NeverarGreat

Hal 9000 said:

The Internet has changed since the days of 2005ish. It seems that the initial reaction to this particular fan edit of TLJ has been to conflate it with the no-women cut, the petition to remake the movie, and other unhelpful garbage.
Even though I think anyone who listens to my commentary track would easily see that those are far from my intentions, I probably could have made the edit’s documentation a little more forthcoming about what the edit is NOT trying to do. Honestly, it didn’t even occur to me that such a thing would be necessary, given what fan edits have been up to this point. With this film’s reader-response dialogue, I should have anticipated the need for doing so.
I have added an addendum to the “intention” portion of the documentation, in the hopes that this project not be so easily assumed the worst of due to an intertextual sense of hatred toward the film for morally questionable reasons.
People are right to point out that most of the changes I’ve made are nitpicky and unnecessary. Of course they are; I wouldn’t have produced this edit if there wasn’t some sort of ‘critical mass’ of changes to get it started. But, while I am at it, I’ll take care of things here and there. I am not going to alter the changelist, as I could type at length for each change. The reality is that people who are predisposed to view any fan edit as anathema will reject it out of hand, and the only way for those interested to assess it is to invest the time into viewing it themselves. It’s merely an alternative; fan edits are destructive of the original version.
As my commentary track makes clear, I like this film a great deal, which is why I want to produce an edit like this, as opposed to doing nothing. I’m preaching to the choir, but wanted to reflect on the initial reception this edit has gotten on the Internet at large.

Sadly, a lot of people will have the knee-jerk reaction to a fan edit that it’s merely an exercise in cutting jokes and unwanted characters, when it could be (and often is) so much more, like reconstructing deleted scenes, bringing back character arcs, and restoring the score.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that fanedits should not be about killing what you hate, but saving what you love. 😉

This is a Paja post I can get behind.

Chewielewis said:

What if Holdo WAS a just feminist manhater who withheld information from Poe simply because she personally didn’t like him. Does this make it a bad film?

Because this is EXACTLY how the audience is supposed to feel in this situation. Angry that we aren’t being given the information by someone who appears to be the wrong person for the job. Everything about her character design and introduction is supposed to illicit that response.

I’d say it casts the Resistance in a bad light when we should be rooting for it to survive.
It might be one reason why so many people didn’t particularly care what happened by the end of the movie, or what would happen in Episode 9.

(and I think she’s not a feminist manhater, she just made bad decisions)

Just another set of ideas for the crawl:

The last Jedi has vanished.
Without this vision of hope,
some in the Republic favor
a return to Imperial rule.

With an Imperial First
Order growing in power,
the weakened Republic
secretly enlists the aid
of Rebellion extremists,
already investigating
rumors of a terrifying
new superweapon, to
find the legendary Jedi.

Discovering a clue to
his location, this newly
formed RESISTANCE
sends their most daring
pilot on a mission into
Imperial space, unaware
of sinister forces lurking
in the darkness beyond…

DrDre said:

TV’s Frink said:

Once again it boils down to “I didn’t get what I wanted.”

Actually it doesn’t. Neverar clearly feels that certain plot developments in TLJ are lacking, and has provided several examples of how it could have easily been changed, such that it makes more sense, and I agree with him. This doesn’t imply that he or I wanted the story to strictly play out that way, just that it doesn’t work for us as it is now, and that alternative story lines are not difficult to come up with that don’t have these issues.

Thank you.

TV’s Frink said:

Once again it boils down to “I didn’t get what I wanted.”

Ricpic.jpg

DominicCobb said:

The extent of the equation is simply “time is running out.” Nothing more complex than that.

If they wanted to do a simple ‘time is running out’ plot, they could have had the First Order take a planet hostage and say it would be razed in X hours/days unless the Resistance surrendered.

Badabingbadaboom done.

BobaJett said:

From what I can view of my fragmented download, the one thing that really caught me off guard were the Tatooine scenes. Was everything really that yellow in the theatres? If so, I guess Ive been conditioned by all the home releases that give it a more natural look instead of the extreme yellow cast over everything.

The home releases were definitely graded to be more muted in their grading, for example Tatooine was quite yellow and the cantina was quite red in the Tech prints compared to later releases.

JediKnightFay said:

Mocata said:

Star Wars is catering for girls… it’s called Forces of Destiny. The zero budget flash animation/doll commercial. Everything else is pure lip service. They cast a wider net with the most recent stuff and the casting is done differently, sure. But broadening the demographic is different from when they actually try and please a particular group directly. See also: the 90s toyline that featured female characters wearing cloth outfits. Low effort, low return, same old. Girls have always liked SW obviously, but that’s not the same thing. Mega-corporations cater to what will sell and what sells rarely changes.

