NeverarGreat

It will be interesting to look back on our first impressions of TFA in a decade.

I liked the podrace, though it could stand to be shortened. Those extra shots are so baffling, because they clearly don’t fit in with most of the rest of the footage. The CG in those shots is worse than in the rest of the film. Even so, it’s one of the more insidious changes to a Star Wars movie since at least most people are aware that the OT was changed. Very few people even realize that TPM has gotten worse with each iteration (with the possible exception of Creepy Puppet Yoda).

Here’s the cutaway I’m thinking of when the agent reports BB-8 at Maz’s Castle:

https://vimeo.com/170422931

Password: Kylo

I really wish I had my copy of TFA to examine, but alas, I have lent it to my parents.

Anyway, it makes very little sense for Han and Chewie to gaze up at a Star Destroyer with approaching fighters and not at least attempt to get to the Falcon. Even my previous suggestion of just showing the star destroyer/destroyer behind an exploding ship makes no sense from this perspective.

I propose a more radical series of events. When our heroes first arrive at Maz’s castle, the First Order spy could report to Kylo Ren, and then we cut to an unused shot of him (perhaps the one cut where he’s on the Star Destroyer viewing the superlaser) and overlay some new dialogue where he orders the spy to plant a thermal detonator on the first ship scheduled to leave the castle. It would be better if Hux were to say this since he doesn’t care if BB-8 is destroyed, but Kylo has the advantage of a mask and a muffled voice. This provides some tension during the ensuing scenes. The exploding ship never has to be seen, just the sound of a ship taking off and its destruction during Finn’s entry onto the transport, causing him to turn around. Then the rest of the scenes can happen pretty much as structured.

I was being a bit flippant about those reviews, since although I do enjoy them, for me they’re intended to induce a state of cathartic dissatisfaction with the prequels instead of explaining how exactly the plot doesn’t work. I haven’t watched Episode 2 in its entirety in quite a while, but I don’t recall that they went into any depth about Dooku or Sypho-dias or Palpatine’s thought process for allowing the Republic to get the clones.

When I try to open certain threads, I get this error message:

😦

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Right now it’s just for some threads. Others I can open without issue.

I’m pretty sure most people on this site have seen the Plinkett reviews, and while they’re great, they don’t really go much further than pointing out things that ‘don’t make no sense’.

Possessed said:

I don’t presume-

BUT YOU DO! REVEALED YOUR OPINION IS!

…

I don’t have anything to contribute.

JEDIT: Jealous Gods, from Poets of the Fall. It’s pretty good. Better than Twilight Theater anyway.

Well that’s disappointing. What a waste of Christopher Lee.

SilverWook said:

Jango doesn’t realize there’s a tracking device on his ship until he’s near the planet, and once he believes Obi Wan was asteroid chow, may have assumed that the Jedi had no time to report his position.

Right, but he technically doesn’t even need to know what his part in the plan is. Dooku could have told him ‘Jango, if the Jedi start snooping around, come find me on Geonosis.’ He says to the Geonosians that the Republic is ‘treacherous’ for raising an army, but he’s all smiles about it with Sidious.

The whole plot is just so convoluted, I would just as much buy that Palpatine had orchestrated every little event in the movie as buy that the Jedi starting the war was only the result of Obi-wan’s investigation.

So why would Dooku erase a whole star system from the archives? He is obviously aware that you can’t actually do that since Hyperspace navigation requires precise calculations. We can’t have ships flying into missing planets or being flung wildly off course, so gravitational effects must remain. If the reason was that he didn’t want the Jedi to know about the clone army, I’d argue that a more effective way of doing that is not drawing attention to yourself by deleting a planet from the Jedi archives, a planet that people know about and that is home to a highly technologically sophisticated and wealthy species. If Dexter had just said that the dart had come from Kamino, it’s possible that Obi-wan would have simply assumed that was where the bounty hunter bought his weapons, not where disgruntled Spice Miners on the Moon of Naboo had hired their bounty hunter. That was after all the leading theory of the Jedi as to the source of the assassination attempts, so the Jedi could have demanded that Obi-wan go investigate that moon instead of Kamino. It is only after they discover the star’s deletion that Yoda gets suspicious and demands that Obi-wan take the trip.

