NeverarGreat

Burbin said:

How about adding Rey walking in so that she doesn’t suddenly appear in the next shot?
https://vimeo.com/499368266

That would be nice. I remember trying to combine the shots but it would have required more masking expertise than I had. As it is, there is a bit of her walking in the background I was able to mask in, but if anyone can improve on it you’re welcome to try. 😃

It really bugs me that the temple has that much livable space on the interior, even with the Rebel additions. The design of the structure seems quite clearly to be little more than massive disks of solid stone with voids between each one supported by the sloping stone pillars. It always struck me that it was like the pyramids in this way, a structure meant as a symbol of power and awe rather than a useable base. I imagined the Rebellion made do with the space between the stone disks, with only the ceremonial room on top as part of the original livable structure. Also, the massive Rebel complex seems at odds with the small rough and ready force we see in the films.

IlFanEditore said:

Movies Remastered said:

I feel TLJ took the biggest risks but did the most damage in the process. I lived the fact they highlighted capitalism, slavery, a broken Luke and the final scene with Leia but it did miss the mark on many things. Daisy Ridley dialogue was awesome and they disrespected Ackbar. Unforgivable imo.

I never cared that much about Ackbar. He was a meme character.
The only disputable aspect about TLJ (in my very personal opinion) was Canto Bight and Finn’s treatment. Finn, to me, worked as a side character, a character used to enhance other charismatic characters. Except for his betrayal as stormtrooper, in TFA he didn’t do that much; he was always with others. First with Poe, then with Rey, then with Han, then again with Rey. In TLJ they tried to give him more ground by putting another even less charismatic character on his path. Still, I didn’t hate it, I just liked it less than other parts. But everything else, to me, was just great.

Finn in TFA was definitely a main character along with Rey. In fact, he could easily have been the main character if he turned out to be Force sensitive from the outset. It was TLJ and TROS that sidelined him the most and elevated Rey to unquestioned Main Character status, IMO.

While that’s certainly true, I’m pretty sure it’s intentional. I think whether it works for you or not comes down to if you ultimately think Rian was being smart or pretentious.

I’d argue that TLJ is more pretentious than smart in this area.

Consider Lando. In less than twenty minutes of screentime he goes from possibly adversarial to seemingly friendly then traitorous to his friends to repentant and allied with our heroes. It’s a constant rollercoaster of emotion, but it is actually just a more dramatic version of the pattern that exists for each ally in the OT. Lando. Obi-wan. Yoda. The Ewoks. Each of these allies is introduced with a moment of uncertainty, whereupon their friendliness is revealed. After establishing themselves as friends they then inevitably come into conflict with our heroes and then this conflict is resolved with one or both parties learning and growing from the experience.

The TLJ allies, by contrast, don’t have nearly the same movement along this axis. Their movement is merely from antagonist to ally, and even this little movement is sometimes abrupt at the end. Perhaps Rian wanted to get right to the drama of each partnership, but in doing so he ignored the greater reason for the partnership - the fact that these characters are ostensibly on the same side. Without this baseline the drama is all we see, and it risks portraying these characters as dysfunctional.

I keep coming back to the example of Lando. If he could become a three-dimensional character as a secondary addition halfway through a movie, there’s no reason TLJ couldn’t write similarly compelling characters given an entire 2.5 hour runtime.

So, the internet is filled with hot takes on what is wrong with TLJ, but recently I’ve been thinking about it and realized that there’s a big unifying issue that I haven’t heard brought up before: The new allies in TLJ are introduced as antagonists.

Basically, Luke, Rose, and Holdo all end up helping our three heroes by the end of the film and are characterized in purely heroic ways, yet their introductions portray them as pure antagonists to our heroes.

Luke immediately throws away the lightsaber and shuts himself in his hut, refusing to help Rey or the Resistance.
Rose, despite her initial fangirl attitude, actively thwarts Finn’s escape attempt in the process and then accuses him of being a traitor.
Holdo immediately gives Poe a dressing-down and refuses to let him in on her plans, to the point that he believes that she is an enemy.

Compare this to ESB, where Yoda is introduced as an eccentric neutral character who may or may not help Luke, whereupon he quickly reveals himself as a true ally, who becomes antagonistic only to help train Luke and they part as friends in ROTJ. Lando is similarly portrayed as being of questionable loyalty until he quickly reaffirms his friendship with Han and his desire to help. Granted he has been compromised by the Empire but his intentions are always good and these win out in the end.

The reason for establishing the affability of allies quickly is simple - first impressions matter. It will take only a scene or two for the audience to decide whether or not they like a character, and the easiest way to do this is to have said character help our heroes. Wait too long and even a character with good motives will become annoying or downright antagonistic to the heroes, and by proxy to the audience.

This is where TLJ fails. The average viewer will see the irritation these supposed allies cause our heroes and will be irritated in turn. If left to fester for scene after scene, this will turn into full-blown anger and then whiplash when the antagonistic character is revealed to be ‘good’. This is especially true with Holdo, where the film goes from characterizing her as an antagonist to Poe to having her perform a full-blown heroic sacrifice in the space of a few minutes.

