I suppose if the discourse is worth it to you guys, there’s not much harm. I was just worried it might burn some people out, and I’d hate to see this stuff go to waste. If I’m wrong, then that’s fine.
Can you imagine the day when we can all sit back and watch the complete revisited OT and these sequels as one huge marathon! 😍
I actually started doing that with some friends of mine a few months ago when I discovered these edits. I somehow just assumed by the time we got to TROS that there’d be a Rey Nobody version complete or close to it. I hadn’t considered at that point just how much goes into making these things, even before scope creep set in.
And yeah, I think the past few weeks have been a visual representation of that scope creep. A lot of really intense argument over single lines that just don’t matter all that much except in isolation. And hey, I did it too, I’m not pretending to be innocent here. But like…okay, I like MR’s “We’ll always be with you”, right? But in the theater, I can’t say the lack of that line or a line like it was what I thought the movie was in dire need of, you know?
Maybe I just respond better to big visual changes (actually scratch that, I certainly do), but a lot of these minor dialogue squabbles read as kind of silly to me in a series where Luke’s final pivotal character moment has him say “I’ll not leave you” in complete earnest.
MR’s placement of the line is perfect, I say either go with that version or don’t alter it at all.
sherlockpotter said:
I’m curious what everyone thinks!
This is good stuff. Version 4 definitely sounds the most, though I’m partial to him cutting her off because I love seeing Hamill being sassy, even artificially (and because yeah, obviously Rey should know he was wrong). Version 1 seems a little empty, while #3 is too crowded, and it doesn’t seem like “lesson 3” should start with a question like that.
Ironically however, the removal of “It was fear that kept me here”, which I’m obviously still in favor of, creates the issue of “What are you most afraid of” feeling slightly non-sequitur. Or, at least, it seems too obvious to me that the line was preceded by something different than just “I was wrong”. I’m tempted to say “What are you so afraid of” might flow better, but I might be overthinking.
Honestly, it’s becoming more and more impressive to me just how knotted-up the problems with this movie’s writing are. I don’t think I would have felt as offended as I did in 2019 had Ascendant (with the changes being worked on) been the theatrical cut, but man this is a real fixer-upper of a film.
Yo! You whipped that up quick!
I can’t speak for others, but it sounds pretty good from where I’m sitting. I think it’s noticeable, but not a lot. Obviously I’m biased, but even if this was the best it could get, I like it.
While Ach-To is in the conversation, can we talk about “It was fear that kept me here”? I know I’m just parroting Nerrel’s video, but ever since he pointed it out I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Luke was kept there by shame, and a genuine belief that the Jedi are a bad thing. It’s a hard thing to reconcile with TROS’s conversation, but I think “it was shame that kept me here” and “what are you most ashamed of” (in a Rey Palpatine cut, of course) would make a lot more sense. Not that I have a good way to implement that or anything.
Well, Billy Dee Williams is on Cameo, if anyone has three hundred bucks to burn. You could get any line you want from Lando that way.
I think “fanboys who can’t let go” is the opposite of this. The fact that this is all in-service of a community effort to turn something they didn’t like into something they do (or, well, tolerate) purely for the sake of their own personal enjoyment is inspiring. It feels to me like a vision of how creating mass-appeal art could actually progress in a world where creators didn’t have to worry so much about what corporate shareholders think is profitable. Even at it’s most dull, this is infinitely more productive than a bunch of people just whining about the movie not being good, because something is literally being produced, and not really out of spite (well, disappointment isn’t much better, but it’s not as mean).
Like, mods and fanedits are just kind of incredible to me? Even before Star Wars, I was absolutely blown away by things like One Pace, Dragon Ball Recut, Dreamcast Conversion and even stuff like Black Mesa (to an extent). It feels like this is just the purpose of fandom, in a way.
The changes to make this film more consistent with TLJ are so great. Going to the extent of making a whole new puppet show depicting the Battle of Crait isn’t just ambitious, it’s genius. It’s just making me bite my friggin’ nails since the progress on “Rey nobody” seems to be halted, when overwriting that was the worst thing about TROS for me.
Green screen in a character into every movie, make them old in the original trilogy and younger in the prequels. They will be present for everything but no one acknowledges them. When anakin and padme frolick in AOTC, the character is there too. When Palpatine is shocking luke, hes just standing next to the emperor.
When vader is dying he is standing next to luke.
