theslime

brash_stryker said:

A fairly radical idea that I just had: When Palps sends the order for 'Order 66', let's not have it received by "Commander Cody" or any clone on Utapau for that matter. Instead have it received by a suited officer on Coruscant (I've never liked the fact that SOME clones can advance to "commander" status - they're all identical and disposable!)

Obviously this would require some refilming of a costumed actor in front of a green screen, but as far as the ideas here go, it's a pretty simple one. Get an amateur actor who looks a bit like Peter Cushing and it can even be 'Commander' Tarkin's career defining move, and why he gained such favour with Palpatine and was able to talk to Vader the way he does - he was loyal to Palps and had this 'Order 66' in place long before Anakin turned.

This is actually a great idea. The way Tarkin was just forgotten about in ROTS was a real missed opportunity - and it's one of many things that make Lucas's point about the episodes being watched in sequence moot. I.e. we're not meant to ask "who's this geezer we haven't seen before" at the end of ROTS. If your idea gets fan-fixed we won't have to.

I'm still really interested in the planned new versions, and episode 3. Has anyone heard from him recently? The last twitter update is from late August.

That's true. Unfortunately that is a really bad idea for a story. What's also true is that I doubt this extreme blindness was what the creator actually wanted to convey.

I like the backstory ideas. The films desperately needed something like this.

Yoda works as an illustration of what's wrong with the prequels: No story should begin at the beginning. We need inferred past. What was so cool about the OT was all the past that was alluded to - the Clone Wars mention and the Ben/Vader relationship in ep.4; Lando/Han and Yoda/Ben (among other things) in ep.5 - it opened up a space for projecting our ideas and images onto the story.

The PT, on the other hand, ran out of past at once. There is no pull, no space for our imagination, in such a scenario.

The only way the PT could have worked would be if they made up new inferred past. One way this could have happened would have been using Yoda for something interesting, like tying him to the original overthrowing of the last Sith empire. Since that happened thousand generations ago, Yoda isn't old enough, but it could have happened in some other way. If he'd been some kind of war hero who started using the Force against mind controlling Sith (and won, making the Sith go underground), that would have given Yoda a past that was interesting, and a history of the Force type of thing without actually showing everything onscreen.

That way it could have been established that now he's old and almost without powers - which is more interesting than showing a muppet working at the peak of his swashbuckling powers. He fails to see the dangers of the dark side because he's old and weak (giving some much-needed poignancy to the "Failed, I have" line).

Yoda is probably the biggest missed opportunity of the prequels. There were two options: (1) either he should only be mentioned by others as a benign presence (though being physically absent), or (2) he can be a true character, but then he needs a worthwhile story with some inkling of what he's been up to for the last 800 years except being the Republic's lapdog. Both ways could have worked. Instead Lucas thought the third option, the fanservice of just being there and looking stupid (like the Boba Fett of RoTJ), and the belief that this fanservice of using a beloved supporting character as a main character would trump the need for an actual Yoda storyline with actual character motivation.

That's some really cool voice acting. Joe Pesci as Jar Jar feels strangely appropriate, somehow. :)

However, one thing I loved about the original Balance and Clone War edits was the fact that they spoke various languages but perfectly understood each other. It added a badly needed OT feel to the scenes. Jar Jar was suddenly more, well, Greedo-like. I do see the need to have MAIN characters speaking English (as several here have pointed out), but you shouldn't rule out subtitles even for important scenes if it feels right.

(Not sold on the Federation voices, but they're still an improvement. I think you could go further with the General too. I actually enjoyed the Grievous voice mockups someone (can't remember who) did with a more classically robotic voice. A welcome change.)

PS: I LOVED Balance and Clone War, btw. Seeing those the first time is still the only time I've enjoyed the prequels (apart from TMBTM's silent film edit).

Agreed. Go ahead, but keep in mind that you would also, in the process, cut the only actually enjoyable aspect of the movie (possibly of the prequels, full stop). So even if it works story-wise (which it might do), it might still not be worth it.

MY EYES!

This is a good idea. While I agree that it might be difficult to reconcile with a more aggressive trade federation, it might actually be worth it.

Speaking only for myself: The burning and Obi-Wan walking away taking Anakin's sabre is the emotional core of ROTS, and pretty much the only scene that works for me in the entire movie.

The high ground line worked for me the first time I saw ROTS. But then I remembered that this concept would mean nothing to force-jumping jedi.

Wow, that was amazing, SSWR. It's a different movie altogether. It's still a bit of a mystery to me why Anakin chooses the dark side, even in this edit. However, in this case it's good mysterious! The removal of some of the lines makes it sound like he's more afraid than insecure, somehow. The context even changes the feel of his lines after the turn (kinda like how Magnoliafan made Natalie Portman a better actress by changing the Trade Federation's motivations to slavery. Suddenly "My people are dying" made sense.). He's been driven into this situation, but he should have known better. He knows that now, but he still doesn't know entirely which side to be on. Very cool indeed.

Nope. :)

I haven't seen your edit, so that's not the one. I think it was Slumberland's edit, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, it's good to hear that you cut it too. :)

EDIT: Just watched the clip. It's very good and a massive improvement. But why did you keep the worst line of the entire saga* (IMO) "only a sith deals in absolutes". Apart from being a contradiction in terms, it's untrue in every respect. The sith love gray areas.

(*With the possible exception of "only imperial stormtroopers are this precise". For such a perceptive guy, Obi-Wan sure has some pretty weak insights.)

vaderios said:

OzoneSherrif said:

When you don't design actual costumes for humans you get problems like that. 

I get your point there but we all know some akward effects that we see in movies from props or costumes. Like star wars, falling pieces of armor, missing parts of a uniform, almost removed helmets etc...

Cant blame 3d for everything. As in real life props and in 3d too you cant predict everything :)

 

-Angel

What's wrong with falling pieces of armour? It's that kind of grounding in real life the PT sorely lacks.

But, when people talk about taking out the entire pod race, or taking out all references of gungans, or completely removing the Yoda vs. Dooku lightsaber duel, that would disturb the flow of the movies even more rather than smooth the flow. I just have the feeling that those sections would just be too big to lop off effectively.

But hey, I could be wrong. ;)

No offense, but I think you are. ;)

I've seen large portions reedited brutally and whole sections cut with only positive effects on the story. You'd be surprised what can be cut. I thought the same as you until I saw an ep3 edit with no Yoda/Palpatine duel. As bad as it was, I thought that needed to be there intercut with the Obi-Wan/Anakin duel. Not the case, as it turns out. The film even flows better without it.

There are a lot of moments like that. Sometimes I wonder if you need episode 1 at all, apart from, like, two or three scenes. TMBTM's silent edit is two and a half hours long, and yet most of the story elements are intact (still too many, imo!), even with approx. five hours cut.

EDIT: Honestly, I don't really think the story elements are that good either. It's way too political. Not that there's anything wrong with a political story, and I dig Roman history (an obvious influence) as much as the next guy, it just feels awkward and uninteresting to me. Not to mention unexciting. We're used to Han Solo, now we get political drama delivered in costume drama stylings, with interminable preachy speeches in pretty badly written and too ornate language. But it's not just the writing. The ideas are bad too.

the story of the PT does not need to be changed all that drastically.

I must say I completely disagree with this. To me, the PT is a train wreck of nigh-Biblical proportions, and they're all quite possibly among the worst scripts ever filmed in big-budget productions (and I even count Michael Bay). Apart from the inept direction, the ugly effects and the mostly clueless acting (even by greats like MacGregor, Neeson, August, Lee and Stamp (and to a lesser degree Smits and Portman)), the films have virtually no exciting moments. They're overwrought and wordy, and yet the action is just too much leaving you with no feel for the situations (e.g. the hyperkinetic sabre fights are way less exciting than the pedestrian Vader/Obi-Wan duel from A New Hope).

You need to go far to save this mess, imo. Magnoliafan's edits of eps 1 and 2 nearly do the trick for me, but they're too long, and a lot more needs to go. I'm looking forward to seeing JasonN's 3-in-1 edit. I also like TMBTM's pan-and-scan, dusty, silent edits a lot (but he could have gone even further with plot changes, imo).

