sade1212

Cutting Luke’s lightsaber entirely wouldn’t add anything to the film, but I’ve been tempted to try to VFX it to be his ROTJ saber. I’m torn between the symbolic importance of the blue lightsaber being the same one that he previously rejected, and the fact Luke otherwise seems to be aiming to appear to Kylo as Kylo would remember him. For all of Kylo’s thirteen years of training at Luke’s Jedi temple, his master had a green lightsaber - we know this since Luke uses that same saber in ROTJ and in the TLJ flashback. And yet, when Luke appears to Kylo again and ignites his saber, it’s blue. Surely Kylo would immediately spot something was up, since every other time he’s ever seen Luke ignite his saber, it’s been green. I mean, the audience notices Luke’s saber colour change ESB to ROTJ, right? It’s a glowing laser sword, it’s not subtle. And if Kylo notices Luke’s saber is now blue, he’d probably glance at the hilt, realise it’s the saber that just got split in half, and suspect Luke is up to something. It risks giving the game away and having Kylo realise he’s being played.

All great ideas! I especially like the idea to move Kylo’s helmet repair to TLJ, since otherwise he goes bare faced for a year then suddenly repairs his helmet one day for no reason. Reusing Leia dialogue from earlier films is a power we have that Abrams did not and I think your ideas would help sell her as a stronger presence in TROS.

Why?

EddieDean said:

These are all really good ideas, and this sounds like a great start. I’d disagree with sade on TROS Palpatine being a clone (body) though. The first factor here is that cloning tech does exist in Star Wars, and the second factor is that Palps not only falls down the reactor shaft in ROTJ, but the entire station later explodes. Since Palps masterminded the Kamino cloning plan, it stands to reason that he thought about having backup bodies for his spirit to inhabit.

Sure, I don’t disagree that Palpatine could have clones of himself, and that his corpse not being completely obliterated is somewhat farfetched (we do see most of the DS2 intact though, down to Palps’ throne even, despite it clearly entirely disappearing in ROTJ). My key issue is that the major victory of this film is Rey destroying Palpatine, but if we’ve already established for the audience that this Palpatine is merely one of many clone bodies, there’s unfinished business. Everyone is celebrating while the audience sits there thinking “Can’t he just move to another clone body again?”.

I’d love to have more Anakin involvement in this trilogy but there’s not exactly a huge bank of relevant Hayden lines, since he’s semi-retired from acting and Matt Lanter in TCW sounds nothing like him. Fingers crossed he’s in the new LEGO game, I guess? Unless you can edit together prequel lines or repurpose one that most edits cut. He sounds pretty much the same in Jumper but he hardly says anything Star Wars-y in that movie.

You have some great ideas and I’m looking forward to stealing some of your edits for my own eventual cuts of this trilogy.

I’d question your decision to make Palpatine another clone. It doesn’t really add anything - I for one am okay with the explanation that Sith cultists partially reanimated Palpatine’s corpse using the dark side (it seems to me it’s not just the original Sidious possessing that corpse, because he definitely hasn’t been ‘all the Sith’ this whole time, has he?) - but it does raise the question of there being more clones on top of the the one Rey explodes in this movie. Endless Sidiouses!

I’m not sure if cutting Kijimi would be more trouble than it’s worth. AEing Zorii out of the entire film is going to be a lot of work for little payoff. Personally I’m hoping for an extended edition to improve the pacing, but some others here are thinking of digitally extending shots with slowmo or freeze frames or masking out the backgrounds of shots and retiming them etc. If I were you I’d wait and see what can be done on that front before attempting to excise the entire planet. It’s unfortunate, because I agree that, focusing exclusively on the main plot, having Threepio just give the information when he first reads the dagger seems like an easy dubbing edit and a good streamline, but Zorii and the business with the force bond and rescuing Chewie really complicate the issue.

Do you reckon the GPS tower or whatever can be cut from the movie? It immediately becomes irrelevant because Pryde decides to move the navigation to his ship anyway. Also, do you think it would be feasible to keep the ‘Final Order’ as the ‘First Order’? It’s just so horrendously cheesy, and also worsens the feeling of TFA and TLJ being irrelevant.