Ive seen those. I just felt like w/reylo in the movie it felt like a super obvious young adult romance for girls. And I enjoyed it. :x Im a… NERD oh my GOD…

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy some of the fan art that’s been made of Reylo/FinnPoe. 😉

TV’s Frink said:

8.87/10.00 to paja, 0.34/10.00 to Dom, 1.47/10.00 to CA.

This is very complicated.

I didn’t mean to imply that Holdo had only two options, merely that there were two obvious ones among many that could be taken.

And I wish Star Wars would go back to it’s more fantasy roots, where we could turn our brains off and just watch the spaceships fly around space like airplanes and shoot lasers at each other, but these questions about relative velocity and fuel calculations and the mechanics of hyperspace and cloaking are woven into the very fabric of The Last Jedi’s plot. The movie itself treats them as issues worthy of our attention, so how is it the EU’s fault that the movie is being held to its own standard?

RogueLeader said:

I was watching some of The Last Jedi BTS and seeing how much practical costumes they made for the Canto Bight sequence really surprised me, especially considering how much of it they actually didn’t use in the final cut.

Not a drastic idea, but I think a worthy change would be to cut the slot machine gag with BB-8 and the cgi alien and replace it with various shots from the Canto Bight deleted scene, which is basically just B-roll of random casino guests. So when Finn and Rose start looking for the Codebreaker, instead of seeing the slot machine gag, we see all the weird aliens and shady aristocrats that they see. Cutting the gag would you give you about 20-25 seconds of space if you want to keep the music in sync, which you could use the music-only version of the movie as a source or reference.

Just feel like it would be more useful to expand that environment and help the audience get more immersed in it, much like how the Mos Eisley Cantina shows of various weird patrons, rather than using the time for an unnecessary gag.

Definitely. I was planning on doing something similar in my edit, as well as moving this sequence to the beginning of the movie.

DominicCobb said:

I fail to see why her actions are illogical (or “throw the universe into chaos” haha okay), in or out of the world of the film, but whatever, you do you. You seem to be doing exactly what Hulk is suggesting, only accepting ‘what you would do’ as correct, and everything else as plot hole, whether it makes sense for the characters or not.

You don’t see why her actions are illogical? I suppose they aren’t, presuming that she’s a particularly poor leader. For example:

-She fails to adequately enforce discipline on her ship (not locking Poe up even after he breaks onto the bridge and accuses her of treason)
-She twice resorts to platitudes in the face of direct questions for basic, unclassified information (Poe is clear that he just wants to know if the is a plan, not its specifics)
-Her eventual plan has multiple points of failure, and even fails at two of those points
-She waits until almost a dozen of the escape ships have been destroyed before taking any action to help them
-Her two big tactical decisions rely on rules of the universe that don’t make sense on a basic, physical level yet seem to work anyway (1: She relies on ‘cloaked’ escape craft which are nevertheless visible to the naked eye, and which are discoverable on a ‘decloaking scan’ or any life sign scan which the First Order should be running constantly. 2: The surprise of her hyperspace ramming maneuver relies on every officer in the First Order failing to comprehend that light speed can be used as a weapon, making it dramatically unsatisfying as a solution to the problem, beyond the larger issues with basic military strategy in Star Wars history).

…and most of these things would be fine if the movie treated her as a poor commander with an even worse subordinate, but as I said, her plans still work merely because the movie says so and her counterproductive platitudes are clearly meant to exemplify the message of the movie’s protagonists. She is clearly the protege of Leia, and dies a hero in the most epic way imaginable. Why should I care about the Resistance if it is being led by people like this? No wonder their allies don’t come to the rescue.

DominicCobb said:

NeverarGreat said:

From the article, talking about the ‘fans’:

They never call it “bad logic” when it’s something they like.

Or when it’s something that makes them feel good. This reveals everything. Because there are plenty of things I find objectionable in a given film and could apply a logic argument to, but I don’t. Because that’s not the point of storytelling, nor why I’d really find the given issue to be objectionable. It’s all about how characters grow, change and are in conflict in one another.

I feel like a creator should always have the intended audience in mind, so as best to know when they can get away with narrative cheats. For example, if the audience is invested in a familiarly textured story, such as the first third of TFA, you can have one coincidence after another and the audience will buy it because they want to be immersed in this world.

However, if you’re giving the audience something new, something difficult and perhaps uncomfortable to deal with, you want to make sure that your story logic is absolutely sound because the audience will be closely examining the rules of the world to make sure that the movie still ‘works’ for them.

