sade1212

D or bust, really.

I like A.

Could I get a link via PM, please? Reading through the cutlist, I’m amazed the runtime is as high as it is - you’ve cut a lot. I can’t say I agree with many of your changes on paper (and classifying all that as “cringe” seems like a massive stretch) but there’s some very technically ambitious edits here and I’d be interested to see how well you’ve executed them.

I quite enjoyed Dom Cobb’s (I think) test with “I’m no one” as she catches the saber. Since the entire OT and ST are about underdog nobody Rebellions/Resistances rising up against the Empire/First Order (yeah alright I guess Luke was retconned to be the son of the literal Chosen One but he still comes across as a random moisture farmer), I feel it works better with that theme. It shows that Rey has accepted she’s Rey Nobody, and that that’s a good thing: she doesn’t have to be someone special to beat Palpatine. I think that’s a more powerful message for the movie to have. It actually builds on TFA and TLJ, instead of ignoring them. Of course it only really makes sense in a Rey Nobody edit, and you’d have to cut Rey Skywalker as well, probably.

Yeah, I was thinking yesterday about how you could squeeze it in to ROTS. It has a certain finality to it, and even ends with “A New Hope shall emerge”, so it sort of feels like it should play all the way up to the end of the ending montage, which is how it’s used in its Rebels episode. You could try to sync the bit about the Empire rising with the shot of the Imperialised Venators and Vader looking at the Death Star, the bit about not returning to the Temple with Yoda landing on Dagobah, and the bit about the New Hope with Luke being delivered to the Lars Homestead. My worry is that would be too on the nose and would unnecessarily distract from the score.

On a similar note: what if you nicked Palpatine’s TROS message from Fortnite and stuck it over Order 66 or something? It’d probably ruin the emotional gravitas of that scene, but surely if anything is “the day of the Sith” which corrects “the great error” after “the work of generations”, it would be the bit in the movie literally called “Revenge of the Sith” in which the secret Sith Lord takes his revenge.

Charles Soule probably knew that Ben was getting redeemed in TROS, hence the Rise of Kylo Ren not featuring any child murder and retconning TLJ’s vague implication that he personally slaughtered all his former classmates. The extended canon materials always gave quite a sympathetic view of his childhood, but I doubt anything pre-Rise of Kylo Ren was written with his redemption explicitly in mind. I imagine that with the comic Lucasfilm wanted to explicitly steer away from making him seem like some kind of school shooter parallel. I mean, it’s bad enough with Anakin - I’m not sure if Vader’s redemption would have been popular if ROTJ had come out immediately after ROTS!

I enjoy the new exchange and I agree that “What did you tell her?” fits much better in tone than “YOU WEREN’T THERE” did previously. I didn’t notice last time that you VFX’d Obi-Wan so his saber ignites second; it’s nice and subtly done.

Vader was only really redeemed in the eyes of Luke, and apparently the Force. I imagine he’d have had a very awkward time trying to ghostsplain to Leia why he made her watch as Tarkin obliterated her entire home planet and everyone she’d ever loved. Or maybe after the Endor Celebration, Anakin never manifested again - from then on he just ghosted his kids 😉

Edit: I wonder if this will be tackled at all by the rumoured post-Rebels Filoni animated show. It’s Filoni, so obviously Ahsoka will be in it, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable that she’d interact with redeemed ghost-Anakin. (Despite not technically being a Jedi, she is a powerful force user, and we hear her voice in TROS so clearly she goes on to learn something about manifesting after death, the Netherworld and all that.) It’d be extremely hard to write though, which is why I don’t think it’s ever been covered significantly in any other Star Wars media.

stickydixon said:

Something about Anakin just calling him “Windu” gives me much joy.

I think NFBisms did it first in his New Canon Cut but I don’t know if he borrowed the idea from elsewhere.

Yeah, I wish Ben had survived the movie, but if there’s ever actually good canon material set after TROS, then I think the only real option which would maintain continuity would be to stick his ghost in and cut the kiss/adjust the music to sell his death as more of a premeditated heroic sacrifice. As-is, it felt to me like it was deliberately edited to be comically sudden and unexpected, like Meet the Spy or something.

I think a lot of young people these days don’t necessarily know enough about film (as in, physical film, not ‘movies’ or ‘cinema’) to realise just how much detail 35mm captures. Growing up in the last 20 years myself, I remember TV going from SD to 720p to 1080p to 4K, and digital/phone cameras doing similar. I think it’s feasible that a person of a similar age who doesn’t take a particular interest in A/V (or fanediting, or film preservation, or anything else along those lines) could just assume that the picture quality of movies would have also followed a parallel progression, and that modern Bluray releases of old movies must therefore be some kind of upscale. It doesn’t help that many have heavy DNR giving them a waxy, unreal look.