When we see all the ghosts at the end of ROTJ, he’s stood with them, but he’s not blue…he’s physically just standing there, blocking most of their vision.
Oh shit it’s Gumbly
I think if the “Skywalker Saga” is supposed to be over, whatever the new trilogy is will (or at least should) have nothing to do with it. Frankly, I don’t think they could do with the sequel characters what the sequels did with the original trilogy’s characters. Those movies only exist in the way they do because of the three-and-a-half decade-long cultural phenomenon that the original trilogy was, and since the prequels and sequels didn’t become that, trying to use the same formula for the second batch of sequels would be a wasted effort.
This is why my big dumb post here says I think they should jump hundreds of years into the future. Give us a new galaxy to explore, divorced from any of the antiquated iconography we’ve seen for the last forty years. Give us a villainous force that is more than just “evil military government”, and a hero that is more driven by wanting to be in the plot than the plot happening to them. If you wanna keep the force around, make the conflict more than binary light-side/dark-side. That’s why I like the idea of a corporation commercializing and selling the force itself. Every person who buys (however the hell that is supposed to work, these are broad strokes here) is participating in something pretty obviously corrupt and against the idea of the force, but they’re not necessarily all soldiers in a war against everything that isn’t them like the empire is (at least, not publicly).]
But that’s only if you want to make more weird action-adventure stories. The upside to the sequels being too similar to the OT is that you actually could use a lot of the original ideas for the sequels that Lucas came up with, where the third batch of movies is about building a society from the ashes of a totalitarian dictatorship. With that in mind, you totally could make something more final feeling if you absolutely had to just pick up where Rise of Skywalker left off. The problem is I’m not totally sure how you’d craft that trilogy and keep it about space adventures. The prequels in large part struggled because the commentary on how western capitalist democracies fall into fascist dictatorship is kind of at-odds with a lot of the action and adventure, and I think that a society-rebuilding story would fall into a lot of the same trappings, because if I’m honest, the world presented by Star Wars as a film series is not conducive to complex issues. Maybe someone could do a better job than Lucas (okay, well, obviously this is true), but I think the prequels have some fundamental issues in how they construct their themes in relation to their content, and I think this hypothetical set of sequels would struggle with them too.
I think it looks pretty okay, but it also looks too fast to be a good establishing shot. If there’s some way to slow it down, maybe record it on a PC with an even-higher framerate or just straight-up interpolate it, that might be better.
I would have liked something that took the best from Rise of Skywalker and the second version of Duel of the Fates instead of what we got, but otherwise I’d keep the sequels the same.
If we were to go beyond the sequels, into another trilogy, I’d really like something set far in the future of the series, where everything we know about the old AND new republics are far back into legend.
When “The Rise of Skywalker” was revealed to be the title of episode IX, I foolishly assumed that taking the Skywalker name would be something along the lines of a new wave of Force users, something decentralized that takes the best of Jedi philosophy to heart and leaves out the problems that created Vader. It’s not an group or an order, more like a movement. As in, you are a Skywalker if you say you are. I think that’s a unique direction to take the force, and would line up way better with the “Force does not belong to anyone” sentiment.
As for what the villainous force would be, it’s too tempting to do another version of the sith or the empire, but I don’t want that. The true antagonist of a post-empire Star Wars (be it the actual empire or the first order) should be something cultural, something systemic. So, not the government, but the things that whatever government replacing the new republic failed to protect against. My idea? A rampant commercialized society of business and industry, that has some way of literally boxing up the force and selling it to people (it would be a crappier version, though). Maybe that’s a workable reconciliation of midi-chlorians being able to co-exist with “anyone can be a jedi” within one canon.
It’s both a commentary on consumerism, a continuation of that thing from TLJ that we just decided to ignore, and taking a shot at Lucasfilm for the last 30 years for being corporate psychos obsessed with merchandise and consumption. You could even work storm troopers in there! It’s just now they’re not soldiers, they’re “Policy Enforcement Officers”. You may laugh at that, but Coca-Cola funds Columbian death squads, so imagine what something on the level of Amazon could do in a series where people can blow up planets. The only reason the empire fell is because it never managed to brainwash citizens into thinking they were supporting it consensually.
