NeverarGreat

I was thinking the night before seeing TROS about a more radical version of this edit where I cut out the opening scene entirely and maybe a few other little scenes in an attempt to have a more gradual, atmospheric opening. It’s something I’ve wanted to do ever since making the mockup of the false starfield open but the first scene feels very important for a lot of characters. It is the introduction of Poe, Tekka, Kylo, and Finn. However, most of these character introductions are problematic in this scene and create slightly or mostly false impressions of future character arcs:

Poe - He’s fairly one-note throughout the film, so cutting his scene here doesn’t feel too destructive except that it removes even more of his character minutes.

Tekka - He dies in this scene and isn’t mentioned afterwards, so cutting this character doesn’t really hurt the film.

Finn - This is important stuff for him, but I’d argue that beginning his journey with shock at the death of a comrade paints a picture of a trooper now driven by conscience and compassion and refusing to take any life, especially those of his brothers and sisters in arms. This is proven false again and again throughout the film so taking out this moment might do more good than bad. I think the moment of him refusing to fire on the civilians is necessary to keep, but I have an idea about that.

Kylo - This edit paints Kylo in a more conflicted light. As such his cutting down of an unarmed civilian and ordering the murder of the whole village makes him far too villainous, especially considering later events in the saga. Other than Tekka’s murder, Kylo doesn’t kill anyone onscreen until Han so it’s more plausible that he will turn.

Removing this scene allows the edit to open on Rey and her life. BB-8 is a total mystery to the audience when Rey finds him, and only in the following interrogation do we learn of his importance. Cut from Rey and BB-8 walking home to the house at night, where BB-8 looks into the sky and bring in the opening shot of the film of the destroyer eclipsing the moon, sans transports. The interrogation could be expanded to include some voiceover from Tekka establishing the map and its importance. Cutting back to BB-8 at the house after the interrogation wouldn’t feel so out of place if it merely bookends the interrogation, then we move into the rescue and our first image of Finn.

As for Finn’s moment on the firing line, it could be placed after Finn’s big confession in Rey’s Force vision after the image of Luke and R2. Using the footage from the trailer without the added rain, move from that orange and firey scene to the burning village and Finn refusing to fire on the villagers. This would segue more cleanly into Rey’s past in the desert.

idir_hh said:

Is there any way of reinstating Hux’s speach?

^If you are referring to Hux’s rally about the death of the Republic, it’s still there, just after Han and Leia have their talk.

That’s actually not a bad idea.

That’s very cool, but isn’t it kind of nullified with Maz’s line ‘It will take the rest of Leia’s power to do such and such’?

DominicCobb said:

Nev, aren’t you using lines from Lego Star Wars in your edit? Did you just pull from what’s available on Youtube?

I am.

But the audio came from fishmanlee, I believe. I recall asking for the TFA soundtrack and he asked if I would like the Lego game audio as well.

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/JOHN-WILLIAMS-Star-Wars-Episode-VII-The-Force-Awakens-Complete-Score-Edit-Some-SFX-REVISED-VERSION-AVAILABLE/id/49168

At least, I think that’s what happened. You could ask him and if he doesn’t have them available just shoot me a PM.

One thing that I really like about this movie is that it confirms this lorecrafting that I did in early 2018

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/This-Snoke-Theory-is-Wrong/id/58545

While I didn’t think they’d go the Palpatine angle, they still had the core of the idea for this which makes a lot of sense out of the Sith’s nonsense rule of two.

I’m sure it’s not a particularly popular aspect of the movie with vast swaths of the fanbase, such as those who liked Anakin as the actual chosen one and those who disliked bringing back Palpatine. That probably accounts for most people, actually. But I liked it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsEkLGQthMk

And even though this movie is so wonderful in its shlockiness…

https://youtu.be/fpRTyRdAwxM?t=20

I FORGOT TO MENTION THE SNOKE CLONES IN A VAT!

That was the best part.

I’m going to let this film sit a while before making a definite plans, but as it stands now this movie feels perfect. Even the trash opening is important to set the expectation for what is to come - a madcap rocket of maximum shlock. It’s kind of wonderful in that way, and I’ve been laughing at its beautiful absurdities for hours now.

This high will surely end sooner or later, but for now, I’m going to enjoy this film no edit required.

Perhaps, I never read those though.

Hal 9000 said:

JEDIT: (Regarding NeverArGreat)

Spot on. Thanks for writing it.

You’re welcome. Despite the snark I really did enjoy it. It felt like a fairly good old EU novel, and that was far more than I expected.