Anakin doesn’t waste time

Delpheas said:

I’m considering a few things, though most of these are more “conservative” than radical, they touch on things that many people would consider sacred cows.

Cut Obi-Wan calling Anakin a cunning warrior

I like most of these little continuity tweaks, but I was wondering what your idea was with this one. I’ve always thought one of the best things about TCW is that it shows us an Anakin who does fit that description.

It’s interesting - I thought the ‘fan service’ like Chewie’s medal weakened TROS, and yet I really really love adding in the ghosts, despite it being egregious fanservice. I guess if TROS has to be nostalgia bait, it’s better if it at least does it well.

Does Anakin mouth something during his hand up close up?

The DVDs and Blurays, and Disney+. If you want improved versions of the prequel deleted scenes, HAL9000 is the guy to ask. He and maybe Poppasketti are possibly the best people to ask about cleaned up versions of any ST deleted scenes also - the TFA deleted scenes have an annoying timecode on the screen, which has only been somewhat successfully removed for a couple of them. Rogue One and TROS have yet to have any deleted scenes released since they’re probably saving them for the 2077 100th anniversary SWC.

When you wrote Jakku, did you mean Jedha? I guess Jakku was the site of the final battle between the Empire and Rebellion (you know, “nowhere”) but I don’t think the extinct Jedi Order cared much about that.

Ever since I found out JJ voiced D-O I can’t unhear it. Tempting to just dub him with beeps.

NeverarGreat said:
A potential direction would be to lean on the idea that Rey is a feral Force user who can’t distinguish what her power actually comes from. In that case when she confronts Sheev it is the first time her power is being put to the test, so it isn’t if she can defeat him but whether she can do it using only the light side that counts.

This was where I thought her character was going. After her snarl in TFA, “you went straight to the dark” in TLJ, and especially after her lightning in this movie, I felt it was clear she was using the dark side most of the time, even though she was using it to do good. After all, it is quicker, easier, and more seductive, and Rey always tended to be motivated by strong emotions. I was really hoping for an “I am a Jedi, like my father before me” moment where she finds a light side way to defeat Palpatine. Instead we got a hilarious inversion of Luke throwing his saber away and refusing to fight: she force pulls a SECOND saber into her other hand, allowing her to more effectively EXPLODE Palpatine’s FACE.

Here’s a very flattering demonstration of what Remini can achieve with faces. Unfortunately doing a 100 frame ish shot in this manner takes me about an hour since the workflow involves Photoshop contact sheets, Bluestacks and EBSynth… It also only works with faces which still have a discernible likeness to the actors - the tiny faces in, say, the ROTS rebellion deleted scenes can’t be saved using Remini, since the faces it generates are not right at all.

Very cool. At 0:45-0:46 one of the background fires is visible through the flying droid, though.

Yeah, I think things generally make more sense in a Rey Nobody edit if Palpatine tells Kylo about the dyad, and his plan the whole time is to use the two of them to rejuvenate himself. It builds on the whole ‘darkness rises and the light to meet it’ idea from TLJ rather than retconning it entirely. It’s not like the theatrical cut makes any attempt to explain why or how Kylo knows they’re a dyad, iirc.
Unfortunately I think it’s difficult to cut around the whole ‘kill me and let me steal your body!’ bit of the movie. I’m interested to see how Dom handles that. Also, if Palpatine doesn’t explicitly want Rey dead, then the difference between Kylo’s plan (“Let’s go kill him and take the throne!”) and Sheev’s plan (in this idea: “I’m going to trick him into bringing Rey to me so I can suck the life out of them!”) is less clear cut.

The big reveal in the hangar scene can be the dyad, right?

jonh said:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xd1gx0Q3dSK1U0W1D24ouJyeZUBZ_uHY
Luke, Leia and Ben V1

Wow, you’re really good at this. My only minor criticism would be: perhaps you could photoshop a different lower half of his body on? I’m just overly familiar with those hands and belt being an ANH Luke thing.

Anthony Daniels has a vast wealth of 3PO lines out there since he’s voiced him in essentially everything he’s ever been in. Job for life. So if anyone has any ideas for literally anything 3PO could say, you could probably do it. Cut half the movie by just having him exclaim “The Second Death Star!” when he reads the dagger on Pasaana.

I really enjoy how Vader and Tarkin casually talk about Obi-Wan being Vader’s old master as if Vader’s identity was just common knowledge. Of course, at the time of writing it was, since he was “Darth Vader” on the light side as well…

Regarding Ben’s Jedi robes, here’s what they look like in canon (bearing in mind comic visuals, especially covers, are not set-in-stone canon since they’re mostly down to the artists).

One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six

Of course, you’d need some kind of cosplay footage to get anything like that into TROS.