In regards to TLJ, he’s saying there’s no bad logic in the first place, just people projecting it onto situations they don’t personally like. Are you just saying they needed to go the extra mile to make the logic of everything clear? Just seems like unnecessary hand holding to me, and I’m sure you’d still get people criticizing that aspect of the film anyway.

In general, I agree with him. Criticisms about logic and plot holes are some of the basest anyone could come up with. Rarely do they have much to deal with what’s actually important about the movie’s story. Most movies are not logic puzzles, Star Wars especially.

I said that the logic of the scene should be sound, not necessarily hand-holdingly clear. To use Hulk’s example of Holdo not telling Poe the plan, consider the scene where Poe learns that the escape pods are being fueled. He shouts about how they’re simply abandoning ship with no other recourse, and accuses Holdo of cowardice and treason.

Now a competent commander could do at least two things in this situation to solve the problem:

1: Lock Poe in the brig for insubordination. This is the logical choice for someone following a strict military hierarchy, and would have still allowed for him to escape from the brig and stage a mutiny, now with even more drama than before.

2: Tell Poe that there is a plan beyond simply abandoning ship. This would make sense under a Leia-style informal hierarchy, and no more sensitive information would be compromised. After all, he already knows about the cloaked escape craft, dooming the Resistance if he were to blab about it. Holdo also professes to like him somehow, even after his mutiny. So why not clue him in?

Holdo does neither of these things, and knowing she has an insubordinate and potentially mutinous captain on board, she takes no action to ameliorate the situation. To be clear, Poe is in the wrong. But Holdo’s logic is shaky at best, right at the moment when it needs to be absolutely sound for the audience to accept the drama unfolding on the bridge. Otherwise it feels like fake drama, manufactured to have people shout at each other.

Maybe I care too much about the logic of a situation, I don’t know. But to say that a character arc trumps the logic of the universe is to exclude the audience from the movie. We can’t appreciate decisions (like a commander ignoring an insubordinate officer) if we don’t know why they were made, and we can’t anticipate epic actions (like a hyperspace ramming maneuver) if the action throws the established rules of the universe into chaos.

From the article, talking about the ‘fans’:

They never call it “bad logic” when it’s something they like.

Or when it’s something that makes them feel good. This reveals everything. Because there are plenty of things I find objectionable in a given film and could apply a logic argument to, but I don’t. Because that’s not the point of storytelling, nor why I’d really find the given issue to be objectionable. It’s all about how characters grow, change and are in conflict in one another.

I feel like a creator should always have the intended audience in mind, so as best to know when they can get away with narrative cheats. For example, if the audience is invested in a familiarly textured story, such as the first third of TFA, you can have one coincidence after another and the audience will buy it because they want to be immersed in this world.

However, if you’re giving the audience something new, something difficult and perhaps uncomfortable to deal with, you want to make sure that your story logic is absolutely sound because the audience will be closely examining the rules of the world to make sure that the movie still ‘works’ for them.

Just watched TLJ again on Netflix, and I was struck by how visually pleasing the movie looks compared to the rest of the Saga.

It’s true. About the Last Jedi, all of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJhOpY7bh6s

Since I’m already invested in creating a dream sequence of Luke’s island with imagery from TLJ, I could go all-in and use a substantial part of her hiking up to Luke from the end of the film. We could even see Luke’s face in the dream, and her offering up the lightsaber. Changing this to a dream would, I think, make it less jarring that the sequel has a different look and tone entirely, since TFA is more idealistic and TLJ is more realistic.

It might be kind of weird to have her utterly reject the lightsaber in Maz’s basement only to have it in the dream, however. But if this works, it would allow me to remove that sequence from the end of the film and end it like DigMod’s edit.

By prophetic vision, I mean that the Jedi potentially have the ability to sense galaxy-changing events before they happen. Presumably, a proactive Luke Skywalker who foresaw the Starkiller weapon and its effects would have mobilized such a Republic response that the First Order would have stood no chance against the Republic. And actually, it is implied that he did foresee this in the TLJ flashbacks but it led him into exile instead of saving the Republic. I think that if I was able to suggest that these visions of the future are the reason the Jedi are so powerful, it would make a lot more sense than simply saying that Luke can lift a whole lot of rocks and Snoke should build a giant planet-destroying weapon in response.

I have some ideas for editing the prequels, but they suffer from so many intractable problems that I doubt that any fanedit could make them more than mediocre movies.

These are really good points, and I like the structure that you give for the crawl. I feel like there has to be some perfect solution, a crawl that includes all of the things that are important, but JJ really made the galaxy into a convoluted state and I’m tying myself in knots trying to explain it easily. My latest (unposted) attempts at a crawl do give more emphasis to the mission, which helps to give the whole thing more energy, but it’s still not there yet.

One random aside - in making Jakku in/near Imperial space, it gives a reason for why Rey should have a British accent.

Anyway, right now I’m exploring the idea of unifying the crawl through the idea of ‘vision’. Basically, I’m trying to make sense of why Luke is so important to preserving peace in the galaxy - it isn’t because he’s going to wave a lightsaber in front of the First Order and they’ll simply run away - it’s the prophetic vision of the Jedi that protects the galaxy from a sudden surprise attack. So in this way, the Starkiller weapon is perfectly reasonable as a threat arising as a direct result of the Jedi being absent from the galaxy.

More generally, since I’m giving Rey at least three Force visions instead of the one in the original movie, ‘vision’ could reasonably be the theme of this movie. I imagine that the Force, unable to channel its visions through Luke, must find another to ‘awaken’ with this power. There’s a good argument for giving Rey more explicit visions of the Starkiller in this case, but it might not be necessary in practice.

But as for including the Starkiller in the crawl, I can see where it would make the movie seem like a New Hope clone right off the bat. But remember, I’m hoping to move the first image of the base until after the halfway point at Maz’s castle, so it might otherwise come out of nowhere. I’ll try what you suggest, in only alluding to an impending attack.

Despite all the trouble over three measly paragraphs, I’m still quite enjoying this challenge. 😃

While the opening paragraph is really good for someone viewing The Force Awakens as a continuation of the beloved Original Trilogy, anyone who isn’t knowledgeable about Luke, the Jedi, or Star Wars in general is going to have a hard time following the crawl, and one of the big reasons for the close mirroring of ANH is specifically to appeal to people who are new to Star Wars. Consider the original crawl:

It is a period of civil war.
Rebel spaceships, striking
from a hidden base, have won
their first victory against
the evil Galactic Empire.

There are no terms here which are particularly hard to understand. It’s very basic, civil war, Rebels, Galactic Empire, hidden base. Anyone can immediately grasp the forces at work.

Even Episode 1, despite focusing too much on the political angle, has a crawl that doesn’t rely on previously-established terms:

Turmoil has engulfed the
Galactic Republic. The taxation
of trade routes to outlying star
systems is in dispute.

Notably, ‘Jedi Knight’ is present later in the crawl, but it is at least well-defined when it appears.

Now take TFA’s crawl:

Luke Skywalker has vanished.
In his absence, the sinister
FIRST ORDER has risen from
the ashes of the Empire
and will not rest until
Skywalker, the last Jedi,
has been destroyed.

There are so many questions here for someone new to the series. I’ll take them in order:
Who is Luke Skywalker?
How was he alone holding back a First Order?
How long has he been gone to allow all this to happen?
How did the Empire fall?
I don’t see a Republic mentioned in this paragraph, is the First Order the only power in the galaxy?
What are the Jedi, and why is Luke the last of them?
Why do they care about destroying him if he’s already gone?

Another attempt at a crawl, keeping in mind RogueLeader’s suggestions:

The Republic is in crisis.
Luke Skywalker, last of the
Jedi Knights and guardian of
galactic peace, has vanished.

In his absence, Imperial
worlds united under the
banner of the sinister
First Order have forged
a weapon to destroy the
Republic. To protect this
perilous secret, they have
vowed to destroy the Jedi
religion once and for all.

To prevent this atrocity,
the Republic supports
a covert Resistance to
find their long-lost Jedi,
and sends their most
daring pilot on a mission
to the edge of Imperial
space…

I’ve taken a bit of liberty in making Jakku near Imperial space, but I think this fits the style of the mission more than everything happening in the Republic and the FO being a purely incursionary force.

TV’s Frink said:

NeverarGreat said:

DuracellEnergizer said:

TV’s Frink said:

DuracellEnergizer said:

I ate out in a restaurant only once. I ordered barbequed chicken. It was exactly like the packaged barbeque chickens they sell in the local supermarkets. It’s like they just bought one of those chickens and reheated it.

So you’re saying 100% of restaurants are bad then?

Like I said, I ate in a restaurant only once. My sample size is pitifully small.

I find this clam astonishing.

WIR

DuracellEnergizer said:

TV’s Frink said:

DuracellEnergizer said:

I ate out in a restaurant only once. I ordered barbequed chicken. It was exactly like the packaged barbeque chickens they sell in the local supermarkets. It’s like they just bought one of those chickens and reheated it.

So you’re saying 100% of restaurants are bad then?

Like I said, I ate in a restaurant only once. My sample size is pitifully small.

I find this claim astonishing.

Nailed it.