Those are just broadstrokes, though. I think if I were to try and craft a story, I’d look at other elements from the first 3 trilogies we can either preserve or alter. Like, for example, all three protags of the Skywalker Saga grow up on desert planets until events conspire to take them away. If we wanted to change that, we would need an active, character-driven story where the main character sets their own goal. You don’t even have to murder anyone’s parents if the protagonist hunts for action themselves. You could have the threat be something other than big evil men with scary weapons (since that’s all Disney seems to understand fascists to be), rather a way that this tech industry empire is exploiting or harming people. Maybe the boxed force-kits have some sort of debilitating late-stage side effects in people? It’s something that should have a complex solution, not just one really big thing to blow up.
I guess most of my problem is that Star Wars is a series inspried by a lot of real-world ideologies and events, and it needs to do way more to have characters believe in something specific other than “the obviously evil guys are evil”. Maybe you think my ideas lean a little hard on the anarchism, but I still think we need something. It’s not like there’s anything to lose, “keep your politics out of my movies” bros are never gonna change their tune.
Lastly, I think there needs to be a radical upheaval of the iconography and design sense. Even in the sequels, there’s so many little “hey, this is the ship you remember” moments, or even little stuff with outfits. Heck, even just changing something about lightsabers might be nice. The monster designs in Evangelion are really cool, but I always looked at Sachiel’s weird retracting arm beam things and thought “that would kick ass in Star Wars”.
Or hey, you could just go full-on wacky and have people flying around with the force and having big dumb Dragon Ball Z sword battles in the sky. I’m honestly surprised Star Wars never really went that far and moved back toward the more intimate struggles in the sequels. Put in mech suits! Brains in jars walking on robot tentacles! Sonic references! A lightsaber so big and heavy that it’s Guts’s Dragon Slayer sword from Berserk. Wacky scriptwriter self-insert characters! Anything for the main series to start cribbing from other media than itself.
(I’m aware everything I just referenced but one was a Japanese cartoon, and the one that wasn’t was Homestuck. Don’t judge me.)
Thing is, she had SO many opportunities to not be terrible. Seriously. Staff members on shows get SO MUCH leeway from fans, because they’re fans! They don’t want to say anything, even if it’s true, because they don’t want to harm the series they like. If you get to a point where fans are outright pushing for your removal, you probably went “too far” a long time ago. This evokes a lot of 2019’s Vic Mignogna shenanigans, where internally the issues with the actor had been known for YEARS, but because they were someone people liked and made the company money, they didn’t get removed until WAY too late, leading to backlash from that sect of online people that just don’t care who gets hurt* as long as they get their TV. If either the company had dealt with the bad behavior early, or the person involved had simply stopped, there almost never would have been a problem (I say almost because in the case of Mignogna you don’t just take back years of sexual harassment).
The simple fact is, companies will only deal with bad behavior once they fear NOT doing so will be a financial threat. The fact that this went down the way it did shows both that Carano did NOT feel threatened by Lucasfilm’s actions AND that Lucasfilm themselves waited the absolute longest they could to take her off the project, which basically ensures the crazy backlash from entitled internet weirdos.
* (I should mention that in both cases, this is a charitable assumption. I actually think defenders of both Carano and Vic are angry because they agree with the actions of the actors who got removed, but I guess there could be some who don’t, and just didn’t want things to change)
TL;DR: Carano dug her own grave, but also Disney should have acted earlier if they didn’t want backlash from the angry online brigade.
Yeah, it looks like it’s got some sort of color cast? Maybe sharpen it a little bit, too. I haven’t played a Star Wars game since the Lego ones, but I think it could be made to work.
I gotta say, this Parler twist is making me laugh out loud. Wow.
I dunno, it should never be funny when something like that turns up, mostly just disappointing. Or alarming, depending on how dangerous you consider it.
But also, taking things a step further by having donations fund a fan project is a bad idea. You can argue what is and isn’t transformative all you like, but ultimately they ARE using a copyrighted intellectual property and taking money to make something with it, and in this corporate plutocracy, if Disney sends a DMCA, that’s it.
Worse, it would set a precedent for removing all sorts of fanworks, since those are using that same property. Doesn’t matter if they’re free. We see this with Nintendo all the time, and their lawyers are bad enough. You think Disney’s are gonna be better?
So yeah, even removing the political aspect (which, to be clear, you shouldn’t remove that aspect), there’s no way they aren’t some kind of threat to the community.
Anyway, hello everyone! I made an account just to follow this edit, especially the development of Rey Nobody. I think TROS is one of the bigger fixer-uppers in the franchise and I’ve loved seeing what’s been done with it.
EDIT: wait. why does my name have an N at the end instead of a D?