I’ve been scrubbing through my infallible photographic memory to work out how egregiously Rey Palpatine was added in, prompted by a quote I saw from Oscar Isaac saying the cast didn’t know Rey’s lineage during filming. Kylo first reveals it to Rey through easily dubbed mask dialogue, and then in the next scene Rey then says she’s going to destroy Palpatine because he “killed her mother and her father” - no mention of him being her granddad. Unmasked Kylo says “the dark side is in our nature” but you can easily read that line as not being a Rey Palpatine reference (I’m assuming that the pre-reshoots/last-minute-edits version of the plot still featured Rey prominently struggling with the dark side, just without the explicit Palpatine lineage). It isn’t until the scene with force ghost Wig Skywalker that anyone actually uses real filmed lip movements to reference Rey Palpatine. (Unfortunately, we’ll never get the pre-reshoots version of this scene so we’ll just have to cut it from the movie, won’t we.) It looks like the real Skellig Michael (rather than a greenscreen composite) to my eyes. Palpatine says “my grandchild” with his lips and everything - there’s some speculation that McDiarmid’s role was expanded in reshoots, right, because early leaks suggested Matt Smith was involved in the Palpatine role. I don’t know if this is evidence for or against that. I’d love to one day get in depth information about the production of this trilogy, but Disney probably has rock solid NDAs on anything fun.

Rey says she won’t hate Palpatine, but then she beats him by blowing him up with lightning.

Every scene with Kylo Ben Ren Solo in is the greatest. I love his little ESB-style hop down on the DS2. Just supercut every Adam Driver scene in the trilogy together to create the ultimate ST edit. I hope we get more Sen Bolo in deleted scenes. If JJ is feeling extra generous, perhaps some post-Bendemption dialogue (or at least whatever Rey says to him at the end).

“Leia sensed the death of her son at the end of her Jedi path” is the absolute worst. Her son dies anyway lol. Can’t wait for the ROTJ-TFA Filoni animated series to retcon this into something less low effort.

Why does Sidious call Leia the Princess of Alderaan when talking to Pryde? Has he forgotten his Empire blew that planet up ~35 years ago? Is this supposed to be fanservice? I’d like to cut most of the dialogue in that scene, and the detonation of Kijimi (it and the ‘final order’ are completely unnecessary), but then there’s not much of a way left to imply Pryde is now in charge…

Can the tower be cut from the Exegol space battle? It’s unnecessary and the last thing the movie needs is weird complications like that. My Dad never even picked up on the navigation signal being switched away since they make such a big deal of the tower. You’d lose Finn’s ‘feeling’ but it’s no huge loss since it’s not like Finn’s force sensitivity is going to come up in Episode 10, is it.

I think my problem with this movie is I just can’t buy in. As stupid as the prequels can be, I still manage to get immersed in those movies. I think the problem here is a combination of the fast pace and the absurd storyline. I’m sure we’ll fix it.

Sorry for the disorganised thoughts. I had a point when I started typing, I think: Only the Luke and Palpatine scenes ever use real lip movements to reference Rey Palpatine; Finn, Poe etc. never mention it. So it was feasibly added in reshoots - but we probably already knew that.

Lots of Star Wars films have interesting reshoots, don’t they? ROTS’s inconsistent Anakin, Ewan’s fake beard in AOTC, rumours that TLJ originally had Crait earlier in the film, TFA’s switch from having Anakin’s saber be the MacGuffin to having the map, etc.

Merry Christmas.

If you watch the whole shot in reverse (not just the portion shown in the Twitter thread) it becomes clear the shot is not reversed, or at least it was carefully shot with the intention of reversing it, because Adam’s head bounces upon impact with the ground. It wouldn’t make sense for him to jerk his head up in the way he appears to do in the reversed footage before being pulled up, and the effect it has on the hair over his face doesn’t make much sense in the reversed footage either, so I have to conclude it’s a real bounce and the footage is being played in the direction it was shot. It looks strange and sped up in both directions because of missing frames and a 23.976fps movie being poorly captured at 30fps.

