We don’t know for 100% sure that Rey is dead dead when Ben heals her. She could just have fallen unconscious and been really weak and on the edge of death or whatever.
She knows. Somehow… she’s always known.
Edit: this is just a ROTJ joke, what are the two below posters agreeing with?
Even if this edit in and of itself isn’t a polished masterpiece, it had loads of fresh ideas that were legitimately exciting and interesting - you’d have thought after 16 years of fanediting effort, ROTS would be stale and ‘done’, but this edit showed that it wasn’t, and demonstrated some of the fun things that can be done with slightly unorthodox techniques like splicing in voicelines from other movies. Like you, I imagine once I see what Obi-Wan Kenobi does with referencing and recontextualising this movie, I’ll go running back to Premiere and start chopping stuff up again, haha.
The new LEGO Star Wars Halloween special has a ‘canon’ appearance for ST-era Vader’s castle. Maybe someone wants to try to transplant some features of this onto the biomes shot or the Rogue One shot. After all, I know what this project really needs is to take on even more difficult VFX work 😉
Maybe skip the sign though.
I was thinking, I wonder if there’s some way to use Rey’s horrible, drunk parents in TLJ to help lure her to the Dark Side in Rey Nobody. Like, a really obvious character thread
for anyone who isn’t Chris Terriois for Kylo or Palpsters to say “Your parents abandoned you. Doesn’t that fill you with anger and hatred?” Or “You have no family, all alone. Join me.” Or heck even, “Take the Throne, rule over the galaxy, and you can ensure that no one else will ever be forsaken again. Like you were.”
Isn’t this what Kylo does in TLJ? “You’re nothing… but not to me.”
The hard part really is just finding appropriate footage of Hayden to use. I’ve scanned through ROTS a few times (and the various deleted scenes) and never found anything at the right angle or which wouldn’t be a super obvious lift.
Spicy take: they would’ve had to have used Ewan McGregor to have his ghost appear in TROS, and I wouldn’t mind that option if Jonh ever decides to waste his time blessing us with more variants. Yes, Luke only ever knew old Obi-Wan, so it makes sense that that’s how he appears to him in the OT and ROTJ, but Rey knew none of them and she hears Ewan’s voice 90% of the time when she hears ghost Obi so that’s not really a factor here.
Edit: whoops, this isn’t getting back on topic.
The TFA novel was written by Alan Dean Foster, who also wrote this (Ctrl+F “resurgence”) interesting piece of fanfiction, so I’d take his ideas about the sequel trilogy with something of a grain of salt. Various parts of the TFA novel have also been retconned since - it suffers a lot from ADF not being privy to where the later movies were going. I don’t think TLJ or TROS were written with the idea in mind that Rey ever downloaded Ben’s training or what have you, though to some extent the dyad is another take on a similar concept.
Please don’t hide or disguise links that, sade1212. If you are going to link to a video by Jenny Nicholson (who seemingly hasn’t a clue who Alan Dean Foster is, other than from reading his wikipedia page) then link to it in an open and more detailed manner.
Thanks mate 👍
Alright, I fixed it.
I’m not sure you need to know much about who Alan Dean Foster is to read his treatment for IX. I confess I’ve never met him nor spoken to him nor read anything he’s written outside of Star Wars either.
The TFA novel was written by Alan Dean Foster, who also wrote this (Ctrl+F “resurgence”) interesting piece of fanfiction, so I’d take his ideas about the sequel trilogy with something of a grain of salt. Various parts of the TFA novel have also been retconned since - it suffers a lot from ADF not being privy to where the later movies were going. I don’t think TLJ or TROS were written with the idea in mind that Rey ever downloaded Ben’s training or what have you, though to some extent the dyad is another take on a similar concept.
I feel like the ignition should be after Rey speaks - her line is supposed to be the main tension release and it seems odd to pre-empt it.
I like mirroring the Leia convo, but in the last close-up of Rey you can definitely tell that Daisy Ridley’s facial scar is on the wrong side if you’re aware it exists. Not that anyone would be looking for that sort of thing in a real viewing, though, of course. Could probably fix it with EBSynth.
@sade I thought Hal already removed the reference to R2 restoring his memories?
Sure, but it could be put back if a different approach was wanted (the idea is more of a drastic change than HAL tends to go for though). I confess I sometimes just post general ideas in this thread even if they’re not entirely in line with Ascendant.
