NeverarGreat

I see the trooper isn’t the only one that missed something.

Another day, another crawl…

The Republic is in peril.
From the Empire a new
order has risen, forging a
weapon of ultimate power.

Tormented by visions of
the mighty FIRST ORDER
and its impossible weapon,
warriors trained by Luke
Skywalker have defected
from the Republic and
driven their master, the
last of the Jedi Knights,
into exile.

With only the terms
of a tattered armistice
preventing total war,
the Senate supports a
covert RESISTANCE
to find their guardian of
peace and justice amid
the countless stars…

I think it’s really important for the story to frame the First Order as something that far predates Luke’s Jedi Academy, since the original crawl makes it seem like the First Order just appeared on the scene no more than a few years before the movie starts. I’ve also given some indication of the Galactic Concordance, which the official crawl should really have mentioned to show that the Empire was never really defeated in full.

Manafort’s been sent to the slammer.

Thanks for clarifying! It’s funny, I animated the Oscillator shaft to glow red since it seemed to make sense, not thinking about the weapon port itself. It makes sense to darken the port I suppose.

As for seeing the stream off of the star, based on your interpretation of the shadows it would make sense for the intake port to be somewhere just off the bottom left of the frame, so that the light could be sucked straight into the base.

The shot of the charging port is gone in Restructured, which I expect leads to this confusion. Something to consider…

I’d definitely need to replace the Leia reaction shot, but if I am able to use a shot of the Raddus escaping, it might work.

The radio chatter would have to be recorded specifically to make it clear that it’s coming from Hos.

The spy subtitles idea is a bit out there, but maybe I could use a technique of suggesting Republic involvement while still keeping it vague:

Female spy: “Inform our friends…I’ve found their droid.”

This is to suggest that Republic intelligence and military are helping the Resistance, giving it eyes and ears in every corner of Republic territory.

Also, I’ve just updated the first post with the more recent ideas.

vexedmedia said:

Handman said:

Thanks poita!

It’s really silly how the 97 SE print looks better in every way from the 77 IB Tech in that shot, other than the glaring green sabre.

I beg to differ.

Yeah, the SE print looks quite a bit softer than the Tech, which makes sense since the SE went through at least one more film generation.

poita said:

I’ll leave the captioning of this one to everyone else.
Goodnight all…

I’m sorry sir, will you please remove any metallic items you are carrying? keys, loose change…

poita said:

I’m interested in how the colour looks in these shots on the bluray.

It’s dark. The color is dark.

I was thinking some more about the critizisms of Restructured, and how it seems like Leia is reacting to only the Hosnian destruction instead of Han’s death. Maybe cutting her slow-motion reaction into two shots would be effective - the first shot being right after Han falls down the shaft, then the destruction of Hos like before, ending with Leia closing her eyes in grief.

On a related note, Hux says that without the Republic the Resistance will be vulnerable, implying that they will suffer some immediate setback that will allow the First Order to win the race to Luke. Yet if the Republic is only providing financial assistance to the Resistance, it wouldn’t immediately be placed at a disadvantage with the destruction of the Senate. That got me to thinking about what sort of thing the Republic could provide which would be immediately ended with its destruction, and the only real answer is communication. Perhaps if the Republic was allowing the Resistance privileged backdoor access to the Holo-net at all times, which allowed them to have a vast web of spies throughout the galaxy able to communicate in real-time with the Resistance. I imagine this is how the Resistance was able to respond so quickly at Maz’s castle.

But how to suggest such a thing? I could change the subtitles of the lady at the castle, to imply that she’s using the holo-net to speak with parties unknown. And during the attack on the Republic, I could have the Resistance listening to all the frenzied communications of the Hosnian system, which are cut short in Leia’s final shot. I’m thinking of something like this:

https://youtu.be/HRkXbTTYfSU?t=2m9s

I’ve had issues where a line of text and then an image forces the text below the image, but a line between the text and the image solves the problem.

When writing my alternate prequel trilogy, it took a long time (several years) to stop writing imitations of the OT in the prequel era. The thing is, I had to get my mind into a ‘Star Wars’ place in order to write something that feels like the OT, and it was only on re-reading it that the imitation of the plot and theme became obvious. TFA and TLJ suffer from this problem a lot. TFA is the more obvious since it’s a love letter to the trilogy, but even TLJ’s deconstruction requires the situations of the originals.

Creating a good Star Wars sequel requires understanding the essence of the originals and not just their surface trappings - what the films are really about - and then taking the next thematically resonant step in the story. When I was thinking about a theoretical sequel trilogy before TFA came out, the story in my mind was to be about how to teach, and how to lead. This was the obvious next step after our heroes overthrew the Empire and became leaders and teachers in the New Republic. The reason that these sequels feel superfluous in my opinion is that TFA avoids this almost entirely, and TLJ approaches it sideways with Luke’s failure. However, if JJ recognizes the opportunity of Episode 9 to deal head on with this issue, especially through Rey and Kylo, then it could be the first really essential Star Wars sequel after ROTJ.

I quite like that one.

Though it looks a bit like a poster for an epic Scooby-Doo movie.

We will have peace - a peace brought about by NK being recognized as a nuclear power on the world stage.

Yeah. There’s a part of me that thinks JJ originally had a version of the movie closer to Restructured, but realized in editing that he needed to pull the First Order stuff earlier to keep them more active in the story.

Maz’s castle and the interrogation(s) will be the most important changes in this edit.

Jay said:

And the reactions would be reversed if James Woods had stood up at the Oscars and said, “Fuck Obama!”

It lacks class regardless who does it or who the target is.

How dare an entertainer speak as classlessly as our president.

ForceGhostRecon said:

He’s almost better off using various different jedi quotes from the past (Obiwan… Yoda… Qui Gon) over the training montage. I think if done properly, it could really give a sense of Rey’s power being a culmination of all the greatest jedi’s teachings.

That’s a really creative idea!

I’m considering a change to Sir Ridley’s excellent version of the Maz Castle attack.

In that version Rey runs into the woods, then we see the First Order arrive, then Rey talks to BB-8 and sees the incoming ships, then Maz hands off the lightsaber and the attack starts, then Rey sees the destruction.

The trouble is that it’s a chaotic and somewhat disjointed collection of scenes, with a lot of character decisions that are made quickly or must be inferred. Rey decides to run away, then almost instantly chooses to return. Same with Finn.

One way to solve this could be to insert some version of Kylo praying to Vader between when Rey runs away and when Finn sees the destroyer. Perhaps just edit out the Vader mask (and maybe the Grandfather line), since I was planning to save that visual reveal for Rey and Kylo’s Force vision battle.

With this scene placed after Rey’s sudden decision, it gives the audience time to process her decision, as well as re-contextualizing Kylo’s thought process. Perhaps he doesn’t want to commit these atrocities, such as the destruction that he has planned for the castle, so he prays to Vader to give him this strength.

Also, it might be better to cut Maz’s ‘those beasts’ line, and replace it with the first few shots of the deleted scene where the crew is running through the tunnel and end with Han’s ‘Oh no’, accompanied by a very large crash from overhead.

Yeah, how exactly is that going to work?

He just puts the ‘before’ images after the ‘after’ images, which is about as confusing as this post.

Glad to hear that there’s progress on this! We can make as many projects as we want on this site, but nothing compares to an official release of the original film.

You can see in the Blu-ray where the gold color has bled into the panels on the left and the soldier’s pants, no doubt due to the yellow degradation in that version.