Hi g00b,
With Ahsoka around the corner, I’m trying to convince some friends that “Rebels” is essential viewing, and I think that you’re edits might be the answer. Could you please provide me a link?
Thanks!
Took some advice from various feedback I got and tried to improve the first Canto Bight scene.
-Full Casino establishing shot restored after they are reported for parking on beach.
-Tracking shot of Canto Bight is cut short before we see Finn and then a shot of someone popping open some champagne is clipped to the end instead.I like this version since it gives breathing room to feel the Casino before we see Finn and Rose. I like being able to absorb the culture and feel of the visuals and then getting out of there quick enough so we don’t get bogged down in other material.
Please tell me if there is anything else that can be improved.
Just a thought, but would it work with the tracking shot first? So: “from stories”, tracking shot, clinking glasses, balcony, waterfall, reported on beach, wide angle of casino, champagne popping, Finn?
I’m not sure this would work all that well. The idea with the current order of scenes is that she says she has only heard of Canto Bight, the planet itself, in stories. Then you see the planet shots before anything in the casino. Then after the man says “they headed off towards the casino”, you get a wide shot of the casino, then you see inside, and then we see Finn.
Sorry, I’m writing on my iPhone and probably cutting too many corners in my suggestion. I think that what I’m suggesting works within those bookends. I was just suggesting changing the order of how the casino is seen so that the first shot after the establishing shot of the planet is the casino tracking shot. That leads to the outside scenes and the “reporting” scene. Then the wide shot of the casino, then inside, but since the tracking scene was moved up you get to Finn and Rose right away.
Hope that makes sense… it does in my head at least… lol
Man, I really want to get into fan editing myself.
Love your work by the way.
Took some advice from various feedback I got and tried to improve the first Canto Bight scene.
-Full Casino establishing shot restored after they are reported for parking on beach.
-Tracking shot of Canto Bight is cut short before we see Finn and then a shot of someone popping open some champagne is clipped to the end instead.I like this version since it gives breathing room to feel the Casino before we see Finn and Rose. I like being able to absorb the culture and feel of the visuals and then getting out of there quick enough so we don’t get bogged down in other material.
Please tell me if there is anything else that can be improved.
Just a thought, but would it work with the tracking shot first? So: “from stories”, tracking shot, clinking glasses, balcony, waterfall, reported on beach, wide angle of casino, champagne popping, Finn?
I am not sure you understand just how great these are!! I clicked on the link figuring I would give them a shot, and ended up grinning from ear-to-ear. These are perfect cuts!! I really hope people are willing to use these in their fan-edits! 😃
I just wanted to say +1 for this. I think that these are both vast improvements over what we got, especially the lightsaber scene.
Has anyone else seen this? It’s a digital recreation of the Obi-Wan / Vader fuel with more modern choreography. This is a teaser, with the full scene to be released next year.
Here’s someone’s attempt to integrate it with the movie:
https://youtu.be/tOBMJJSe66g
Just sharing.
Rey won a lightsaber fight without any training at all. This indicates that she is special and incredibly strong in the force and it begs for an explanation.
The explanation is chewie had just shot kylo ren with his crossbow and he was quite injured. You can even see blood falling out of his suit in several shots.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. Yeah he was injured, but it was still someone trained against someone untrained.
Obviously the only way to test this is for you to go get trained in the Force, dahmaged will shoot you in the side, and then you and I will have a lightsaber fight. Let’s do this.
^ silly.
Let me know when you come up with a better way to prove you’re right and I’m wrong about that scene.
It seems to me that the standard approach on this site is to claim that the other persons opinion is unjustifiable while the opinions of the current poster are correct.
Then, sit back and allow the mob mentality to kick in.Um…did you actually read the conversation you quoted?
Of course I did. And as usual it’s one person giving their honest opinion and subsequently being told how incorrect the are by others. Ultimately someone gets frustrated and belittles a poster.
Yeah, no. Warb even pointed out himself that I was just being silly.