This problem of antagonistic allies could have been fixed fairly easily at the script stage without changing the film too much.

For example, Luke could have pretended to help Rey and even given her an introductory lesson. Then at the end of the lesson he could have said “…and this is why it is time for the Jedi to end.” The audience would be in shock; they have just seen Luke as presumably his old heroic self, allowing themselves to get on board with his character, only to have the rug pulled out from under them in an interesting way. Luke is an ally to Rey since he has already given her instruction, but now he is antagonizing her in order to force her into conflict and growth, just as Yoda did with Luke.

Rose could have met with Finn as he packed to escape the cruiser, someone who wanted to help the great Finn in this presumably secret mission for the Resistance. He tells her that he has to find Rey, as she is in trouble and is the last hope of the Resistance, flashing the binary beacon at Rose. So she helps him, but as they make their way to the escape pod she takes a minute to reflect and asks him how they will find this ship again. Finn says that he and Rey will use the Force, but in a callback to TFA Rose calls his bluff and stuns him. So at this point the viewer has come to consider Rose as a part of the Finn/Rose teamup, and we feel guilt that Finn has misled her instead of annoyance that she is getting in the way of our favorite former Stormtrooper.

Finally, Holdo is made the acting leader of the Resistance. She appreciates Poe’s contribution and asks him how their location was discovered. Poe vows to figure that out, and convenes with Finn and Rose to discuss the problem. In the meantime Holdo learns of Poe’s hasty demotion by Leia as her last act and becomes more cold toward Poe since he failed to mention this demotion, and when he comes to her ranting about ‘impossible’ First Order tech and a harebrained scheme to leave the ship to find a master code breaker, she suspects that Poe could be the spy. Their spiraling mistrust leads to Poe going rogue and initiating the scheme without Holdo’s permission. This structure allows for at least a scene of Poe and Holdo working together before the troubles appear, and since both think they are in the right the audience expects that the misunderstanding will resolve, which it does when Leia awakens.
…

Well, this turned out longer than I expected. The short of it is that Rian was so enamored with subverting expectations that he forgot to make the allies of the film likeable from the outset.

RogueLeader said:

So maybe you could have him say “I had a dream/nightmare” offscreen before he goes on his I Killed Them All rant?

Basically.

Ed Slushie said:

One idea that I’ve been thinking about for a while is keeping in Anakin’s “I killed them all” speech, but changing it so that instead of killing the sand people, he just wanted to kill the sand people - but still felt really bad about it because he’s always been taught that anger leads to the dark side.

That’s honestly the best potential edit to AOTC. I’ve suggested before that the actual footage of the murder can be repurposed as a dream that he’s recounting for Padme, which makes him feel like he’s already straying from the Jedi path while still keeping him an ostensibly good person.

“…so he can take control of it.”

I agree with you there, but you’d have to delete his line about not caring if the Resistance won, then. There’s no universe in which Hux doesn’t want the First Order to win.

Honestly Hal, the fact that you haven’t built a 1/5 scale model of Vader’s castle yet is kinda embarrassing rn. And you call yourself a faneditor. /s.

TestingOutTheTest said:

There is an issue I feel needs to be addressed… it’s established in the actual film that the Falcon cannot jump to lightspeed because of the compressor (until Rey turns it off during the Rathar sequence so Han can jump to lightspeed), yet you had the Falcon jump to lightspeed after the chase on Jakku.

I always read turning off the compressor as an extra step before each jump, so Rey would have known to turn it off when escaping Jakku but Han was unaware after the Rathtars.

You also removed Rey saving Finn from the Rathar; the whole point of that scene was to show Rey now caring for Finn despite initially disliking him.

Pretty sure that the entire Falcon chase across Jakku and subsequent excited summarizing established that Rey had come to appreciate Finn’s contribution.

Sounds good to me. Besides, it’s a small enough thing that anyone who wants to can cut it themselves with little effort. 😃

Seems like telekinesis is a higher-level power than mind trick to me, or at the very least they’re comparable. So I don’t see how that would make her escape any more believable.

DZ-330 said:

Could Finn’s “you gotta boyfriend? a cute boyfriend?” be removed? A Rey/Finn romance is never established in the ST and it feels out of place. Plus it always felt kinda odd for Finn to be concerned about that during that moment.

My version cuts out the ‘cute boyfriend’ addendum but leaves the first mention, which I think works well. Taking out the whole boyfriend line doesn’t really work, since the scene becomes too abrupt without it.

So I emailed the StarWarsAficionado author and he got back to me with some pages from his ROTJ issue.

(This is the issue in question, I believe https://www.jedinews.com/misc/articles/star-wars-aficionado-issue-14/)

He says that the information about the Lightman comes from a conversation with Antony Daniels at a Star Wars Celebration as well as the Peter Diamond interview.

In response to Hoop’s original question about where the scene was supposed to be, the author says that the scene was intended for Threepio’s initial foray into the palace, where he would be led down the hallway toward the throne room. This sequence was ultimately cut and replaced with a lengthy shot of the droids following Bib into the darkness, watched by the Gammorean guard in the foreground.