If I were making bets, I’d say that there was a good chance that Dooku deleted the star system on orders from Palpatine, or even that Palpatine deleted the system in order to draw attention to the absence.

Another thing, why does Jango lead Obi-wan right to Geonosis? Unlike Kamino, this system hasn’t been suspiciously deleted from the archives, so if it was Dooku who wanted to delete planets to keep things secret, he forgot this big important one where they’re literally planning to build the Death Star. Perhaps its role in the war happened after Dooku could no longer access the archives. In any case, why did Jango go there? He knows he was just tracked down by a Jedi, does he think that he’ll be safe on Geonosis? Why not just go anywhere else in the galaxy that’s not the secret base of your employer? It’s the same problem that happened in ANH, where the Falcon could have gone anywhere else and gotten rid of the tracking device.

My guess is that Dooku fully intends for the Jedi to find Kamino and Geonosis, and although he is working for Palpatine, he secretly plots the overthrow of Palpatine and the defeat of the Republic. He’s an idealist after all, and though he goes along with Palpatine’s plan, he believes that he only does it to get close enough to Palpatine to put the proverbial knife in his back. So in Episode 3, perhaps he was the one who, alone, led the attack on Coruscant to capture and perhaps kill the Chancellor.

Perhaps the Clone Wars explain the character of Dooku, but I DON’T WATCH IT.

It’s an interesting question. I suppose we should ask ‘important to whom?’

For people who want to watch the original film but are opposed to acquiring any fan reconstruction or preservation, an official release is absolutely more important to them than Despecialized.

For people who just want to watch the original film regardless of where it comes from, Despecialized is just as important as an official release.

For people who appreciate the work of dedicated fans more than profit-minded studio execs, Despecialized is more important than an official release.

I haven’t discounted the prospect of doing them, but I’ll decide that after this project is finally finished.

It’s gonna be great.

I would suggest double checking all of the trench run shots where the lasers are very small, since the cleanup has a tendency to erase them:

This is just an example of the type of shot I’m talking about, I don’t know if any in this shot were deleted.

Good idea. I’ll add that explanation.

There is also the small thing that Palpatine needed the Jedi to discover the clones so that he could start his war. As I understand it, Palpatine ordered Jango to use the toxic dart on Zam with the knowledge that the Jedi would eventually trace it to Kamino. He also must have ordered Dooku to erase the planet from the archives, which would draw attention to itself when combined with the existence of the dart. It then follows that Palpatine must have ordered Jango to go to Kamino and wait for the Jedi to show up, and then lead the Jedi to Geonosis so that the war could begin. It sounds really contrived when put in those terms, but that’s George Lucas for you.

If anyone has another reason why Jango would singlehandedly lead the Jedi into a war, I’m all ears.

Thanks!

Also, I’ve updated the first post of this thread to include some more current info on the project.

I was thinking more along the lines of a single large explosion taking up perhaps 1/8th of the sky. For that to work it really does need an establishing shot of a ship leaving Maz’s castle, then cutting to Finn boarding the transport as the explosion happens, then he turns and sees the debris in the sky, with the star destroyer just entering the frame from the right.

One thing that I didn’t consider was that Finn asks ‘Where’s Rey?’, and in this sequence of events it might imply that Finn feared that she was on the destroyed ship.

This is one of the last scenes of this half of the film I haven’t finalized yet, but here’s something close to final:

Luke Leia Han

Indeed, it’s the same settings I used for the Reel 4 preview.

Or at this point perhaps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMLbeuShF8s

Here’s a part of Reel 6

Alternatively if you have photoshop CS6 or later you could use the Chalk and Charcoal filter on the image and then invert it:

This is one of those shots where the true color of the shot simply doesn’t exist in the Blu-ray. Note the magenta of the cup on the left, which is supposed to be white, still retains a magenta hue in the correction. Similarly, Luke’s dusty offwhite shirt has too much green in the highlights and too much magenta in the shadows, and the correction still doesn’t completely remove these inaccuracies.

This picture skews red but still shows how Luke’s shirt is definitely not white like Leia’s gown: