sade1212

Anyone else get slightly irritated every single time anyone calls Kylo Ren just “Ren”? Especially in this movie, since it establishes there are other Knights of Ren. IIRC in TLJ when it’s shortened, it’s shortened to Kylo (like in the real world), and Rey calls him Ben for the latter half of the movie. Obviously it doesn’t make sense for her to call him Ben early on in TROS because that’d ruin the impact of the moment when she does, but I would’ve enjoyed more consistent use of either Kylo or Ren across the movies.

Anyway, obviously it’s not feasible to change it, but my point is that cutting “Ren’s ship” is one fewer uses of “Ren” instead of “Kylo”, which I see as a good thing.

I think the pages of discussion over single lines are a consequence of two things. Firstly, there’s very little material to work with for TROS: no deleted scenes and a really tightly edited movie to begin with. Secondly, it’s one of the more underwhelming Star Wars movies, and the new ending of the Saga too, so there’s a strong drive to try to improve it. It winds up with everyone getting a little desperate.

I think those other interpretations are still valid regardless of the end scene. I imagine the original idea was to write a title which had multiple interpretations relevant to the movie. It reminds me of Return of the Jedi - is it the Jedi Luke Skywalker returning to save Han Solo and defeat the Empire; the Jedi inside Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker, returning to save his son; or is it the implication that in the wake of the Empire’s defeat Luke can now go on to start a new Jedi Order? It’s all three, right.

Not to unnecessarily derail this thread, but a few pages back people brought up Rey’s narration in the cave in TLJ, and I’ve seen this complained about elsewhere as an example of ‘telling not showing’. The thing is, she’s not just narrating it for the audiences sake; she’s describing the experience to Ben, right? I think you’re supposed to wonder “why is there narration in my Star Wars movie!?” and then it’s a little twist when it cuts to Rey in the hut Force Skyping Ben. I think if you cut all that narration out, it’d feel quite abrupt to cut to the hut and have her suddenly start talking, and you lose that immediate realisation/understanding that she’d been sharing her emotions with Ben.

Maybe he grew it out in between scenes.

I’m also very sensitive to TROS taking intentional or unintentional shots at TLJ, but I don’t see “it was fear that kept me here” as one of the problem lines. It’s an oversimplification of events, but I think it works well enough given Luke is trying segue into his discussion about her fear. I see it more as meaning fear of himself/failure/making things worse, not fear of Ben or the First Order.

I actually take far more umbrage with “I WAS WRONG!” because even though, yes, part of Luke’s TLJ arc is him admitting to himself that he’s wrong, the TROS line is so blunt that it gives me the exact same vibe as “a Jedi’s weapon deserves more respect!” in as much as it feels like it’s there for the people who to this day tweet on and on about how Disney ruined “Jake” Skywalker or whatever. Having him cut Rey off with it slightly lessens that feeling, but it also makes it seem quite harsh, which is line with grumpy TLJ hermit Luke but might be a bit much for gentler TROS ghost Luke.

A few random comments on things that have come up in the last sevenish pages:

• I love the night-time to morning idea for Ahch-To and Nev’s latest mockup is really getting close to being flawless. The shot of the TIE bonfire from behind Rey is so much better with the intense contrast.

• I do like TestingOutTheTest’s interpretation of Rey’s arc, but I don’t think her giving the lightsaber to Leia (and then getting it back a few minutes later) actually does anything for it. It feels totally half-baked, like an idea JJ and Terrio had but then forgot to expand on and just left in anyway. I also prefer the implication that Rey has been struggling with her training and ‘making excuses’ about it for a while, whereas leaving it in sort of makes it seem like this is the first time. I’m also not the biggest fan of the importance the films place on that saber to begin with; Luke only used it for a few years, long before he became a legendary Jedi Master, so it’s much more iconic in the real world than it ever was in-universe - it feels like another symptom of JJ’s love for the OT sort of meta-infecting the universe itself (see also “this is the ship that made the Kessel run in 14 parsecs!”), but that’s a whole different discussion.

• I don’t think the Bestoon Legacy is Rey’s parents ship. The TFA flashback (and its reuse in TROS) do seem to imply that she watched them leave in it, but the name ‘Bestoon Legacy’ (Ochi of Bestoon) and D-O being onboard and all suggest to me it was Ochi’s ship. Plus, he must’ve gotten to Jakku somehow. I think in ret(con)rospect, we have to assume the Jakku part of the TFA flashback is a mixture of vision and flashback, and that little Rey never actually, literally watched that ship fly off while Unkar took her away. I’d assume that at some unspecified point after her parents sold Rey, Ochi arrives in the Bestoon Legacy, locates Rey’s parents, takes them on board for interrogation, flies off, and then kills them. Maybe Rey saw the ship fly off and sensed her parents were on it, hence that being part of her TFA vision/flashback or whatever. But there’s no way they sold her to Unkar seconds before Ochi flies away like the flashback would imply if interpreted literally, because that’s just silly. Rey also appears to ‘remember’ her parents being killed by Ochi, which isn’t possible, unless that bit of flashback/vision is just for the audience’s benefit. EDIT: Revisiting TROS; Rey does literally say “the day my parents left, they were on that ship”, doesn’t she? Implying they really did sell her right before getting taken by Ochi. Good God, what a retcon.

• I still believe editing TROS such that Rey’s parents were always bad people is feasible. Rey can still be mad that Palpatine killed them, even if they were terrible people. She does have reasons to hate him other than that too, such as him being Space-Hitler, his corrupting influence on Ben (to whatever extent she’s aware of that), and even surface-level stuff like Luke telling her she has to face him. I think the toughest question to answer with this change would be what was mentioned previously: why wouldn’t Rey’s parents give her up to save themselves? I think there’s a few ways you could come at that. Perhaps Rey’s Dad and his wife hated Palpatine so much they were willing to withhold that information just to spite him, even if it meant their own deaths, as someone (Jar Jar Bricks?) suggested earlier in the thread. It’s still essentially a sacrifice to save Rey, but it leaves them morally grey rather than having them be retconned into the loving parents that Rey wishes they were. Or maybe they did try to sell Rey out, but didn’t know exactly where she’d wound up - I’m sure there’s plenty of Jakku outside Niima Outpost - so Ochi killed them anyway. It does get a little contrived, I admit, but it’s not like this movie’s plot is rock solid as is, and I personally think it’s worth it to avoid undermining the TLJ reveal.

• Darth Muffy brought up deepfakes but they’d not actually help here at all. The faces of young Luke and Leia aren’t CGI like in the Mandalorian or Rogue One, they’re actually footage taken directly from ESB and ROTJ and composited in, so they’re 100% legit Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher. They only look odd because of the extensive relighting and masking and recolouring done to get them to fit into the scene (and because they took Leia footage from the scene in ROTJ where she’s really sad lol).

• I’m sure everyone will be pleased to know Kylo canonically flew a TIE Scout to Exegol, which is a variant with a hyperdrive. You can always trust the expanded material to paper over goofs. I still like the idea that he steals Vader’s TIE.

• I would certainly like to see the “Leia sensed the death of her son at the end of her Jedi path” line altered if anyone can pull it off well, because it adds this weirdly pessimistic vibe to Ben’s sacrifice. Rey taking Leia’s saber to ‘finish her journey’ or whatever is supposed to be a hopeful thing, right, but it just sort of feels like Rey accidentally makes Leia’s vision a reality and seals Ben’s fate. This weirdness is compounded even further in the theatrical film by having Leia only become one with the Force after Ben dies, and then everyone being happy ghosts without him (and also the scene earlier in the film which can be read as Leia distracting Ben so Rey can stab him), as this super uncomfortable sense that Ben’s death is inevitable and everyone (except Rey) seems kind of relieved about it rather than sad. I don’t think it’s intentional at all but it’s really strange.

I like the “becoming” a dyad idea. It feels more romantic to me that this power is something born out of their organically-developed connection, rather than the original implication, which seems to be the opposite, that they’re drawn to one another because the Force decided to make them a dyad (presumably whenever Rey was born?). This is probably because I do admittedly prefer heroes with self-determination rather than set destinies.

However, the Rise of Kylo Ren comic has Rey feel Kylo’s fall to the dark side before they ever meet, which does somewhat firmly establish the idea that they were predestined soulmates (guess the Force just sets up arranged marriages).

Yeah, I’m afraid I’ve fallen behind as well, I’ll try to catch up soonish.

You reckon JJ and Chris Terrio ever really hashed out a clear idea in their minds of what the plan was? I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the clarity was just lost in editing, but maybe the whole thing is a casualty of the rushed production.

B U R G E R⠀ K I N G

Kylo was already lying about Palpatine wanting her dead as a child in the theatrical cut, right? Doesn’t Finn learn from D-O that Ochi’s job was always to take Rey to Exegol? At least I think that happened, and I think it was supposed to be a twist. That ‘reveal’ also makes more sense if the audience doesn’t already know Palpatine has actually been trying to kill her.

My only concern is the effect this change has on Kylo. It’s not a big thing, but the only reason I’ve been able to guess for why it is the way it is in the theatrical is because JJ/Terrio wanted it to be very obvious that Kylo is disobeying Palaptine, because he needs to be ripe in the audience’s eyes for his second act redemption, and I wouldn’t want to do any significant damage to that. We only explicitly learn in the hangar scene that his actual plan is to have Rey join him so they can use the power of the dyad to usurp Palaptine, so with this change it’s more of a mystery before that whether Kylo is or isn’t actually going along with Palpatine’s orders. Maybe that’s a positive though - it helps prevent the audience asking questions like “if Kylo wasn’t really going to kill Rey, and instead wanted her to help him kill Palpatine and take the throne, why didn’t he just go through with stabbing Palpatine in the face at the start of the movie when he had the chance?” or whatever.

I’m with Neerb on Rey’s parents. I think cutting away the retcon that they were actually good people gives us a nice compromise between Rey Nobody and the theatrical, and brings things a little more in line with TLJ.

It lets you have your cake and eat it, to some extent: her parents were selfish drunks who sold her for drinking money… and her father just also happened to be the (sTrAnDcAsT cLoNe) son of Palpatine. Maybe that traumatic childhood was what led him to drink in the first place. As a young girl, Rey probably wouldn’t have known about her father’s lineage, so her saying “they were nobody” would be true - from her certain point of view.

Plus, it removes the little niggle in the original movie where Rey seems to worry that her lineage dooms her to being evil, even though her father, a literal clone of Palpatine, was apparently a decent guy who made a noble self-sacrifice. Obviously you can argue that the difference is he wasn’t Force-sensitive, so it’s not a pLoT hOlE or anything, but I think having Rey be the first real hero in her family strengthens her arc of coming from nothing and finding her place a little bit.

She was clearly designed with the intention of having the magnifying lenses on her face to make her eyes bigger most of the time, with the tiny eyes being a bit of a gag, but then in TROS she never has the lenses down because they presumably don’t look correct on the puppet. Such an odd choice. If she was a puppet all along I’d probably be glad, but switching to a puppet in the final movie just feels like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Speaking of leaks, wasn’t there potentially a previous draft of the story where Palpatine did know about the dyad, and everything he was doing was a ruse to get Ben and Rey together so he could slurp their energy out? In the Skywalker Legacy documentary, Chris Terrio lets slip something about Palpatine knowing about the dyad at the beginning of the movie, which obviously is not true of the final edit.

