia” when they actually did it, and word is the sequence was even longer initially.

I guess I am giving them the benefit of the doubt simply because they didn’t really, except for that one scene which, as I said, they would have done as CG regardless.

Hal 9000 said:

DominicCobb said:

FreezingTNT2 said:

@Hal 9000 Can you remove the voice-overs of Mace Windu and Aayla Secura speaking when Rey fights Darth Sidious? It contradicts previously established lore in the pre-sequel trilogy canon, in which only Obi-Wan, Yoda, Qui-Gon, and Anakin knew how to become Force ghosts.

Here’s a question, how did Anakin know how to become a Force ghost anyway?

Well, this is obviously only a question once the prequels are factored in, as in 1983 one assumed that’s just what Jedi all do. I think the best answer would be that Obi-Wan and Yoda helped him.

Right. If we only consider the OT, then there’s no problem hearing voices of Jedi like Mace Windu. But if we do consider the PT, we are forced to assume that Anakin learned after death how to become a force ghost. Which means someone like Windu could too.

FreezingTNT2 said:

@Hal 9000 Can you remove the voice-overs of Mace Windu and Aayla Secura speaking when Rey fights Darth Sidious? It contradicts previously established lore in the pre-sequel trilogy canon, in which only Obi-Wan, Yoda, Qui-Gon, and Anakin knew how to become Force ghosts.

Here’s a question, how did Anakin know how to become a Force ghost anyway?

Hal 9000 said:

Yeah, I don’t know though. If a thousand generations live in her and she’s trying to commune with past Jedi, I guess it’d have to be more than like four guys.

I’m not sure what the canon explanation will end up being, though.

My guess is simply that the voices are not Force ghosts. We never see Luke have to struggle to speak with Ben or Yoda. Rey’s attempting to commune with those who have become one with the Force, whether they’ve achieved “immortality” or not.

I will say, I don’t like including this in the crawl. The crawl is an opportunity to include information not in the film itself and frame the story in the way you choose. When we meet Rey, we learn she’s trying to contact the past Jedi (so putting it in the crawl is redundant and a missed opportunity). But why is she trying to contact them? The why is what should be in the crawl.

RogueLeader said:

Regarding Han shooting without looking, I played with a version where after he made the shot, he looked at the dead trooper and said, “Huh”, like he actually was surprised he managed to do it.

I’ve never liked the Han not-looking shot, but the Ben call-back makes me feel like I need to include it. I like this solution.

Broom Kid said:

Leia being around was a key part of Kylo’s redemption, and they specifically tied her dying to his redemption. It seems pretty apparent to me they only wrote Kylo’s arc (which essentially superseded Rey’s arc in terms of importance) the way they did because they worked backwards from what would redeem him, and they decided his mother’s choice to kill herself by reaching out to him during that fight would be the catalyst.

So they kept her active in the plot by recycling footage and writing dialog to mad-lib their way to the end of the 2nd act, specifically because they needed that presence to register just enough for Kylo’s redemption to pay off as intended.

I’m still not sure I understand. I’d hardly rank Kylo’s redemption as one of the film’s primary problems, and I’m not sure how you can really link the problems with Rey’s arc to his, because those problems are really totally unrelated.

If anything, Terrio’s answer when he was trying to explain why Rose Tico got so minimized seemed to hint that their initial “We’re not going to CG her” was an out and out lie, (it kind of was already, considering that training scene) and I wouldn’t be surprised if Han’s appearance was similar to how Superman’s mother is who showed up in Superman II once Marlon Brando was cut out. “Well, we can’t CG Carrie for this scene, let’s see if Harrison will do it instead.”

Well, every Carrie scene is heavily touched by CGI. I don’t think anyone would deny that. Some scenes are going to work more than others, so it seems misguided to draw the assumption that they had tried to do a CGI Leia. I don’t really buy that they’d do that, and likely the scenes that were cut were inconsequential. The CG Leia in the training scene would have been CG whether Carrie was alive or not, which is likely how they justified its presence despite the fact they said they wouldn’t do CG Leia.

So even setting aside the fact her scenes aren’t particularly good (and it’s fairly obvious she’s not really acting with anyone in the scene, and nobody in the scene is really acting with her) the initial decision to make her self-sacrifice key to Kylo’s redemption, to justify repurposing a bunch of deleted scenes, is what hemmed them in.

It’s why the movie is so plot-focused at the expense of any real feeling or thematic coherence. They approached it like a puzzle first and foremost instead of really exploring what they had to work with at the end of The Last Jedi and building from there. If your primary story question (and they kept saying keeping Carrie is where they actually started) isn’t “Where do I want my characters to go from here” but “How do I repurpose deleted scenes so they’re so vital to our endgame that you can’t remove them,” you’re starting from a pretty mercenary spot, even if you’re doing so with the best, most honorable intentions.

But this is what I don’t understand, the scenes have nothing to do with the plot. Kylo Ren’s redemption through Leia has nothing to do with the plot. Unless you’re suggesting that they should have ditched his redemption if they ditched trying to include Carrie, but that’d be a terrible idea and I doubt that was ever in the cards. They’d have just found a different way to redeem him.

That would have been awful. They should have tried to write for a single film instead of trying to cram as much in as possible (and then cut it down to a runtime that is clearly too short for everything going on).

