You’re right that these are severe problems with Rogue One being a preqquel, but that hardly seems fair to blame the original movie from 1977 for not taking that into account.
Not “blaming” the movie. Just wanna recut it for a smoother binging experience
You’re right that these are severe problems with Rogue One being a preqquel, but that hardly seems fair to blame the original movie from 1977 for not taking that into account.
Not “blaming” the movie. Just wanna recut it for a smoother binging experience
I mean, I wouldn’t personally be that interested in a cut like this, but if it’s what you want for your viewing experience, go for it.
I don’t think you’d really need to cut everything before Luke’s intro. In fact, I feel like it may actually be MORE jarring to just cut to them on tatooine.
You could still keep the opening, but cut the conversations between vader and the soldier & vader and leia. Thenn the opening just becomes: Vader’s crew catches up to the ship, comes in guns blazing; we see leia give R2 the plans, 3PO and R2 escape, and we just follow them rather than cutting back to the ship.
That could also work, i will habe to try to see what works best.
I just wanna probe others for their opinion here to check if there is interest in a certain kind of edit.
Please don’t be too harsh, my suggestion is controversial.
When watching ANH in a marathon including Rogue One, the opening has several problems for me at this point.
First off, the Crawl has a lot of info that we already know. A bit weird to have the last movie you watched (RO) recapped in that format. The crawls usually are used to describe space in between movies.
Then the movie starts and we are just one Hyperspace jump after RO. So even if we would change the Crawl, what would we put in it?
Then we get character introductions for Vader, 3PO and R2 but we already know these characters. So it feels kind of redundant. We also get a a lot of implicit info on the Empire, the Rebellion and the Power dynamic between them. But that has been established already in the last movie. Leias character is the only one that feels like it is not established yet, but we don’t get much of her and she gets plenty to do for the rest of the movie. So even her scenes here in the beginning are by no means essential to the story.
When Vader interrogates the Rebel soldier, we run into a continuity problem. Vader talks about intercepted transmissions. But the Rebels did not intercept a transmission, they received one that was actually targeted at them, sent from the surface of Scarif. Also, it is weird that Vader mentions a transmission instead of “I saw you running away with the disk that has the plans and then I saw you flying away with exactly this ship. Which I then followed, which is why I am here”
Vaders wording as well as the Rebel Soldier trying to BS him with being on a diplomatic mission in the context of coming from RO feels completely off.
Then we go off to Tattoine, where the droids wander the desert, split up and then immediately find each other again. This was already kind of pointless in the Original, but in a situation where 3PO and R2 are already established characters, it is even more pointless.
So here is my controversial suggestion:
We cut everything before Lukes introduction and create a new crawl that describes an attack on Leias ship near Tattoine, that was only escaped by R2 and 3PO.
If they show up on Tattoine with the Javas it is pretty obvious what happened and we get rid of a lot of pointless or redundant content plus a very weird Vader conversation that just does not add up.
We do loose the iconic opening shot, but since the function of that shot was to establish power dynamics, it is not needed story wise. It is just a cool looking shot, that is no longer needed to tell the story.
So far, so good. Again, don’t be too harsh.