Anyway, I feel like Palpatine knowing of the dyad, and that being his plan all along, is way more coherent: it gives Palpatine a singular goal (get Ben and Rey together on Exegol); explains how Kylo knows about the dyad (Palps tells him); and makes it less of a weird bit of crazy luck that Palpatine just suddenly finds a way to rejuvenate himself. It’d even create some dramatic irony/tension if the audience was clued in on this and knew Rey and Ben were headed to their doom when they rush to Exegol to face Palpatine. As a bonus, it removes any plot significance for Rey being a Palpatine, and makes it clearer why Palpatine would’ve wanted to turn Kylo to the dark side (besides it just being a middle finger to Luke, Leia and Han).

Unfortunately I don’t think there’s any feasible way to retrofit the final edit to this idea.

Somehow, Palpatine returned.

Oh yes, red lightning is absolutely videogamey and tacky, but the final battle is already Rey making Palpatine explode by using two lightsabers and channelling all the Jedi, so (like with Jonh’s ghosts) I feel like it works better to lean further in to that rather than try to mitigate it. We can’t easily fundamentally change the third act of this movie through fanediting, unfortunately. I feel red lightning makes for a much more visually interesting contrast rather than having even more blue on blue; it better conveys that sense of Rey (and Jonh’s ghosts if present) struggling to hold back the overwhelming power of Palpatine; and the poster promised me some red lightning damn it!

I love orange Exegol a bunch, but you’d have to do a lot of masking to bring back the blue engines, blue lights on control panels, whatever colour lightning, etc. Ditto for the red lightning, which I’ve fiddled with myself in the past - very cool but a lot of masking needed to perfect it.

I think super orange is the easiest place to go with Pasaana. I might put it together for my edit (no guarantees though). After all, Blade Runner 2049 did it, so it’s officially kino.

Yeah, “8K Bluray compliant” just isn’t a thing, and even with modern AI framerate interpolation, trying to get 24fps footage up to 60fps inevitably leads to inconsistent motion and artifacting. Also, the only way to reach six hours would be to play the entire film in slow motion. I don’t really see how you intend to realise any of this.

Handbrake is just a GUI frontend for FFmpeg anyway, right? It basically writes and runs FFmpeg commands for you. The advantage to going directly to the commandline yourself is that it lets you use FFmpeg functionality that the Handbrake GUI doesn’t expose, but Handbrake is definitely more convenient for straightforward x264 encoding and similar. I’ve personally never needed to use anything other than those two (besides Media Encoder for rendering stuff out of Premiere); I mostly use DNxHR HQ for editing and FFmpeg can convert to that just fine.

But the original question was for “continuity nerds”, which I for one read as meaning DominicCobb was looking for an answer in the context of the wider Star Wars canon.

The thing about the Anakin idea is it inevitably begs the question… why then? Why wouldn’t Anakin have appeared to him earlier? The Han scene is some combination of a Leia-induced hallucination and a visual metaphor for an emotional breakthrough, but Anakin’s ghost would just literally be the sand man himself manifesting. Why then and there? It’d also remove some of Ben’s agency from his turn, making it less of a personal choice and more of a response to getting a bit of a scolding from Grandad.

Of course, the Force Ghost question already exists in the movies as they are, and even in the OT, Obi-Wan’s choices of when to appear or not seem entirely motivated by plot convenience, so it’s not the end of the world. It’s apparent why Lucas decided when writing the PT that no one learned how to become a ghost until afterwards, haha, to avoid this sort of thing.

It’s almost like before his “death” his identity was pretty contained to the man “Sheev Palpatine”, but after his “death”, the collective consciousness speaks through the shell of Palpatine.

This was how I assumed things to be on my first viewing in the theatre; that it was Palpatine’s actual corpse being reanimated by some kind of amalgamated essence of evil. Dooku and Bane have canon voices that could be imitated (as do Vader and Maul though they arguably weren’t Sith when they died). I like this idea a lot since it adds a greater finality to the conflict rather than being just Palpatine again.

Put the wreckage of the second Death Star in the background, implying it was somehow still spaceworthy and he just flew the whole thing to Exegol.