One possible angle you could take with the Threepio mind-wipe is just playing it entirely for laughs. Finn has a line in that scene along the lines of “doesn’t R2 back up your memories?” and I’ve toyed around with just ending that shot there and cutting to the procedure. By using that line to suggest that the characters understand Threepio will be fine in the end and is only temporarily confused, and downplaying the other overly sentimental bits of Threepio’s ‘sacrifice’ while keeping his protestations and the relevant jokes, you can have one fewer weird fakeout emotionally-flat ‘death’ in this movie without losing memorable bits like ‘he’s my oldest friend!’ etc. It is a departure from what’s presumably intended to be a, uh, “traumatic” moment, but it’s not like that emotional beat lands anyway once you know he gets all his memories back a few scenes later.
Not to be too Testing about it - and I know there’s been a “FanFix” category of fanedits since time immemorial - but can we collectively stop referring to completely subjective changes as ‘fixes’? Fixes are what Adywan does when he corrects an accidental visual mistake or continuity error, not what’s being done when an editor consciously moves a film away from what was originally intended. Both are totally valid, and half the fun of being in this community is seeing everyone’s very different takes on what can be made from the same material, but surely if there’s anything that’s apparent from the discussions on this website, it’s that there’s a wide variety of opinions about what people do or don’t enjoy or “want to see” in each Star Wars movie.
Personally I’ve never jived with the idea of renaming Jedi to Skywalkers (especially after the movie has such a focus on Rey becoming a Jedi - “she’ll never be a Jedi”, “I’m (all the / a) Jedi”, “confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi”, etc.), but I do very much prefer that scene cut down such that the old woman only asks one question and Rey responds with Rey Skywalker. I think a lot of the groaning that that scene induces just comes from how contrived the “Rey whO?!???!” part of the exchange is.
ClanVizsla said:
words
“You know who we are” is a good idea, thanks. I’ll see if I can put it together. That line is already made up from separate “you”, “know” and “who you are” clips so it might sound even more chopped up, but I like what it conveys so hopefully I can get it working. The music isn’t too much of an issue, luckily - while there is some music in the centre channel and some echoes of Kylo’s lines in the side and surround channels, they’re mostly separate enough that you can fiddle with them individually and move bits around without anything sounding too wrong.
I would also like to find a way to suggest Palpatine isn’t completely surprised by the dyad - as I understand it there’s a slightly weird bit of canon at the moment where Snoke knew about the dyad, but seems to have never told Palpatine about it (maybe he just didn’t get the chance), and I’d like to smooth that over a bit - but I haven’t tried out what’s feasible with that scene just yet. Palpatine is a more fun character when he’s at least giving the impression of having backup plans for his backup plans, rather than just getting lucky.
I actually feel like it is sort of important to make it clear that Leia didn’t finish her Jedi training. Luke has to be the last Jedi, after all. I actually find it funny that the writers even specified that it was her last night of training.
I agree, but I think the “surrendered her saber” and “finish her journey” lines make it clear enough that Leia didn’t become a fully fledged Jedi. Though I do love the change, if one was to nitpick, “she had sensed the end of her Jedi path” carries an implication that the end has arrived now in a way “she had sensed the death of her son at the end of her Jedi path” doesn’t, so those other two lines are doing a lot of clarification work either way. Anyway I’m just spitballing - trimming out the mention of Ben’s death already massively improves that dialogue, and V5 sounds pretty good to me. I could probably convince myself it’s a good idea to remove basically any line in this movie lol.
Do you even need the line at all? Luke already tells us it’s the last night of Leia’s training, and omitting any further elaboration on that lets you headcanon that she’s just moving into politics, or is just finished with whatever Luke had to teach her, or something. The idea of Leia saying something along the lines of “I have sensed the end of my Jedi path!” is hilarious to me - then again, she apparently also took the time to prophesise that her lightsaber would be picked up again by someone else, so Luke should hide it in his hut…
“Luke! I’ve sensed that my son is going to die if I continue training. This is the end of my Jedi Path.”
“Wow, that sucks, but fair enough.”
“Ah, but someone will pick my saber up again, and finish my journey.”
“I see. Wouldn’t that also lead to your son dying?”