I saw this early this morning on two hours of sleep and I haven’t had any more, so I’m definitely in a fit state to talk about this film.

I liked it.

The crawl lands like a passenger airline on an L.A. expressway and crashes into the first scene, killing everyone. I don’t know if Kylo was fighting the Knights of Ren or helping them kill some other people and I don’t think it matters. What matters is that while rooting around in the garbage behind Rian’s apartment JJ also managed to rescue the pieces of Kylo’s mask and welded them back together with his own blood. An alien tells R2 via SATA cable that Sheeve is back and has to outrun some TIE fighters, but makes them so mad that they forget they can’t go into Hyperspace for a minute, but they can’t catch the Falcon because it has gone so fast that it is on fire.

Meanwhile Rey is in the jungle with too much Force power and little by little is going insane.

Everyone decides to get out of the jungle and go to the desert to find a magical D4 or a dagger or something that leads to Sheeve. Rey gets a nice necklace from an alien and then has it immediately stolen by Kylo despite him not being there, and who is apparently jealous that someone else is giving her jewelry. They find the Horcrux after conquering Devil’s Snare and befriending the Basilisk, but it is stolen by some bad Quiddich players who also make off with its bearer, Chewbacca. Rey shoots spells at them and blows them up and is sad about killing Chewie, whom she doesn’t sense in the transport during any of this despite that being something she can do effortlessly.

Kylo flies straight at Rey with an entire spaceship and loses. This is the most normal part of the scene.

Anyway, C-3PO needs to nuke his hard drive to read some Black Speech and to do that they need a hacker, so they go to a planet where the First Order is harvesting babies to meet Poe’s old buddy Mask Lady and her puppet friend. Mask Lady has a medallion that makes the First Order act extra stupid for one scene and gives it to Poe, who immediately spends it, and this makes Hux stupid for the rest of his dumb life. It also allows our heroes to rescue Chewie, who was only dead inside, and also steal the dagger from the prop department before they could finish it.

The Falcon crashes onto Endor because it has no landing gear and is too tired at this point to hover.

Rey goes to the complex of Extremely Expensive and Devastating Distractions (E2-D2) and is distracted by an evil version of herself into rolling a 1 on her magic D4, causing it to be picked up by Kylo who then fights her. She rolls another 1, and is defeated. Leia must spend her last action on an E2-D2, and when Kylo rolls to save he is defeated as well. Rey has a free action which she uses to heal Kylo, then takes the D4 and Kylo’s second spaceship to Luke’s island, where it bursts into flames. It is unclear whether this is simply how Kylo’s spaceships are designed to land.

Luke demands that Rey leave and throws his gross, waterlogged spaceship at her.

Rey finally faces Sheeve, champing at the bit to finally kill this monster. Sheeve gleefully cackles that he wants Rey to kill him so that his consciousness may flow into her and he will be immortal, and then checks himself with a ‘shit, did I really say that out loud’ expression. This ruins his whole plan.

Meanwhile, Rose, Finn and Jannah.

Meanwhile there are many Star Destroyers and, in keeping with their namesake, each one is capable of destroying an entire planet.

Meanwhile, the Falcon visits approximately 1,138 planets on its newly installed Recruitment Drive.

Kylo reminds everyone that he is still in the movie but he has foolishly thrown away his lightsaber after hallucinating an image of his dead father. Luckily, Rey has an extra one from where Luke was throwing things at her, and distracts the editor long enough to phase between locations and give it to him. They both face Sheeve, who drains them of their will to live and then gets to work on their life force. He throws Kylo down a big pit, knowing that this will surely kill him.

There is a cavalry charge on top of a spaceship. This is the most normal part of the scene.

Meanwhile, Klaud.

I forget how Sheeve dies. I blame Klaud. Maybe Klaud did it. Maybe he did all of this. I don’t know anymore.

Rey dies. Kylo emerges from the pit and brings Rey back to life at the cost of his own. Rey, upon awakening and seeking Kylo dead, brings Kylo back to life at the cost of her own. This continues for some time. They kiss. One of them dies, I don’t care which.

At the end there is a funeral for Snap Wexley and he posthumously gets the medal intended for Chewie. There are cheers and warm embraces, all live in the light of a new day for this, the galaxy reborn. The yoke of the First Order, which has lain heavy across much of the galaxy for a few weeks, has been lifted. The Rule of Palpatine, which lasted for thirty years and eight hours, is ended forever. Bask in this light, galaxy of peace.

Rey gets a yellow lightsaber. The camera falls to the ground, where it continues recording for several seconds.

