I think the second and third version of Luke and Ben’s nighttime flashback scene are not different enough.
2nd version: Luke tried to kill him.
3rd version: He was only about to.
I really hate to say it, but I’m liking this movie less and less as time goes on.
I know, right? Hehe
Go for it! I’d love to eat my hat.
How about pepper? The guy sneezes during a cutaway, and it echoes across the landscape.
Which spoiler was it?
It’s not the kind of thing that strikes me as easy, but I am out of my reckoning. 😃
Ridley, don’t feel bad if it’s out of the realm of possibility.
Wow, I just looked this up. Look at this disparity. Roughly same critical reception, markedly lower audience reception.
(edited to fix links)
I will try editing the shot of the girl out of the later scene, but I think Poe looking over like that is a better shot for the firing scene. (It’s reused, sure, but it fits well.)
Also, we have no plans to do FX work on Kylo Ren’s hood in the second Snoke scene; it seems like something out of our reach.
I feel like the ST collectively (so far) feels jarring. TLJ is extremely well written and put together, and successfully executed its apparent goal of subverting what came before (including, no, especially) TFA. However, it does feel like a smartass taking a turn at telling the story (y’know, when people tell a story one sentence at a time).
I feel disappointed that I didn’t get the legendary Luke, and the movie actively wants me to feel that way, so I can’t fault it for that. I was someone who, when they announced they’d be doing 7, 8, and 9, ventured into the post-ROTJ EU to take in the broad strokes of the continuing adventures of the legendary Luke Skywalker. (This trailed off when they announced the EU was no longer canon at all, not that I was expecting them to be beholden to it. I figured they’d probably ignore the EU and contradict whatever they happen to contradict, leaving the EU to deal with it.) Luke is a different character here and the film deliberately thwarts everything that I went into this moving looking forward to. And… it did so in a series of 9 movies with only one left.
If your small town has an apple pie baking contest, and someone submits the best peach cobbler in the world… what do you do? I don’t know, this movie more than any previous one is hard to swallow, by design, which is good and bad which is good. I’ll have to chime in later after a week or more once I can sit with this.
Yeah, those are included in my shorthand. 😃
I assume they did the Leia hologram thing while they had everything out for the end of Rogue One.
Did Luke take his mechanical hand with him when he died?
His arm was already golden again at the very end of TFA.
I think I got an analogy for how part of me feels about THE LAST JEDI.
I feel like the grandfather from The Princess Bride was in the middle of telling Fred Savage a story. He had to leave and he came back the next day. Except, it wasn’t him that came back, but Rick (of Rick and Morty).
There is a distant firey explosion after Luke tosses the saber over his shoulder, and after his face is offscreen, a quiet Joker laugh.
^ What Ridley said about those two.
And thanks, I hope these things are easily enough done, but I understand if you can’t complete them before then. 😃
And with TLJ… nothing about TFA really fits snugly with it. I don’t think the movie wants any of it to.
From NeverarGreat, needing:
Recolored Leia deleted scene (needs it from Ridley first)
From Sir Ridley, needing:
Retimed sequences - Starkiller firing, Starkiller destruction
Tweaked audio - music brought down around Maz/Han and Snoke lines
3PO leg removal shot, sans widescreen matte
And “weapon fully recharged in 30 seconds” line - waiting on two specific people
This movie deliberately challenges what I want out of Star Wars. If that’s it’s goal, it is incredibly successful. I don’t like what it did with “my stories,” and that was what the movie was trying to do. It successfully makes me feel conflicted about it, which is good and bad. Which is good.
The dice died. Hehe, get it?
I had a whole post written, but deleted it because I’m sure someone would click on this thread, mistaking it for the TLJ SPOILER FREE thread, and be in for a sour surprise. I’ll sit on that original post for now.
I’m hoping for year’s end.
I tend to have multiple perspectives about something at once, sometimes to the detriment of taking action.
With TFA, I had a perspective that loved the sheer STAR WARS tone and atmosphere which I felt it came close to nailing. The way the movie was made, written, shot and all else demonstrated a close effort toward that end.
My other perspective was that it was aping STAR WARS without much substance.
Ultimately, these two perspectives aren’t far off, are they? I can easily reconcile them and give the movie a strong like.
With this movie, though, the two perspectives are a bit farther apart.