Rey’s totally talking though.

What’re the chances they get the movie voices back? I know the Lego TFA game has been very useful for faneditors of that movie and I hope we get some more material. Some people have noticed that TROS opens itself up to redubbing, what with Kylo’s helmet, Zorii’s helmet and Sheev’s often darkness-shrouded face, so it would be nice to get some more dialogue from those actors. Or dialogue from a character who says nothing except ‘ow’ in the final film. I also hope for the return of the prequel actors, and living OT actors where possible, though I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear the Clone Wars voice cast. Might even be fun to have Matt Lanter re-enacting ROTS.

I’d absolutely love it but I don’t see it coming from the squeaky clean JJ Abrams/Disney machine. Compare the TFA and TLJ documentaries and deleted scenes; Rian’s film is a lot more open about the production than JJ’s first was, and I imagine TROS will follow in TFA’s footsteps. I doubt they’d want to reveal any vulnerability or risk having to admit that they may have gone too far in a few places with the editing, especially as this movie was somewhat rushed and it’d open them up to criticism for pumping out the last Skywalker saga film in an unpolished state to meet a deadline. Seems more likely they’ll just push out a 4K Bluray set of the theatrical version and move on. Or even worse, they’ll think to themselves “Gee, don’t Star Wars fans hate it when the movies get changed?” and use that to justify only ever releasing what I essentially see as a bad edit of a potentially good movie.

Leia’s “Ben” which distracts him could easily be delivered from beyond the grave. That would probably make more sense than her lying down and force skyping it to him so hard that she dies, anyway. Even Mace Windu, who never learned how to be a force ghost and has been dead about 50 years, managed to communicate through the force to Rey.

Mink2301 said it was dead in March 2017, right? Because of no clean SFX/dialogue channel being available so the original score cannot be removed.

What’re the chances the film actors come back for Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga? Hopefully that’d give us more Kylo/Palps dialogue to work with. I’m secretly hoping for new prequel actor dialogue, though admittedly I think it’s far more likely they’ll go the Battlefront 2 route and get the Clone Wars VAs. Hayden also sounds noticeably older now, as heard in TROS, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The Rise of Kylo Ren comic reveals the Knights of Ren are not Luke’s former students. Oddly it also suggests Snoke’s facial deformities are caused by Luke and are thus presumably unique - but the other Snokes in the tank have them. To be fair there’s a good few other canon issues in this film to be retconned around besides that.

I’m not sure fanedits can save TROS. I reckon you’d need more footage, not less. The first act already feels like it’s been trimmed within an inch of its life, we never spend enough time with any characters except Rey, Kylo and Poe, and the final act features an awkwardly silent Ben Solo.

What the movie needs is simplification: can the “Final Order” be axed? Surely at least one of the early plot points/planets can be glossed over to get the ridiculous fast paced first act out of the way sooner. Palpatine’s plan is kind of incoherent since he asks Kylo to kill Rey, then reveals he never really wanted her dead. What if Kylo had actually killed her, Sheev, then what would you have done?

Can Leia be killed earlier? I really appreciate what JJ was trying but to me it felt like an awkward fanedit - Carrie’s line deliveries never seemed to quite match the awkwardly engineered lines written to deliberately lead in to them. In one scene she practically just says “no”. It always cuts away from Leia very quickly. The worst offender is her death, which features Maz awkwardly explaining to the audience that Leia has decided to go and die to send a message to her son through the force, or something.

The ending is trying to be fan service but is absolutely tone deaf. We see Leia and Luke’s ghosts smiling at Rey because she decided to adopt their name for no real reason, immediately after their son/nephew has just died and faded away.

There are a few unnecessary jabs at TLJ which won’t age well when people watch this trilogy in a few years without knowledge of the BTS drama. Luke basically says you have to respect lightsabers and that he was totally wrong about the Jedi. He’s also wearing an awful wig.

I’m hoping for a serious bounty of deleted footage to be made available on the Bluray. Even then, this one is going to be a real challenge to fix up.