Thank you for making this topic. I also take issue with much of JJ’s style, to the point that many scenes in TFA (and I’m sure in TROS which I see tomorrow) don’t feel like they share any of the previously established cinematographic language of Star Wars.

Take for example the opening scene of TFA. We begin with the classic pan down on a moon or two which are quickly eclipsed by a Star Destroyer belching landing craft. This is a strong visual in keeping with the established style of Star Wars, but almost immediately we get a flashing, shaky series of shots depicting the new Stormtroopers. Compare this introduction with the introduction of the Stormtroopers in ANH; There are similar flashes but happen due to explosions and laser blasts, and there are several cuts but they are all focused on the back and forth between the Troopers and Rebels. So we see that this shot intends to mimic the action of the original without the underlying substance.

Moving on to the shot of BB-8, and here we begin to see how dynamic JJ’s camera is in comparison to those of the other Star Wars canon. The camera spins around the droid and zooms in on its head so that it takes up most of the frame, and then pans up as the droid scoots away. This could have been several static shots in ANH.

Inside the hut of Lor San Tekka, the camera begins in closeup on the map and continues in medium/closeup shots throughout. The color of this is saturated, with bright blue lights of unknown purpose shining through holes in the structure.

Over the rest of the scene, this language is repeated. Dynamic moving cameras of characters running or fighting, shaky cam, vivid splotches of moving color, closeups.

So what is the effect of these techniques? Again, compare this to ANH. Even in the Tantive the camera was often locked down to static shots, and the momentum often came from the quickness of the cuts and the movement of the actors themselves. There were occasional tracking or dolly shots focused on characters walking down hallways, but the action largely took place in single locations with tripod camerawork. One effect of this was that the viewer’s eye was not drawn to a subject by the camera itself but by the subject’s own action. Thus a viewer could choose to look instead at the set or the details of costuming without hindrance. This was a more documentary style, more agnostic about the purpose of a scene.

In contrast, JJ’s cinematography leaves no doubt as to the intention of a scene. Visual stimulus is maximized in an attempt to generate excitement through the style of the director instead of the details of the world or the performance of the actors or the story of the film. And this is why I feel that this style is fundamentally at odds with Star Wars - this universe is about immersion in a detailed world to the point that one hopefully forgets about the existence of the camera and absorbs the story and world on its own terms. In ANH the camera becomes a window into the world, whereas JJ’s camera is merely a camera.

I have honestly never seen TFA on the bottom of a ranking like that, or for that matter below the first two prequels.

JKMaxx said:

I got a chance to sit down and watch the whole edit last night, and I thought it was a treat! I can’t offer technical feedback in the way ziggyonice did, but I will offer some of the thoughts I had while watching.

From the jump I loved the Jakku regrade, it does a lot to showcase the idea of Jakku as a kind of purgatory. Just the simple brighter colors make it look much more hot and miserable, so when Rey keeps insisting she has to go back there’s even more of a feeling of “Why would you ever want to?” to it. In addition with the scenes of her scavenging and fighting and tinkering, it really hammers home that this is really all she’s been doing all day long for most of her life.

So glad you like the grade. I was worried that it might be too bright (and in some cases I’m still planning on toning down the highlights due to clipping issues) but overall I’m pleased.

I particularly enjoyed the darker undertones to Rey as well, and the whispers/voices that accompany her Force feats definitely shine. She’s obviously a person with issues and, as Snoke and Kylo said, a lot of latent ability, and especially having just watched the rest of the saga and Clone Wars, Rebels and so on, it’s clear cut that she is on a dangerous path. She has no formal training yet already taps so deeply into these emotions and into her buried feelings of being left behind in order to get ahead. I think this leads quite well into Luke’s horror in TLJ when he accuses her of going straight to the dark. I’ll be seeing TROS this evening, but I’m hoping that it will continue the themes of Rey being far closer than she knows to falling. I personally never really clicked with the complaints of Rey being a Mary Sue, but I do think were someone who does to watch this edit they might feel that there’s better reason for her to do the things she does.

Yeah, my intention to give her more reason for her power was actually secondary. The primary reason I wanted much of her power to flow from a dark place was because it gives her a much stronger internal struggle, as if she’s well-composed on the outside and outwardly quite competent but at the cost of burying her lifelong traumas beneath the surface. All this existed in the original of course, but the Dark Side angle helps to throw it into sharper relief.