I’m curious what you mean. I can’t think of much that those scenes did to box them in. There are a lot of choices they made that boxed them into a bad story but I don’t really see the negative effect of the Leia content. A lot of her dialogue is very ambiguous and her scenes are minimal and don’t feed very much into what’s going on. They could have done a lot with that footage.

I don’t think any of TROS’s main problems derive from Leia’s role. The idea that it lead to Rose’s reduced role is just a poorly conceived excuse from Terrio.

I like the Jedi starfighter designs, but again, why did there have to be a new one in ROTS? It’s sort of indicative of the general problem of the PT designs. More does not equal better.

The head canon for me is simple. There’s nothing in the film that says Snoke was a literal puppet. Even if he’s a clone, there’s not much reason for me to think he couldn’t have his own agency.

I doubt even PT fans could name any of Padme’s ships.

In my Rey Nobody concept, we need to believe that Palpatine ‘wanted Rey dead’ because he saw her future. Part of my way of accomplishing this will be to make Rey have a clearer vision of herself on the throne, but I just had the thought that it’d also be cool to have a Palpatine voice over during this: “I’ve seen your future. I know your power will be too strong to control.”

I also really like the idea of Rey following up “I’m all the Sith” with “I’m no one.” There’s a shot where she grabs the other saber and we don’t see her face, so you could potentially have her say “I’m no one… and I’m all the Jedi.”

Anakin Starkiller said:

I disagree about the PT not having an iconic ship like the Falcon. It may not technically be a single ship, but Padme’s vast array of chrome ships with identical interiors are functionally the same. They may not be quite as iconic as the Falcon, but they’re still noteworthy.

They’re not iconic at all. The fact that there’s three of them does not help. There’s no comparison.

Broom Kid said:

I do believe there’s more than that, but even if there isn’t, there’s still a ton from The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, The Force Awakens, and The Rise of Skywalker that hasn’t been released yet.

Oh I’m aware (although the TPM Ultimate Edition is primarily the score as presented in the film).

Besides which, being able to watch the movies with that music synced to picture hasn’t been an officially released option ever.

Not official no, but anyone interested should know it’s an option included with Despecialized and 4K77, I believe.

joefavs said:

A lot’s been said abut the similarities between this movie and the Dark Empire comics, but today it occurred to me that the whole secret-armada-in-the-Unknown-Regions bit is very Dark Force Rising. And the Death Star guns on Star Destroyers is more than a little Darksaber. I think it might be fun to catalog all the recycled Legends elements in this film.

Terrio is supposedly an EU fan so it makes sense.

Forgive me if I’m mistaken, but I believe the only OT music in the films that hasn’t been released at this point is a short TESB insert and two diegetic cues from ROTJ.

theprequelsrule said:

theprequelsrule said:

Most disappointing aspect is easy: it is completely redundant.

Really, what was the point of it all? The ST was compressed into one movie already: Return of the Jedi. So I guess I have to give Johnson credit for realizing that when he made TLJ and killed off Snoke - essentially saying “we already killed the Big Bad Guy 2 episodes ago remember?” TROS undid this and remade ROTJ - thus undermining Luke’s character arc, as well as Anakin’s (for those who consider the PT canon). Rey is now just Luke…only better (or worse - since Luke defeats evil with Faith/Love, while Rey uses lightning). Thanks to TROS the entire ST is just a reboot of the OT. NO POINT!!

Quoting myself is lame, but I wanted to add this quote (from a youtube comment of all things!)

“If you don’t stop at Return of the Jedi, you have to commit to perpetuity.”

For me the most disappointing aspect is they worked this very thing - the perpetual nature of it all - into the story as a reason for extending beyond ROTJ, but then they completely undid it in TROS.

ChainsawAsh said:

No, Luke proudly holding the blue lightsaber that he rejected twice throughout the film is too symbolically important to lose.

Plus the synergy with his earlier “go out there with a laser sword” line, and the kids’ toys at the end and the broom boy holding up his broom.

NeverarGreat said:

Using the vision effect from ROTS has been bothering me. The only vision we got in the OT was the darkside cave, and yet that trippy, genuinely disturbing low-framerate effect has never been replicated in either the PT or the ST. I wonder what Rey’s vision in TFA would look like with that effect?

Maybe for future visions there could be a combination of ROTS vision halo and ESB vision framerate.

I had always taken it as two separate kind of visions. Anakin’s is a flashforward, Luke’s is not, he’s there interacting with it. Going off that, I’d think Rey’s cave experience should echo Luke’s, but Rey’s saber vision is a weird in-between, where it’s a flashback and a flashforward and she’s there experiencing it like Luke. Perhaps a mix. I think having that slow motion effect might be too trippy for the entirety of Rey’s saber vision (which is pretty chaotic), but maybe for specific moments.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to replicate the ROTS look for awhile, but the liquidy cloud effect is very tricky. I could take it or leave it for the TFA vision, but in my idea for TROS, where I’m emphasizing her vision of herself on the throne, the ROTS effect seems kinda necessary (as it’s essentially a parallel of that plot).

NeverarGreat said:

There were far worse ways to close out the saga than with a focus on one of the two droids that have seen it all.

The only problem with it is the lack of R2!

There is a pretty good full shot of the throne towards the end of the film. Any VFX wizards here think it’d be possible to add dark Rey sitting on it as part of a vision? And along those lines, anyone know how to replicate the vision effects from ROTS?

I thought 3PO was great. Really don’t have any complaints about that aspect. But then, 3PO was always one of my favorite characters.