I mean there’s certainly other examples you could have used but that’s about the worst one.
If you re-read your post you’ll notice that you asked for an alternative methodology… my apologies, I let my thread frustrations get the better of me while providing an option.
Rey won a lightsaber fight without any training at all. This indicates that she is special and incredibly strong in the force and it begs for an explanation.
The explanation is chewie had just shot kylo ren with his crossbow and he was quite injured. You can even see blood falling out of his suit in several shots.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. Yeah he was injured, but it was still someone trained against someone untrained.
Obviously the only way to test this is for you to go get trained in the Force, dahmaged will shoot you in the side, and then you and I will have a lightsaber fight. Let’s do this.
^ silly.
Let me know when you come up with a better way to prove you’re right and I’m wrong about that scene.
It seems to me that the standard approach on this site is to claim that the other persons opinion is unjustifiable while the opinions of the current poster are correct.
Then, sit back and allow the mob mentality to kick in.Um…did you actually read the conversation you quoted?
Of course I did. And as usual it’s one person giving their honest opinion and subsequently being told how incorrect the are by others. Ultimately someone gets frustrated and belittles a poster.
Don’t worry, it’s not just you.
Rey won a lightsaber fight without any training at all. This indicates that she is special and incredibly strong in the force and it begs for an explanation.
The explanation is chewie had just shot kylo ren with his crossbow and he was quite injured. You can even see blood falling out of his suit in several shots.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. Yeah he was injured, but it was still someone trained against someone untrained.
Obviously the only way to test this is for you to go get trained in the Force, dahmaged will shoot you in the side, and then you and I will have a lightsaber fight. Let’s do this.
^ silly.
Let me know when you come up with a better way to prove you’re right and I’m wrong about that scene.
It seems to me that the standard approach on this site is to claim that the other persons opinion is unjustifiable while the opinions of the current poster are correct.
Then, sit back and allow the mob mentality to kick in.
Sorry, I probably just misread the reply. I agree with you both.
No, Warbler first agreed with the meme, then subsequently agreed with Collipso who counter-argued the meme.
This meme or whatever you call it is dumb. Obi-Wan didn’t tell Luke: “hey you’re Dad was an asshole and the Jedi deserve to die.” Yoda never told Luke: “there is no dark side or light side. the jedi were arrogant and wrong”.
I also agree with this sentiment. A friend of mine sent that meme to me a few days ago, and while it has what Stephen Colbert would refer to as “truthiness” that might cause others to nod their head in agreement, it really doesn’t hold up under any scrutiny. Kenobi was acting as a watchful guardian, protecting a young boy from harm. Yoda was bidding his time, awaiting a new apprentice. Both were on the run from being butchered, having already lost all of their friends.
None of these circumstances are comparable to Luke.
In the few times I’ve watched TFA this past year, after Rey meets Han, I skip ahead to that last scene. I thought it was done perfectly. I don’t anymore. For me, the emotional depth of that last TFA scene was ruined when it goes from serious to shoulder toss let’s go milk a sea monster in a matter of moments. WTF Rian?
Luke can certainly be dismissive of The Force. After 40 years of what he views as a misguided trust in it, that’s a totally valid and interesting story direction. I just don’t buy that he would flippantly toss aside something that was such a big part of his earlier life. He lost his only family and several friends in the first film, learned more\lost more in the second, then grew emotionally, saved millions of lives, and redeemed Vader in the third.
He could have respectfully handed it back to her and expressed why he dismissed her ideas and her quest. Rian instead went for shock value over depth and emotion. That was very disappointing for me.
I 100% agree with this. I’ve been thinking over the last few days that if Luke simply refused to accept the lightsaber and pushed past Rey, that would have conveyed the same story but with much more dignity and respect.
I really agree with your dislike of the dark and gritty DCEU, but i am perplexed that you would lump this with those (hyperbole aside). Luke is shown as ‘not perfect’ and struggling with how to exist as a perfect legend, and a flawed human. And i feel like he resolves this by the end of the film, so I didn’t come away feeling that he was flawed when i left the theater.
Sorry, I just realized that I didn’t address your actual point about Luke redeeming himself by the films end. My issue would be his inaction for the 30 years leading up to this film.
JJ / TFA set RJ up with a difficult question to answer: Why would Luke go missing for all of this time? RJ came up with the best answer he felt that he could… that Luke felt compelled to take himself (and the Jedi) out of the equation, leaving the Knights of Ren to run amok.
That just doesn’t ring true to the character for me. Assume for a moment that he DID react in a moment of pure instinct and draw his weapon on this adolescent nephew (not exactly avuncular, but let’s suppose it happened). Would Luke immediately exile himself for that? Would the shame of failure with all of the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders “break” him? RJ would say yes, but I (and at least a very vocal minority) would say no. We already saw Luke deal with the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders and he never gave up on his friends. We saw Luke find out that he was the son of (one of) the biggest bad guys in the galaxy and he didn’t run away into hiding. After getting beaten from one side of Cloud City to another, having his hand lopped off, and being told that he was the heir to a legacy of death and destruction, can anyone imagine an ROTJ where Luke Skywalker has abandoned his friends, leaving Han to be a permanent ice cube and Leia to be Jabba’s own personal concubine? Gritty and realistic. And had ROTJ been made in PTSD aware world of 2017, maybe this is what we would have gotten, but I come to Star Wars for escapism and parables.
I’m with Mark Hamill… “our” Luke would not have acted the way RJ has written him in TLJ. He may have had to regroup, but he would have acted to save Ben and not have abandoned Leia and Han. Only then, AFTER he had righted his wrongs, THEN he might have made the decision to end the Jedi order and exile himself.
So who’s to blame here? Is it JJ for sending Luke off in the first place and creating a mystery box too impossible to answer without destroying a hero? Or RJ for not giving Luke a noble enough reason to abandon his friends and family? Maybe both, I don’t know.
I really agree with your dislike of the dark and gritty DCEU, but i am perplexed that you would lump this with those (hyperbole aside). Luke is shown as ‘not perfect’ and struggling with how to exist as a perfect legend, and a flawed human. And i feel like he resolves this by the end of the film, so I didn’t come away feeling that he was flawed when i left the theater.
Hi dahmage… It really wasn’t meant for hyperbole, as I know that at least some people enjoy the DCEU (i.e. to them the comparison might be viewed as a compliment).
I think that I alluded to it in my post just before this; I view the treatment of Luke Skywalker and Zack Snyder’s Superman in a similar light. In both cases the filmmakers thought that a darker / flawed version of the character would make for a more interesting and realistic story. Neither resonated with me, but in the case of Luke it’s exacerbated because it’s the continuation of an existing character rather than a re-imagination.
If I stopped supporting DCEU for a “missed” re-imagination, you can imagine I will be doing the same for Star Wars.
The cinematic landscape is not so barren that I will miss a Han Solo prequel, etc. If I catch it on Netflix, great.
Perhaps my parting lesson from Star Wars: “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.”
It has been posted before, but it seems it needs to be posted again:
From that article:
“Because there’s a company called comScore that provides exit poll surveys that, while it is an opt in survey, is one that adjusts to reflect the movie going population. […] comScore surveys almost a thousand audience members in 20 markets immediately after they view the film, including The Last Jedi. […] this data shows the audience liked The Last Jedi a great deal. Rating a movie as either “excellent” or “very good” tends to be the key metric in most Hollywood evaluation of content, both in testing and in exit polls. Anything over a score of 80 in the “top two boxes” is concerned a great score, and The Last Jedi has a top two box score of 89.”
To be completely honest with you, if someone had polled me on the way out of the theatre I would have scored it favourably as well. There was too much to process to really score it accurately.
It’s only as it’s had time to sit with me that I’ve grown to dislike it.
Unlike the prequels, a fan-edit isn’t going to save this one for me, because my fundamental issue is with the treatment of Luke. I wish that I could get on board like some of you, but I can’t in the same way I couldn’t get on board with a neck-snapping Superman, which is why I stopped going to DCEU movies. DC fans bent over backwards justifying Superman’s actions in “Man of Steel” but while there is a place for gritty and broken heroes in cinema (John Wick, John McClane, etc.), doing it to existing heroes is a step too far for me.
This reminds me of when me and my dad went to see Skyfall. I remember he said “it’s a very well put together movie, but that’s not my James Bond”. He said James Bond wouldn’t have his ass kicked, or wouldn’t be in such a bad shape. James Bond is that guy who kills everyone and completes the impossible mission and his suit is still clean afterwards. So for him, it didn’t feel like James Bond, none of the Daniel Craig movies did.
I think this is what a lot of people feel towards TLJ, more specifically to Luke.
I appreciate the response and the anecdote with your dad. Take your dad’s reaction and multiply it by a few thousand for “Luke” in TLJ.
With James Bond I can wrap my head around the tonal changes because the part is recast, demarcating each series of movies from the next. Daniel Craig was essentially a reboot, and I was able to get on board with it. The same can be said for Chris Pine, whom despite never knowing his father in a rebooted Star Trek timeline STILL managed to resemble Captain Kirk.
With Mark Hamill continuing on in the original part, this depiction of “Jake Skywalker” is too much of a departure for my belief system, at least not without a trilogy of movies taking us through that emotional journey, and even then I’m not sure how “enjoyable” it would be to watch your hero lose their idealism and abandon their friends and family to die alone.
But for some, TLJ was a step too far. Rian Johnson, with the full authority of canon, told fans that Luke Skywalker is transformed into someone else. Let us not forget that Star Wars is a very special thing to its fans. For many its a part of their childhood. To see that Luke went from being the idealist to being nihilist is too much for a huge swath of the fanbase.
That sums it up for me. Thank you for articulating it so well.
Lol… thanks to most for understanding what I meant. I’ve not even brought my 4-year old to a theatre yet and won’t until he’s proven he can sit still without talking at all throughout.
You can ignore the ST. I can’t ignore the lack of one.
To quote Ron Burgandy:
“That doesn’t make sense”.
😉
To be honest, I would rather they never had made the ST
Sounds a tad selfish, no?
I don’t wish Lucas never made the PT because I know some people enjoy it, even if I don’t.
With all due respect, no I don’t think it’s selfish. There are many franchises that have gone back to the well too often, to the detriment of the overall experience. I feel the same way about everything after Aliens, Terminator 2, Highlander, Predator, The Matrix, Robocop, Ghostbusters, etc. I applaud Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale for not caving into calls for any reboots, remakes, or sequels of the “Back to the Future” trilogy while they’re alive.
I don’t think that my stance is any more selfish than me flipping it and accusing others of selfishly wanting more Star Wars to the point of over saturation.
Just my opinion, and I will vote in the only place that matters… with my ticket and merchandising dollars.
Edit: Clarified that I was speaking of the “Back to the Future” trilogy as a whole, not just the first movie.
By the time I got to see the movie and find this thread, it was already 76 pages long. I slogged through the first 40 before I started seeing the same posters cycling through the arguments again and again.
I can’t contribute anything that hasn’t already been said over and over other than:
a) I’ve only seen the film once (lucky to at all with a newborn),
b) I came out of the theatre conflicted about whether I actually enjoyed it,
c) I’ve thought about the film everyday since I saw it, and finally
d) I like it less and less each and every day.
Perhaps subsequent viewings may soften my stance, but as for now:
a) I won’t pay to see it again theatrically, and
b) Barring a major course correction it will be the last Star Wars movie I see theatrically.
I don’t disagree the political arc chosen for TFA and TLJ is a “realistic” or even “probable” one, and that the Rebel Alliance couldn’t establish a utopian government post ROTJ. Despite feeling like a rehash, I was willing to buy into that “reality” with TFA.
