NeverarGreat

The inner editor in me can’t help but notice when scenes can be cut without impacting the plot, and there were a lot of those even in the first two episodes. Did we really need to meet a boatload of castaways just to see them die in the next scene, or a rock-breaking competition which the characters then ignore?

I liked a lot of scenes as well. The conversation on the lift right after the rock breaking was wonderful! There’s just so much filler already, I had trouble staying focused on what was going on and my girlfriend fell asleep in the middle of one episode.

The biggest issue however is the way this is plotted and edited. It feels very much like many other Big Dumb Shows. I’m talking Foundation, Westworld, His Dark Materials. They all seem to throw out a bunch of loosely connected characters and have them wander around until plot happens to them while the viewer flies from one meandering scene to the next, often by map. Maybe something will happen to these characters, maybe they meet. Will they? Who knows, apparently not the show.

Hopefully this show has a destination in mind. I’ll keep watching for now, but I’m not going to expect greatness.

Also, to address the controversy: don’t think I didn’t notice how wrong some of the characters look. I get that it’s an adaptation and not strictly adhering to Tolkien’s vision, but characters like Durin’s wife take me completely out of the world; JRR would be spinning in his grave if he knew that the world would one day be forced to behold a clean shaven Dwarf.

😉

Congrats!

Maybe Obi-wan distracted the nearby guards with the Force, and the cameras in the docking bay fed only into the control room which they immediately commandeered, rendering them useless?

But yeah, that is probably the most hand-wavy scenario in the movie.

Neat. And I thought I knew every deleted scene by heart.

You’d be surprised what a pair of coveralls and a ladder will do in lieu of a security clearance 😉

NotTheDri0ds said:

Add in Palpatine explaining, in complete and thorough detail, the cloning process causing him to return in Rise of Skywalker.

Don’t want the plothole of having to fill it in with your imagination, after all.

Actually, I think making an explanation for Palpatine’s return and the Sith Eternal would make their battle against the Resistance a lot more interesting and believable. Sure, it will never happen due to the Mystery Box rating, but making the stakes of the battle understandable would honestly be an improvement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5S9Vx3-QM0

New clip.

The fact that the Jedi don’t wear disguises doesn’t bother me. It makes sense that the Chancellor sent them as both ambassadors and Jedi to quickly end the dispute with this show of force. It also appears to almost work, since the Trade Federation only resists them due to the influence of a more powerful Force user driving them to attack the Jedi. Otherwise the Federation would have given in to the Chancellor’s demands.

I like the title!

https://i.imgur.com/Ml6kwR3.mp4

‘Dangerous Desire’, ‘The Peril of Greed’, ‘Cloven Trust’…Just being silly now 😉

Maybe a Star Trek title like ‘Avarice Syndrome’, ‘The Web of Greed’, or ‘All that Glitters’?

I have only seen the original episodes once, so I’m a bit fuzzy as to what happens.

screams in the void said:

Random thought / observation …nearly every prequel rewrite or idea I come across still uses characters that were created for the movies that came out between 1999 and 2005 . Darth Maul , Grievous , Dooku , Qui Gon, etc . Be nice to see a rewrite or idea using original characters as well as the ones from the OT that would logically carry over …

I had an involved outline for a prequel trilogy that used only original and OT characters, but which coexisted in the same continuity as the Lucas Prequels.

The first one is set between Episodes 2 and 3 and follows a family of scrap merchants scrounging material from Clone Wars battles. A young woman from this family finds a stasis pod among the wreckage and takes it on board, only to realize that inside the pod is an injured Anakin Skywalker. He communicates through the Force with our hero throughout the film, which is a self-contained tale set on the ship as she works to evade evil droids bent on destroying the injured Jedi. Though these trials she gains the confidence to become a pilot like Anakin.

The second story is set during the events of Episode 3 and tells of the young woman who has finally achieved her dream of becoming a pilot and serving under a Jedi Master in the wars. She forms a close bond with this original character, but when Order 66 comes down the line he is shot down and despite her best efforts he dies. The war is over, but she is now even more lost than she was before.

The final story happens in the aftermath of Episode 3 and details the rise of the Empire. The young woman finds her family again and together they form an underground movement led by certain Jedi in hiding and aided by droids from the Separatists whom they managed to protect. There is an assassin droid among them and it has a detailed plan to destroy the new Emperor. They go along with this plan, initiating the final battle of the Clone Wars, though it fails and they evacuate under fire. She is chased by a figure in a sleek Imperial fighter who calls himself Darth Vader. She recognizes that this is the same Anakin Skywalker that helped her years ago and he senses her as well. She leads him on a merry chase and manages to evade him through techniques he had taught her, eventually leading the entire cell back underground to join with the growing Rebel Alliance and fight this new war among the stars…

That’s hilarious.

