That looks great! It might even be easier to film a new lightsaber roll with a Maul prop lightsaber than to mess around with doing it digitally.
Where did the new lightsaber shot come from?
Especially if the shot of Qui-Gon changing his expression is reused as him wordlessly communicating with Shmi, I think it lets the theoretical viewer connect the dots.
Something unrelated from my rewatch: when Duel of the Fates starts playing, it punctuates the doors opening with Maul standing there, making for a really cool moment. But then the music stops matching what’s happening on screen for the rest of the hangar scene - it meaninglessly spikes at a shot of the side of the Naboo starfighter, and an equally meaningless shot of some droideikas rolling around, and has some of the frenetic part play while Padme and the others are calmly talking and leaving. I’m not sure how you’d do it with the coverage available in the scene let alone separating the music from the audio, but man, it would be really nice to rework the score there a bit so it doesn’t use the first appearances of those big musical moments on nothing. It all starts syncing up with the action as soon as the fight starts.
Nice work! I agree about the little Qui-Gon arc and characterisation that leaving the hand wave in would do. It would also explain why Watto’s mad when he leaves the conversation, and let you leave in his comment about Qui-Gon as he passes Anakin. Plus, it’s easy to cut Watto in the earlier scene saying “I’m a Toydarian,” to make it sound like he’s saying a mind trick won’t work on him because he’s not weak-minded, not because it arbitrarily doesn’t work on his species.
Which I never really interpreted that way, though. I parsed it more like someone saying “I’m Sicilian, I won’t fall for the switched cup routine,” and it’s just an easy line to misinterpret, like “You’re a big guy / For you” in The Dark Knight Rises.
As they say in the film industry, you have to murder your darlings - if the edit works better without it, then it’s gotta go. (I know I’ll be cutting my favourite scene in Rogue One when I eventually get to that movie.)
That would work! Though I’m generally a proponent of retaining as much original footage as possible, lest a TPM edit become too short, so if it could be retained somehow, I think it would be worth keeping it in.
Change Snoke’s line to “And then I will kill you with the cruellest Snoke,” to support the idea that Palpatine was controlling Snoke the whole time and to foreshadow his cloning vat full of Snokes.
I wasn’t thinking about it when I watched the chance cube scene, but, I think it could work with a bit of clever editing. Make the bet for two slaves, like Qui-Gon originally wanted; Watto disagrees that a pod is worth two slaves, but greedily agrees to let chance decide, pulling out his weighted chance cube. He rolls it, Qui-Gon uses the Force, Watto is pissed off, telling Anakin that if Qui-Gon isn’t careful he’ll end up owning him too, etc as the rest plays out like the theatrical.
The only thing I can’t figure out off the top of my head is what to replace “red, the boy, blue, his mother” with to convey the idea that red = both and blue = neither.
Following up on an idea Mrebo and PeterPan discussed in the Prequels Redux thread, I’ve just watched the relevant scenes in my TPM rewatch and I think it’s possible to make it so that Qui-Gon frees both Anakin and Shmi. After the podrace in their house Qui-Gon says both of them are free, Anakin starts celebrating that he can train to become a Jedi, he asks if Shmi is coming with them, Qui-Gon gives Shmi a look that Anakin doesn’t notice but Shmi understands, and Shmi explains that her place is on Tattooine and she’s not going with them.
First of all, why bother doing that? Well, I think that it helps drives a few points home. It shows us the disparity between Qui-Gon’s ethics and those of the Jedi Council, instead of simply having Obi-Wan tell it to us later on Coruscant. It makes it clear that (in Mrebo’s words) “she is left behind because the Jedi don’t make allowances for parents tagging along,” but also that Qui-Gon is the kind of person who would free her anyway, while still understanding the difficult position it puts them in. All of this supports the thematic idea that Qui-Gon would have been the right person to train Anakin successfully, because he isn’t as dogmatic and black-and-white-morals minded as the Jedi Council. Anakin needed understanding and flexibility, which the Jedi didn’t offer - but Qui-Gon certainly seemed like he would have done.
It also means that Anakin’s frustrations with the Jedi arbitrarily forbidding him from seeing his mother in AOTC serves to highlight the whole “Qui-Gon and his lackadaisical approach to the Jedi Code was the right way to do things” idea, by absolving Qui-Gon of being (in retrospect) a complicit arm of the Jedi Council when it comes to Shmi, and Anakin’s attachment to her.
Basically, the Jedi being actually pretty terrible is a big part of Anakin’s fall to the Dark Side, and if you want to enhance the themes of Qui-Gon being the only one who’s really got the right way of doing things, it helps to make it about “the Jedi won’t allow attachment so he can’t even check on his mum” instead of “Qui-Gon was fine with leaving his mother a slave if it meant getting a strong Force user for the Jedi.”
Spoilers for The Book of Boba Fett episode 6:
Shamook’s time at Lucasfilm has clearly been well spent. With a Disney budget behind him, my god, it’s indistinguishable from if they’d invented a time machine and used it to grab Mark Hamill circa 1983.
Damn, Eddie, that was fast!
What’s the reddit account to message?
His reddit account is reddit.com/u/giggawattboy.
Thank you!
I like the orange look for Jakku, but the second option looks better for the non-Jakku scenes.
I really want to see how Ackbar instead of Holdo would be even possible to pull off visually.
Also, as much as I’m against losing Ahmed Best and Brian Blessed’s performances, Australian Jar Jar is done incredibly well. I didn’t know it existed, and in a case of convergent evolution and unintentional national nose-thumbing, I’d kicked around the idea of dubbing Jar Jar as a Kiwi (but retaining his original “nervous everyman in over his head” characterisation).
What’s the reddit account to message?
Oof, just spotted something else to amend what I’d just said-
Queen Amidala (the figurehead) is the macguffin, Padmé (revealed in the third act as the true Queen) is a character with real agency. This way you don’t reveal that Padmé is Queen until the right moment.
Perhaps-
The GALACTIC REPUBLIC is failing. As
its Senate becomes more complacent,
QUEEN AMIDALA, elected ruler of the
Naboo system, stands as a vocal champion
against corruption.With the Republic’s ability to protect
its worlds diminished, the greedy TRADE
FEDERATION have invaded her home planet,
in an attempt to force her compliance.The Jedi Order, mystical wielders of
THE FORCE and defenders of the Republic,
have dispatched Jedi Knight QUI-GON JINN
and his apprentice to bring the Queen to
safety on the capital planet of Coruscant.The key factions are the Galactic Republic (complacent, corrupt, unable to act), the Trade Federation (greedy, opportunistic), and the Jedi Order (protectors, mystical, act semi-independently of the Senate). The key characters are Queen Amidala (champion of democracy) and Qui-Gon (a Jedi Knight). The plot is escape from invasion.
You could perhaps do more with what the force actually IS, and that getting the Queen to Coruscant might actually help (beyond just escape), but I think early dialogue captures some of that.
This is a really good opening crawl. It conveys what it needs to and all the language and grammar sounds right, which is surprisingly tricky to accomplish - George Lucas was right when he said it’s like writing a poem.
I was trying to come up with something that started with just: “Invasion! The greedy Trade Federation have blah blah blah” but I couldn’t get it to work in that paragraph order.
Good analysis by RL, and good follow-up by Eddie! The thing that leaps out at me is:
So that gives us a solid backbone:
- The Trade Federation invasion is the simple well-defined threat we care about, that the main characters are invested in stopping.
- The solution is to get Padmé off planet to Coruscant, which they believe is their best chance.
- Qui-Gon is our main character driving this plot in line with that goal.
There’s your opening crawl.
Add an additional framing device to The Book of Boba Fett, by having each episode start with Chewbacca’s father Itchy putting on the video-watching helmet that Art Carney gives him.
I feel that the audio for the OT should be based on the Laserdisc mixes, which have far more dynamic range than the Disney+/SE DVD/Blu-Ray mixes despite being stereo.
Don’t the Laserdisc versions gradually speed up over the course of the movie, though?
Only some Pan & Scan versions of Star Wars & Empire are sped up. All LDs of Jedi, The Pan & Scan CAV editions of Star Wars & Empire and all letterboxed versions of the trilogy are proper NTSC speed.
Huh! Interesting; thank you for explaining that.
I initially read that as CED editions and was like “wow, now that’s a deep cut.”
I really like the idea of using the Anakin deleted scene in that way. Also,
Anyway, I’m not saying Brian Blessed should be the authority on this
Brian Blessed gets my vote for authority on everything.
I’ve just realised that I can stream TPM on my phone, so I’ll rewatch it so I can better contribute to this thread. I’ll have to watch it with the sound turned off for various reasons, though this might provide a unique perspective on things since I won’t be listening to the voices of Jar Jar, Watto, the Nemoidians, Amidala, etc etc while still getting to see their performances.
I feel that the audio for the OT should be based on the Laserdisc mixes, which have far more dynamic range than the Disney+/SE DVD/Blu-Ray mixes despite being stereo.
Don’t the Laserdisc versions gradually speed up over the course of the movie, though?
My only criticism to an otherwise good idea is that I like how the audience gets to gradually realise the Republic is starting to fail across the prequels. It’s not obvious at first, as the different stakeholders attempt to keep up appearances to hold onto their positions (the Jedi’s ability to use the Force has diminished, the Senate has become a bureaucracy, everyone except Sidious is one step behind everything that’s happening across all three films), and in the end that’s their undoing as Sidious sweeps in at the last minute and knocks the final pretence of function out of a system that was already dysfunctional. (That’s drawing across AOTC and ROTS as well, but it starts in TPM.)
The regrade looks awesome, nice work! I like your first grade better on the nighttime snow forest though; the extra blue works there. Other than that, it’s an improvement all around!
Just have each Bacta bath lead to a different Temeura Morrison movie in its entirety.
Use EBsynth to turn one of the adult women characters’ skin white in Rangi’s Catch, to repurpose it as a story about TCW era Boba and Aurra Sing.
Two things I’d never realised until reading Eddie’s plot summary:
- Why does Sidious want to invade Naboo? Why the fixation on recapturing Padme?
- When exactly do Padme and the decoy switch places? She introduces herself to everyone as “Padme” when she’s pretending to be a handmaiden; do people not know that’s Queen Amidala’s first name?
1- Because the original plan was to get her to sign the treaty ( Palp thought she was young so easy to scare) to legitimize the occupation and create sympathy for him in the Senate so he could use it to win the next election ( Valorum had less than a year left on his mandate.) He never expected that Amidala would find her way to Coruscant. He just adapted after that and he got what he wanted even quicker. The old EU cover that story pretty well ( Cloak of Deception )
I wonder if there’s a way to hint at that more in the movie? (Which may or may not work if it’s an edit that tries to keep Sidious and Palpatine separate, depending on how it’s done.)
2- Amidala is a persona. Every queen of Naboo get one. Nobody knows Padme Naberrie is the queen of Naboo apart from a few selected people. Padme is just one of the handmaiden for the casual personnel.
Again, I wonder if there’s any way to hint at this? I like the backstory; it evokes the names given to Japanese Emperors and their ruling eras (I forget the word for it).
Canon book Queen’s Peril cover that in details. The first switch with Sabe in TPM as the decoy is just before they get captured (black dress.)
I personally think leaving this being ambiguous in the movie works in its favor, but it’s cool to know there is actually a point where they switch and I’m going to see if I can spot it next time I watch it.
With the “slaughtered all students” thing, don’t forget that “Snoke already turned his heart.” This isn’t the genesis of Ben Solo becoming Kylo Ren inside, it’s the final straw that triggers his external actions. So, slaughtering everyone tracks fine to me. I always interpreted “the final thing (Luke) saw were the eyes of a frightened boy whose master had failed him” as more about Luke seeing his own failure reflected in the moment (and some of Ben’s true nature/motivations deep inside) than Kylo actually literally being a little kid afraid of Luke’s scary lightsaber.
I’ve seen someone take the scene of Dooku landing on Coruscant and talking to Sidious in AOTC and recontextualising it in TPM, but I don’t remember who it was or how they did it.
Two things I’d never realised until reading Eddie’s plot summary:
In terms of what to do with Jar Jar, I’ve always liked Hal’s approach in Cloak of Deception, to recontextualise him as a stressed-out everyman who’s in over his head with a few judicious cuts. I’m curious about the redubbing and subtitling attempts though - I’ve not seen many of the edits on the list, so if anyone has links to the edits by Secior, TM2YC, Andreas/Anjohan, or Yads, I’d love a PM.