Here’s an attempt to shuffle the dyad revelation to be what causes the big swell. I also rejiggered the rest of the scene to try to fill in the void left by the dyad lines with… something.
My main issue with this is that the premise of this scene is Kylo telling Rey why Palpatine wanted her dead as a child, so there’s kind of two options here: a) have Kylo just answer with “he knew what you would become” and then keep “what Palpatine doesn’t know is…” before the dyad reveal, but this seems a bit like he’s suddenly changing subject without a satisfactory explanation, or b) what I’ve done in this mockup, where I’ve sort of implied the dyad is part of the answer to the question - but this does require some tweaking later to establish that Palpatine isn’t only just then finding out about the dyad.
Then again, the theatrical movie’s lines here aren’t exactly a satisfactory explanation of why Palpatine wanted Rey dead either: the elaboration Kylo gives originally is that Palps took issue with her having “his power” by being a Force-sensitive blood relation of his, but there’s no reasoning given as to why that necessitates death (and we do find out later that he didn’t actually want to kill her when she was a child at all!).
I’m trying to use lines that aren’t super crucial elsewhere. Most of their conversation of Pasaana is just exchanging unrelated jabs at each other so it’s reasonably easy to pick from there, for instance (I can definitely live without the line “I’m going to find you, and I’m going to turn you to the Dark Side!”).
I’ve been messing with the big reveal scene a little using dialogue from elsewhere in the movie and I’ve got this so far. It’s not really working as a cohesive whole but I think there’s a few bits here that could have promise.
I’d be in favour of a little Imperial March, if done tastefully. Echoing the sentiments of many others, if I wanted to watch the 1977 theatrical Star Wars with minimal revisionism, I’d load up 4K77; this project doesn’t need to be that.
I think the key idea Testing misses is that everyone else knows that some edit ideas have pros and cons, it’s just that they’ve independently made the judgement that the pros outweigh the cons for the specific purpose of their fanedit.
Like Leia’s lightsaber being purple in Ascendant: yes, it does make it less similar to Anakin’s saber and thus perhaps slightly less Skywalker-y if you’re really clutching at straws, but it also a) is a nice tribute to Carrie Fisher, b) better distinguishes the two lightsabers on Exegol so they’re easier to keep track of, c) breaks up the sea of blue on Exegol, d) makes Leia’s saber distinct from Anakin’s in the same way Luke’s green saber is, etc. I wouldn’t use that change for my own fanedit because I generally prefer to stick with canon saber colours, but there are many compelling arguments for it, and having one possible downside doesn’t instantly negate all of those.
At the end of the day, fanedits are alternate versions of the movie. We’re not sat here planning the new Official Special Editions to forever replace the originals. It doesn’t really matter if someone wants to make a change that you personally think ruins the movie because you don’t have to watch their fanedit. This is all doubly true for ideas like the one Nerevar is floating, where the whole point is that it’s a big change to the movie and the fun is in discussing how it would work and what the ramifications would be - it’s not being proposed as a definite total net improvement that must be implemented. It’s more of a “What if?”.
It’s also extremely condescending to act like any one person’s ideas about the films are the only correct ones. Star Wars has always been somewhat open to interpretation and means lots of different things to different people. This is true of all film (and art in general). It’s not even uncommon for art to resonate with people for reasons entirely unintended by the creators: Data in Star Trek has been seen as a relatable character for autistic people even though he was never written that way deliberately; and similarly Dax’s struggles as a character who used to be in a man’s body but is now in a woman’s body is something trans people relate to, even though that wasn’t necessarily on the writers’ minds in the late 90s. There’s no right answer, and insisting there is and that everyone else must just be stupid is just a really unfortunate lack of empathy.
Even if David Lynch sat down one day and suddenly explained at great length the reasoning behind every decision he’d ever made in his films and TV shows, people would still continue to discuss their own personal take-aways and ideas, right?
In ANH Obi-Wan described Vader as having hunted down the Jedi, so your idea conflicts with that.
Also, so… Obi-Wan’s lying to Padmé to locate Anakin?
I can’t believe I’m engaging with Testing again but… plenty of Jedi survived Order 66. In both the old EU and the current canon, there are many comics and stories of Vader finding and killing these survivors. Vader killing most of them when they were all rounded up in a temple is barely “hunting down” to begin with!
Awesome! Is the plan still to release higher bitrate versions when ANH HD and ROTJ are done?