Harmy said:

I’m gonna have to do some side by side comparisons but I’m 99% sure that all the shot’s from Empire are from TN1’s Grindhouse version and I have a feeling that the Star Wars shots might actually be from the Silverscreen Edition.

I said this out loud when I saw it. Though seeing the comparison it does look like a different film source, it’s weird that the best source Disney could find for a print is essentially the same as something this community had several years ago and has since surpassed.

It amuses me to no end that Disney is just recreating this scene for real.

of_Kaiburr_and_Whills said:

Interestingly enough, there was speculation back in the 80’s that Obi Wan was a clone designation, possibly derived from OB1.

I really like this and I don’t know why.

It’s great because it’s open-ended. Was Obi-wan himself a clone? Was he a template for clone forces? Was it a designation given to him by clones, perhaps as a form of endearment? Was it a designation to disguise his prior identity as Ben Kenobi? Was it perhaps his choice of Jedi name once he became a true Jedi much like Darth Vader may have been Anakin’s Jedi name? There’s no knowing which (if any) of these theories is true, and that makes it, like the Clone Wars themselves, a brilliant bit of worldbuilding that ignites the viewer’s imagination.

I agree. Droids in Star Wars should have an element of life which isn’t clearly reducible to their mere components.

The prequel and sequel trilogies went too far in reducing droids (Threepio in particular) to mere machines, in my opinion. At the end of the PT, Threepio has his memories erased, presumably destroying the person he became over the course of the prequels. However, since we see his construction in TPM we know that his personality was present from the beginning, so erasing those memories means almost nothing in practice. Further, in the ST we see Threepio factory reset (again having no change on his personality) and then his memories are able to be restored anyway.

I always felt like the original Star Wars film portrayed 'droids as a persecuted underclass that was viewed by most people in the universe as simple machines prone to glitches and erratic behavior. A droid with personality was defective and these troublesome errors would be prevented by restraining bolts and fixed by routine memory wipes, much like you would wipe a used computer’s hard drive before using it yourself. Viewed in this way, a droid becomes more erratic, more of a person, over time, and a memory wipe destroys the personality and the person. Some people in the galaxy, such as some in the Rebel Alliance, seem to have a soft spot for droids as people, but for the rest of the galaxy they are nothing more than machines. This gives the original films a whole new dimension of thematic power, and is another reason that for me the PT and ST trilogies don’t exist in the same universe as the OT.

Relatedly: Since Luke says “The Force is strong in my family”, move Threepio’s levitation to the end of the film and intercut it with the burning of Vader’s corpse as a ROTS-esqe act of symbology where Vader’s power passes to his firstborn ‘son’.

The Oscillator confrontation was my first attempt at that sort of Force power. The Poe interrogation was done after that scene and I feel it was a lot more successful because it was better integrated into the surround mix, but for V1 I never went back and adjusted the Oscillator scene. For V2 I will definitely be making it more subtle and well-integrated. I don’t want to remove it completely, because although it feels obvious that Kylo is using some sort of power to interrogate Han based on the Poe and Rey interrogations in the edit, it wasn’t obvious in the original film at all (at least to me) and came off as psychopathic rather than conflicted.

I will also take another look at Jakku 😃

Not much to report lately. I’ve had this on the back burner while working on some other projects, but the plan for everything in V2 is rather straightforward (unlike V1) so it should come together fairly quickly once I get back to working on it.

Eddie has provided new lines for the Resistance officer and I have a plan for the trooper dialogue concerning Hangar 718. I’m contemplating a change to TR-8R’s dialogue as well in order to jump start Finn’s concern about Starkiller base, but that would depend on whether axlanian would be willing to entertain the idea; I’m happy with the existing dialogue in either case.

Then of course there’s the visual effects side of the workload, and that will probably be the biggest bottleneck.

So that’s where the project stands. I will announce when there’s something to show 😃

hero said:

Just got done watching this edit - WOW. Superb work. Genuinely a good film. Really enjoyed the additional restructuring and edits you made - bravo. Somehow the characterisations work so much better.
This is 100% the to version of the film now for me.

Thank you!

Thank you for your continued work on this project (over ten years, wow!). I always enjoy reading your updates, since these are issues I never would have considered.

The problem with putting the training before Palpatine’s Office is that Star Wars almost always follows a strict continuity of introducing characters where they are introduced and themselves meet or otherwise introduce more characters. The only place in 1-6 where this doesn’t happen is Vader on the Death Star in ROTJ transitioning directly to the droids, but even then a transition was scripted and filmed.

It also seems strange that Anakin would sense Padme’s distress and not even comment on it.

Nice avatar, ya frackin toaster 😉