I absolutely loved the Leia and Han voiceovers when Han touches Kylo’s saber, especially after coming off of the psychometry in Jedi: Fallen Order and seeing Kylo dig around in Poe and Rey’s minds, and with the SFX used. It plays out so naturally and matches up so well with the expressions on Kylo’s face that it feels like a part of the original scene. Bravo on that! I do agree that Leia seems to react pretty late.

That’s quite a relief to hear, it was one of the changes I was most worried about. The Leia reaction unfortunately must stay where it is unless I restructured that section back to the way it was which would leave a hole between the Oscillator X-wing damage and the end of the lightsaber fight.

I remember reading somewhere in this thread that you intended to place in some kind of voice that names Hosnian Prime when Starkiller Base is preparing to fire, and I definitely think that would help since we as viewers have no reason to know that isn’t Coruscant unless we’ve read some EU material. Likewise, the transition from Takodana to D’Qar is not immediately apparant, in my opinion. I don’t believe it’s ever stated that they’ve gone to a different planet, and I remember when I first watched TFA I thought that it was a different place on the same planet as Maz’s castle. Some kind of throwaway line to contextualize that, maybe just a simple “Welcome to planet D’Qar” or something, might go a long way on that matter, more so than a wipe transition and suddenly we’re somewhere completely different that also is green and pretty.

I wonder if regrading Takodana to sunset will help with that transition. In Restructured I had to cut a lot of the establishing shot of D’Qar for music purposes, so that certainly doesn’t help.

As for naming the Hosnian system, the only time it is mentioned is by Poe in the original, which was of course cut. I’ve included a faint version of that line in the final scenes of the film (has anyone picked up on that yet?) but I agree that it needs to happen before it is destroyed. There’s just no way I can see of doing it short of recording new dialogue.

In all, I feel absolutely that your hard work has paid off in spades, and that you’ve already made the definitive fan edit of The Force Awakens for hardcore fans and to show to newbies alike. I believe that your future plans such as new alien subtitles, voiceover for TR-8R, Phasma triggering the silent alarm and so on will only serve to make it even better. Once more, bravo!

Thank you very much!

dgraham414 said:

Only have been able to watch half of it but I must say the change in color when Kylo first takes off his mask is amazing and helps that scene so much!

Excellent. I’m sure someone will still say it’s too dark and I’ve gone and crushed the black levels (it’s all true) but I think the benefit to a more shadowed and frightening Kylo is worth it.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m going to watch both. On the one hand, a film so horrifying in conception and execution that I will question my very existence, and on the other, Cats.

RogueLeader said:

I have only gotten to the Falcon escape, but I do have some thoughts.

I think Jakku regrade was a massive success. I genuinely love this look for Jakku. Some might find it too bland, but that feeling will make seeing the green of Takodana much more cathartic, imo.

I do think the BB-8 night shots are rather quick as well, but I get why it cuts to him at that point. I did have another thought though. Since we moved Ren’s line “I’ll leave that to you” Maybe in its place you could put something like, “Kill the pilot.” Poe gave them the information they need, he is no longer useful. Maybe when Finn walks in, he could say, “The Captain wants the prisoner.” So the audience might think he is about to be executed, maybe by Captain Phasma on Hux’s orders, then it turns out to be Finn trying to escape. Maybe that could help the transition between those two scenes?

I’ll have to comment on your other questions as I get farther into the edit.

That’s a great idea.

PM sent^ 😃

I’m interested in hearing everyone’s thoughts when they get a chance to see it, particularly the general feeling of the edit in its entirety. Does the darker version of Rey come through? Is Kylo sufficiently conflicted to be compelling in his evil? Does the dramatic increase in visions/voices hinder or help the narrative? Does the pacing flow well from scene to scene? After spending so long with a giant lens to the film it can be difficult to step back and see the full effect.

Where they keep the ladders on the various small fighters in this universe is something that bothers me late at night.

That’s eerily good.

DuracellEnergizer said:

NeverarGreat said:

Anakin Starkiller said:

Anyone wanna try deepfaking a young Hayden Christensen onto Jake Lloyd to make for a smoother transition between films?

That sounds like a healthy 1% chance of success, 99% chance of horrible nightmare fuel.

DEWIT

It’s not the Jedi way.

Anakin Starkiller said:

Anyone wanna try deepfaking a young Hayden Christensen onto Jake Lloyd to make for a smoother transition between films?

That sounds like a healthy 1% chance of success, 99% chance of horrible nightmare fuel.

I think it was 54 or something just a little while ago, so it’ll probably go higher. Still, not surprising for JJ and his apparent inability to tie a bow on his own mystery box.