Jar Jar Bricks

Most people do agree that the reasoning behind why they’re called the “Resistance” could have been better explained seeing as how the New Republic is supposed to be the dominant power at this time. I think your version probably does the most we can in as few words as possible. The politics behind it (half the Senate not taking the threat seriously or wanting to avoid war) we can probably leave to other content to explain. It’s pretty clear Dave Filoni was headed in that direction with Ahsoka’s first season.

We’re simply making it so that they’re known as the “Resistance” because they operate solely outside of New Republic borders, and their big secret is that they’re funded by the Senate.

The guy also made a video on his channel to speed up the Episode IV duel, kinda like Adywan. Although I’m not sure who does that specific duel better.

I’m kinda weird in that I’d want to see the duel I linked above in a purely extended version of ROTS, with no other changes besides that duel and deleted scenes. I may reach out to this guy and see if he is willing to share the source files. Although something tells me he mixed the audio in stereo since he was always intending to upload it to YouTube, so it might be a no-go for most edits.

I’m not sure where else to post this. Has anybody seen this excellent video of the Palpatine/Mace duel?

https://youtu.be/YC8VRvDNw1k?si=K24jw4HL_yBILYNS

I think the only rough spot is around 2:33 with their spinning moves, but I can’t believe how much better the duel flows by just being sped up a bit. The CGI backflip doesn’t really feel out of place anymore.

If I recall correctly, Hal usually doesn’t mind his threads serving as idea boards, either.

Broom Kid said:

• Removed the “this is a first for me” in the prison. Now he just doesn’t say anything. FWIW I guess Gilroy has commented on this, and he said “Oh, yeah, Cassian’s just lying to them, he just met these guys, why would he tell them anything about his personal life?” Which I guess makes sense. I’m not 100% that this works, but it’s fast enough and Chirrut is sort of self-satisfied enough that I think it slides by

I think we should use an AI line here, personally. I liked GAT’s idea of “It’s all the same to me.”

That’s super impressive! It looks fantastic.

Bingowings said:

What if… Instead of destroying the Endor shield generator the Rebels redirected the shield to protect the moon from debris. Everyone looking up and seeing the station exploding could be a briefly tense moment as they wait to see if the recalibrated shield works. The big celebration could be seeing the debris bounce off the shield knowing the people below were safe.

This would explain why a moon like Kef Bir would get the majority of the Death Star debris instead of the moon right below it.

The current workaround for this ridiculousness was Ascendant just turning Kef Bir into a different part of Endor. But if I worked at Lucasfilm I would have to make the retcon you mention here to make sense of things in theatrical TROS.

Oh, I didn’t know that about him. I guess I figured everyone around here were obsessed with all the intricate details like Adywan lol

Okay, sounds good!

G&G-Fan said:

He’s voiced that he wants to be done with the Prequels.

And this is precisely why I was pushing for last minute changes he could sneak in there. Imagine in a year or two from now, random newbies to the forum will post on this thread saying “why is this continuity error present in your edit” or “why isn’t this deleted scene that everyone likes in your edit”. My goal was to avoid that headache preemptively, since this is the last time he will be touching them.

Don’t get me wrong, I am very grateful for these alternative versions. Perhaps I should have been clearer about that. I’m sorry, Hal. But I think you’re misunderstanding the motive I had for pushing these things, G&G.

It wouldn’t be a problem aside from the fact that it would cut his robe in two. In real life, the physical lightsaber prop’s blade got all caught in Hayden’s robe. He even notices this and pulls it off the ignited blade in the shot. Who knows why they went ahead and applied the VFX to it anyways. Probably has something to do with the droid factory being a last minute addition to the film and they didn’t have any other shot options.

This being harder to solve is exactly what I was afraid of since I probably can’t fix it myself.

Oh, I don’t think you understood what I meant about the droid factory sequence. I’m not suggesting that you follow Joy’s editing sequence at all, but that you cut away from Anakin’s lightsaber getting caught on his cloak for 2 seconds. It’s a really small trim, shouldn’t take much effort at all.

That’s a really interesting thought process, Thrawn. It’s probably more realistic from a psychological perspective. Anakin blames only himself for losing his mother and vows to do better, and then comes along Palpatine who tells him that the Jedi don’t trust him and have been holding him back all along. It’s much easier to latch onto an outlandish idea like that if it absolves you of any guilt. Anakin coming up with that explanation on his own is harder to believe from an audience perspective since he’d be deluding himself.

I do wonder if this means that Hal should re-delete that portion of Anakin complaining about Obi to Padme earlier on, if we were to go with this approach.

I think it works in theory, but in practice the transition right into Anakin’s face like that is a bit off putting, as well as the brevity of their conversation. I’d have to prefer GAT’s version, if it were spruced up, personally.

If nothing else, I’ll agree that the scene does help in furthering their relationship together since Padme otherwise gives Anakin no sign of empathy or comfort on-screen. It does help us buy into the two of them falling in love.

See, the thing is that Anakin says basically the exact same thing at his mother’s grave; that he wasn’t strong enough to save her but he won’t let it happen again. Watching the edit recently I realized how redundant that scene is, minus the part about fixing things being so much simpler.

Hal - I’ve got a few pieces of feedback before you re-render the 1080p large version to fix those issues. It seems like a couple things slipped through the cracks that weren’t on your changelog:

• Somehow the goofy sentence you trimmed when Jar Jar is accepting his temporary position from Padme got reinstated, along with Anakin complaining about Obi-Wan to Padme. I’m actually fine with the latter part being reinstated, because it means you could potentially cut out the cringey part about Anakin making Padme feel uncomfortable without the scene feeling too short, now.
• Somehow the part where Mace Windu and Yoda in the Senate telegraph to the audience their exact next moves got reinstated, as well. I really enjoyed how their arrival to Geonosis was made into a surprise later on - it really escalated the stakes for the trio in the arena.
• I highly recommend checking out the trim JoyOfEditing made to the droid factory scene to remove Anakin’s lightsaber getting caught on his cloak. This sticks out really badly.
• The audience member I watched it with was really disappointed to not see the extended dismemberment of Jango instated 😉 (he pointed this out without me saying anything at all about it previously)

That was about it! Thanks for making this for us.

I understand that perspective much more, s88. I think I know the answer why. Most people at this stage of the fan editing community prefer to see something that could have theoretically released in theaters without anybody being the wiser. In other words, the changes made shouldn’t distract or stick out. Hal9000 has spoiled us like this lol.

When you remove Palpatine, you lose your third act. Then the movie is no longer functioning as a movie. You also lose out on a huge chunk of the main character’s arc.

In order to replace these things in a smooth way, we’d need a whole team of professional VFX artists, editors, a Hollywood budget, and access to all of the actors. The only way any of this is feasible for a (relatively) small community like ours is with extremely advanced AI. So I’d come back here in like 20-30 years. If you still don’t see something like you’re wanting at that point, then I’d understand your frustrations, but I think your expectations of us are set a little too high haha.

It’s an interesting situation because we actually know what the alternative to TROS was with Duel of the Fates. And, yikes, that would have been super duper bad imo. Besides the arc for Finn and a couple cool moments like the Vader duel, I prefer what we got 100%.

The fact of the matter is that TLJ didn’t leave us with a lot of places to go. Kylo Ren is not intimidating as a lead villain, but is an awesome character study nonetheless. The only alternative I can think of is that Snoke resurrects himself and reveals himself as Darth Plagueis, claiming responsibility for the creation of the Skywalker family and Rey herself. But as amobex pointed out, there is not enough material for such a thing to be created in a mere fan edit.

Plus, at the end of the day, I’m starting to care more about larger continuity and adhering to canon regarding fan editing. I think it’s more fun to take an existing storyline and trying to improve it in more subtle/clever ways than just scrapping it all and starting from scratch.

Spartacus01 said:

It is not exactly a radical idea, but I would still like to propose it. Essentially, I believe I have found a way to integrate the scene from Attack of the Clones in which Anakin vents his grief to Padmé after his mother’s death, without necessarily including any mention of the massacre he committed against the Tusken Raiders.

My idea is quite simple: right after Anakin says, “It is all Obi-Wan’s fault. He is jealous. He is holding me back,” the scene would be cut immediately to the moment when he collapses to the ground and sits down, with Padmé approaching and saying, “To be angry is to be human.” I believe that, with the right cut, it could come across as realistic. This way, it would be possible to preserve the most important part of the scene — namely, Anakin’s desire for omnipotence and his determination to prevent people from dying — without keeping the part where he essentially admits to Padmé that he killed children.

To achieve this, I think the scene would need to be stripped of its original score and rescored entirely. However, I am fairly confident that it is feasible. What do you think?

I like this idea. The problem is that we’d need a long shot of Padme to not make it weird that Anakin teleports across the room. There is a reaction shot of her during his rant which could break up the shots but it’s only a second or two long. Perhaps it could be slowed down using a bit of slow motion in a sneaky way.

Same here actually haha. The biggest hurdle here is definitely the Vader duel, otherwise I could have had this done a long time ago.

Which dialogue reads better to you guys?

A: (Kylo) It was Palpatine who had your parents taken. He was looking for your father. But he learned he was a powerless failure. So he gave the order… Palpatine wants one of us to take the dark throne. I’ll come tell you why.

B: It was Palpatine who had your parents taken. He was looking for your father. But your father was a powerless failure. So he gave the order… He sees us both as heirs to the dark throne. I’ll come tell you why.

A was what I had originally had in mind, and B is what I’m considering due to space limitations and general flow.

At this point I’m waiting to see what PixelJoker95 does with the Kenobi flashback in his edit to determine if I’d like to see it in AotC instead. If it works well there and I like his edit, then I’ll just use this purist edit. If I don’t like his edit of Kenobi for some reason, then I’ll use Spence’s version of Kenobi and put the flashback into this edit.

Still haven’t watched this purist edit though; it’s downloading right now. Sounds like it came together nicely!

Vader scenes are a must imo.

Grand Admiral Thrawn said:

• Mon has been resigned from the Senate for several years at this point, but the radio guy on Yavin still chases after her yelling “Senator!!” to inform her of rebels on Scarif. It’s not too major, I just assume he’s calling her that out of respect.

They were still calling her Senator in the final three episodes of season 2. I wouldn’t worry about this one at all.

Feels a bit retcony, but I suppose it does work. And there are far worse retcons in the Star Wars universe.