TLJ is a bold departure from STAR WARS, and TFA for that matter, in terms of filmmaking, story, and atmosphere. It adds story meat and we explore the mythology that undergirds the franchise. Things are turned on their heads and we get an unpredictable story that is very much not a retread, unless only retreading things in order to trick you with a subversion.
The other side of my reactions is to say that the movie seems to wantonly shake up the lore and characters in ways deeply incongruent with the message of the saga as Lucas completed it. Rey tries to take after Luke’s loving beckon to his father’s inner goodness and brings about his redemption in a bold, powerful move that I have always admired. I do not mind that Rey fails in her effort. What I do mind is that Luke and Leia forsake this idea. For shame. The Last Jedi is, if anything, too unconventional and different from what came before.
I agree with Mark Hamill in this rough reworking of his quote: “I fundamentally disagree with what you’ve done with Luke’s character. But my job is to like it.”
This movie is harder for me to embrace than TFA, for certain. And that conflict, even just by being there, is discouraging. I appreciate that it had substance with which to interact and have emotional reactions to (even like this), but I dislike the strong incongruity with the story of what came before.
Luke was about to murder a yet-innocent child because he sensed the potential bad things he might do. He had his gun drawn and cocked. That’s profoundly different from the man who confronted Vader on the second Death Star.
Leia giving up hope with her son, essentially saying, “Yeah, go ahead and kill him,” is profoundly different from Leia in the very last movie.
This themeatic element from ROTJ, which I find myself advocating for and is my greatest takeaway from the Star Wars story writ large, was punched in the stomach and kicked in the head repeatedly until suffering traumatic brain injury and entering a coma.
Will it wake up? Find out in Episode IX: Epilogue.
If it can be implied through editing or maybe changing a few mentions of her to different names, remove Maz and imply Poe sent them after the codebreaker. (Might be slightly incongruous when he asks if they got the codebreaker and doesn’t seem to know who it is.)
Get rid of Maz.
Get rid of ”Droids” style clowning around by BB8 on the casino world as well as using an AT-ST.
Bring the humor down just a notch through careful selection, avoiding jokes one’s mother would notice being gone when viewing again a year later. (Yeah… let’s go with that as a rough barometer.)
Possibly remove Yoda burning down a church and Rey having the Jedi texts later on. (No need for a surprise reveal; there’s already plenty of those and it was unnecessarily confusing to even me after two viewings! Rey can be safely assumed to go and refer to those texts sometime later.)
The last scene usually has no dialogue, but that’s not the case here. If one wanted to remove the Oliver Twist ending, the previous scene wouldn’t be any worse for it. (I probably wouldn’t do that though, myself.)
“Big-ass door”? I did not appreciate the degree to which the real-world/Marvelish/GOTG permeated language and quips. Removing just the handful of those that go over the top would be helpful.
Guys, I left TFA’s second viewing concluding that no fan edit was necessary, and only ended up doing one because a beautifully elegant idea emerged that was too good to leave unrealized. In the case of TLJ, I find myself wanting to grapple with this movie but finding not a lot to do. I’ll be following this thread diligently.
EDIT: Oh, and if we could remove maybe just one of the seventy-four death fake-outs, that’d be great.
Also, I saw the movie twice and I did not see the Jedi texts anywhere in the movie after Yoda burns down a church. If it weren’t for you all insisting they made it onto the Falcon, I’d be convinced they were destroyed. I suppose one could remove the entire Yoda scene, and even the texts from later in the movie, to assume Rey later retrieved them after the film ends. (Not a problem since we know she knows where to find them and haven’t implied they’re gone.)
I like the content of the Yoda scene, but that was a “look what I bought at Target” level of horrible Yoda. CPY has nothing on this one. If that’s the best they could have done I think they ought to have made it CG.
(It almost looks like when they’re done, the real Yoda would appear, and take a puppet off his own hand.)
After two viewings, this movie at least seems integrated. It’d be tough to do much plot restructuring, though perhaps some reordering and pruning could help.
I guess it’s a good sign that everything I consider whether it could be cut ends up being thematically relevant or necessary to the plot. (Example: After Finn says to Rose that rampaging through the Casino was worth it, I’d be inclined to trim away, “…to make them hurt.” But, it ties into his and Rose’s story toward the end.