The other shot of the Lightman emerging from the Rancor passage would presumably be one of the random background appearances, as well as the shot of him behind Han and Luke in the recently discovered image.

Hal 9000 said:

Happy to.

No one looking up at the destruction of Hosnian Prime from Maz’s castle seemed to have any issue identifying what was happening. That explanation just doesn’t fly.

And I do feel similarly about lightspeed skipping. Maybe it’s just me being an insufferable dork, but I do.

I feel the same way about that scene and I’m definitely an insufferable dork, so there’s no maybe about it 😉

I’ve been searching for a good-quality version of Han Solo and the Princess that Williams composed in 2018, and this popped up in my recommended tonight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWem0wXiSSY

It’s slower and less grand than this rendition, but it does feel more like a studio recording.

I did just that last night and it’s quite the sight to behold. Bravo Jonh!

Chase Adams said:

I had so many great ideas for the ‘Muxing up Movie Quotes’ thread but now there’s nobody to appreciate them.

JEDIT: Usually don’t get them, but I still read them.

benduwan said:

there´s some information about this:
https://vimeo.com/36474256

The info is at 9:29 and shows the callsheet where ‘lightman’ appears, though I don’t think there is any more context about what his purpose was.

Arch, maudlin, or romantic dialogue only works with charismatic actors and competent direction, often where the actors play archetypal characters. See The Adventures of Robin Hood for that style done to perfection. ANH actually does a reasonable facsimile of this since the characters are properly archetypal (the rogue, the princes, the farm boy, the wizard). The problem is that the prequels have almost none of these elements. The charisma of the actors is buried under robotic direction, and the underlying characters are muddled and pale shadows of their archetypal counterparts in the OT. As such, the stilted dialogue is just another nail in the coffin.

I assume this is the source of the info?

https://starwarsaficionado.blogspot.com/2016/10/deleted-scene-enter-lightman.html

Some more sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyjuHeVJcI4

From this site, there’s some more discussion.

I wonder where aficionado got his info, since his is the only source I can find that suggests this creature had an entire scene devoted to him. Maybe you could email him?

JEDIT: Also interesting to note, these two images show very different costumes. The first one appears to be intended to be placed on the actor’s back, and the second one appears to be on his front, and there are different patterns of lights on each costume.

It might be interesting to extend the scene of Tarkin learning the situation on Dantooine. It would start with the darkened conference table and a voice coming through from the orb at the center. The Emperor warns Tarkin that the destruction of Alderaan could drive more support to the Rebellion, but Tarkin assures him that they now have the location of the Rebel base. The transmission ends and they receive word that Dantooine is a bust, leading Tarkin to call for Leia’s execution.

JakeRyan17 said:

No, but she says civilians deserve to be murdered by cops… again: brainwashing is brainwashing. Anyone can be radicalised.

Anyone can be the victim of propaganda, sure. Do I view my parents as victims of their propagandistic media diet? Yes. But they also haven’t picked up arms and joined a terrorist organization bent on ruling the world. At a certain point there’s a choice with an adult, brainwashing or not.

I’m just saying that if we want to feel better about stormtroopers in Star Wars being people, stunners is the way to go. Trying to find reasons to excuse murders just feels wrong. Stormtroopers being abducted as children or conscripting as adults doesn’t really matter. They are adults now with the ability to go against those orders (as Finn, Jannah, and several others have) or not. I don’t think we need to create an age limit for when someone joined they deserve to die or not.

Of course it matters if they joined as adults…that means that the choice Finn consciously made in TFA to defect was available to every one of them before they even joined and they all joined anyway. When Finn tells Rey he made a choice…well that’s actually his second choice. His first was to join in the first place, and his defection is him merely atoning for that choice like Vader atoning for his decision to follow Sidious. Before this atonement Han was right to shoot at Vader on Cloud City in an attempt to kill, even though you could argue that Vader was definitely brainwashed by Sidious to be evil over the course of Anakin’s entire childhood. There was still a choice that Anakin made, the same choice that Finn would have made were he conscripted as an adult.

If empathy is the goal, looking for excuses why some people deserve to die and others don’t, especially separated from their own actions (as no one is changing what the First Order is doing, we’re not talking about cutting out the violence stormtroopers inflict here), just doesn’t feel like the path to it.

If people being killed bothers you, stunners solve that problem. A new backstory that’s barely different doesn’t really change the fact that people who used to be in the same position as Finn and Jannah are now being killed by them.

Actually, stunners solve basically nothing since almost all of the First Order troopers die in starship crashes. Millions died before our eyes in the final minutes of TROS. If they were willing recruits, that’s entirely different than if they were kidnapped as children and programmed to be soldiers. We don’t cry out at the destruction of the Death Stars. Why? Because we view those inside as willing and complicit soldiers fighting for an evil empire, not as victims who were raised in isolation to kill.

You have my trust SilverWook, for what it’s worth. I believe this place would be a darker one with your absence.

Indeed, it doesn’t make sense to have a hard age limit at all, especially with the different growing periods of different species.