The travesty here is the character arc chosen for Luke. Despite all pro-TLJ lobbying, I simply cannot believe that this hero would have responded the way he does in TLJ.
I don’t want my heroes to be “fallen”. Some may applaud a “James Bond” movie where the protagonist is portrayed as a recovering alcoholic and sexual predator as “realistic” or “honest”, but that’s not why I would choose to watch a Bond movie. And that’s why TLJ will be the last Star Wars film that I see in theatres, the same way I stopped going to see “dark and gritty” DCEU movies after “Man of Steel”.
To be honest, I would rather they never had made the ST and I wish that Mark Hamill would have had the option of reading a script before being contractually obligated to make this film.
Lastly, I would explore explaining away the ineffectiveness of the gas in Jabba’s subsequent subtitles, something to the effect of “you must think us fools to try that old trick”.
I was thinking something more to the effect of “You fool. [Gas name] gas has no effect on hutts.” Then again, everyone around him was fine too, so I guess that wouldn’t work. That said, your line wouldn’t be any better, since it doesn’t actually explain why they weren’t affected.
I didn’t have the whole scene in front of me so I didn’t want to write too much, just give a sense of direction. The idea was that they were prepared for the ploy… I’m sure with some effort we could collectively come up with an explanation. 😃
Thanks for the shout out and good luck with your edit!
I like the idea of the gas, at least is some limited capacity (and using only existing scenes). I liked NeverarGreat’s idea of introducing the gas concept through Leia’s dialogue with Threepio. If I had the skills I would show the thick mist that NeverarGreat describes, but just before their capture I would have it quickly dissipate with an accompanying sound effect or a ventilation system kicking in.
Lastly, I would explore explaining away the ineffectiveness of the gas in Jabba’s subsequent subtitles, something to the effect of “you must think us fools to try that old trick”.
Can we all please stop discussing future instalments in an OT thread?
With all due respect I don’t come here for spolilers or mild speculation that could turn out to be spoilers.
Please keep politics out of this discussion. Thank you.
Unless of course we’re talking about an insurgency to overthrow an intergalactic governing body.
Flipping those shots doesn’t work because the skiff ends up on the opposite side of the barge at the end, which is why they ended up flipping them in the first place
Not being bad at all, but I did notice that and I felt that the Barge had circled around while we cut away to the interior of the barge and it was not a problem at all because enough time passes from the exterior to interior and back to the exterior again allowing for the change of / new position. you can hear the engines also within the interior shots slowing too…
But I did not feel it was an issue. But if you think it’s an issue no worries don’t mind it either way…
I agree… And apparently my brain can subconsciously fill in the gap of how one floating ship can circle another off-screen a lot easier than in can figure out why a flipped Mark Hamill’s face looks so absolutely unnatural on-screen.
Just as a test, here’s the beginning of the sail barge sequence with flipped shots put back:
https://vimeo.com/238829311
It’s more jarring than the original, without a doubt. Although, I do like that Mark Hamill’s face is flipped back to normal now. I think that’s the main giveaway.IMHO that looks incredibly promising. I never realized how incredibly off putting it was to see Mark Hamill’s face flipped like that. As someone else said, it really bothered me on a gut-level and I didn’t realize why.
Yes, Mark’s off-putting asymmetrical mirrored face is the only reason I’d want them flipped. Then there’s the direction of Leia’s chain not really matching between shots, and the 180 degree rule stuff that was mentioned before. It’s a trade-off, I guess.
I’m not in the profession of filmmaking, but I did watch an introduction video on the 180 degree rule so that I could better discuss it here. The video left off with this insight on breaking the 180 rule: “It’s not a hard and fast rule. Rule of thumb: As long as it’s not distracting or confuses your audience, you’re good to go.”
I can’t speak for everyone, but I was neither confused nor distracted in that proof of concept.