I did attempt this a few months ago but scrapped it before training it fully because it was awful. I had to track down some obscure stuff to get footage of young Hayden but even then there just isn’t enough to cover all of JL’s facial expressions and angles in TPM. You see how at some angles the face is just blurry and lame. I never got the eyes working either.

The vast majority of Star Wars movies are, to some extent, terrible, so personally I’m not too phased by these negative critic reviews. Even if the movie is abysmal when I go see it this evening, I’m sure I’ll be able to at least enjoy it in the same way I enjoy the Phantom Menace. Maybe I’m a mindless consumer.

And then a few years from now, our community here will have produced hundreds of fanedits, and maybe managed to turn it into a good movie. It sounds like it suffers from the opposite problem as TLJ though: that movie is too long and has some jarring jokes and moments - problems easily fixed with fanediting - while it sounds like this movie tries to cram too much in to its runtime. We can VFX in extra ghosts, replace audio, adjust Ben’s fate etc etc. but it’s not really going to be possible to change Palpatine’s death sequence or anything that fundamental. Fingers crossed for some high utility deleted scenes.

Burger King Germany is running an ad campaign based on the leaked spoilers for TROS. Note: contains LEAKED SPOILERS.

Huh, that gif shows the ship in the sky is in a different position. I also didn’t realise there were additional scurriers in 1997. Personally, I AE’d out the scurriers from the Bluray footage and use a colour corrected version of that for my own versions (with theatrical audio to remove the squeaking).

I’ve been quickly partly-Despecialising and tonemapping down to SDR the 4K Disney Plus releases for my own personal use in a marathon very soon. Most shots look noticeably sharper in this new master than the Bluray, and even with only the ~20gb streaming versions of the 4K releases available, there are noticeably fewer compression artifacts during motion. They’re a great version of the films (as a base for projects which remove Lucas’ worst ideas for changes, of course).

Except for this shot. Ignore the colours, it’s my own tonemapping of the HDR down to SDR for my TV, which is nowhere close to being properly calibrated, so they’ll look off on anything which is. The point is it’s blurry and looks like it’s been upscaled. Lots of detail is missing. I included part of the wipe in the comparison because I believe this might give us evidence that this is what this shot actually looks like in the negative/how it potentially looked in 1997. The sharp detail seems to wipe in slightly behind the main wipe. See the edge of the bunch of air ducts (?) on the centre-left; the left side is blurry but the right is sharp, and then in the next frame the whole thing is sharp. I think the sharp version of this shot is an alteration made for the 2004 master, when they redid the landspeeder. It seems what’s happened for this release is they’ve just composited the 2004 onwards landspeeder onto the blurry version of this shot from 1997 (and shifted the landspeeder to the left right slightly).

So for anyone like me who enjoys some of the Mos Eisley changes, you’d probably want to grab this shot from the Bluray.

Did we ever work out if the sound mixes are totally new? The waveforms look different to me vs. the blurays, but my hearing isn’t fantastic so I can’t really tell if they sound noticeably different.

Imagine if Star Wars had never gotten a sequel. Luke’s lightsaber would just be a Chekov’s gun since he doesn’t use it until ESB.

Apologies if this has been mentioned before, but Han’s shoulder has been replaced by starfield in this shot.

It’s quite fun to use Dre’s tool to apply these colours to the Bluray. though of course you still get the Blurays’ oversharpened skin and general flat look.

I quite enjoyed that clip; though I don’t disagree that “they fly now” is fairly goofy dialogue. To some extent, each trilogy chronologically gets sillier dialogue - the prequels are stilted, the OT is fairly casual but still has some George Lucas clangers, and then the ST is kind of quippy. You can handwave an in universe explanation for that if you really want; but it doesn’t bother me as long as the overall story still delivers on Rey/Kylo/Palpatine well. But some of those comments - people are claiming it looks like a fan film, or that it has terrible obvious CGI or whatever - there is no possible way a fan film could get a high enough budget to do a scene like this, and to me most of the stuff looks like real filmed greenscreen elements at least (even if it is composited together afterwards) though I don’t know how anyone can be passing judgement on that in such a low quality compressed video.