That statement makes no sense to me. It's much more interesting from a narrative point of view if a rogue jedi has the same regalia as the jedi that are out to hunt him down and kill him. To me, at least. They're supposed to be on the same team, and yet there they are: in lethal battle. If you rotoscope his saber yellow, you've already - heavy-handedly, I might add - said he's not on anyone's team - and the mystery of his character is deflated faster than you can say "Geonosis".

Also, such symbolism presupposes an off-screen event where he gets his yellow saber once he leaves the jedi order. At some point he must have said to himself: Now that I'm no longer with the Order, I need a different saber colour.

That's not my idea of a good plot point. And it's IMO way worse than the actual prequel story where he probably got his red saber from Palps (a plot point that makes sense and serves a purpose).

I must say I agree with those saying that this is the most minute of all my issues with the prequels. Rogue jedis having rogue colours feels like silly and obvious symbolism to me. Not very interesting.

I agree that any editor making Dooku a rogue jedi and not a sith should change his red saber to a blue or green one, though.

mrbenja0618 said:

JasonN said:

Avatar said:

JasonN said:

I'm sorry, but I think that time and knowledge has proven that Lucas's "original vision" isn't worth jack...

i'm talking about the pre-special edition/prequel lucas

I was talking about Lucas the person, period...
(including before the Special Editions and Prequels came out)

This is true. Did anyone hear about his original cut of SW? Sounded awful... Fortunately at the time he wasn't surrounded by yes men.

I don't know about his first CUT, but here's an analysis of his first DRAFT. Granted, it's a first draft, but I'm willing to bet that had he been the famous George Lucas of today, this dud would have been filmed with very few rewrites.

Being surrounded by yes men is murder for any artist. (Especially one as fickle and inconsistent as Lucas.)

IIRC Magnoliafan claimed he would be able to make the reveal work by subtly editing the Ben/Luke conversation. I'm not sure he ever revealed what the intended wording was.

I think the scene in ESB would still work fine, although very differently from what we're used to. It will go from being a total surprise to being a surprise for only the main character - i.e. what you could call the Scottie Ferguson Narrative. From "What will happen?" [in general] the effect becomes, in Hitchcock's words, "What will he do when he finds out about it?" And that's still pretty cool. We didn't stop enjoying rewatching ep.4 after knowing the reveal in ep.5.

If keeping the surprise for new viewers can be done in a convincing way I would love to see it, of course. Magnoliafan claimed to have a way before he left the board. It would also be pretty cool to have Vader, the new apprentice after Anakin dies, kill the younglings (as suggested in this thread), but it would mean insane amounts of rotoscoping.

Bingowings: There are plenty of countries with a no dubbing policy. And thank god for that. Which is worse - reading a little, or having some stranger adding sounds to Harrison Fords lip movements (out of sync)?

Also, in countries with rampant dubbing, there at least used to be a flourishing film club market where you could watch subtitled films. DVD probably stole a lot of that market, though. A lot of people changed to the original language once the format allowed them to.

Also, I'm not a big Lord of the Rings fan and haven't seen the films since they came out, but wasn't there loads of subtitled Elvish-speaking in there? Didn't stop a gazillion viewers from enjoying it like nobody's business. Why should Star Wars viewers be any dumber?

The whole idea that you can't follow the action while reading is ludicrous. Tell Quentin Tarantino that, who subtitled half (at least) of his latest film. Or, you could just tell it to George Lucas, who subtitled one of the defining moments of Star Wars (Han shoots Greedo).

The dumbing down of the prequels - i.e. everybody speaks English dialects - is one of the most annoying things for me. I think Magnoliafan was right to just change it to an alien language. One of the cool things about the original Star Wars trilogy was how people understood several languages, with or without droid help. Whereas in the PT they only need to understand bad accents.

If bad was bad, very few of the myriad fanedits would even exist.

Star Wars is different because a lot of people like the old ones enough to go to a lot of trouble to save the new ones. I'm not really one of them. I'm a narratologist. I'm basically all talk.

But fanedits exist. They're proof that people care. They care a lot, actually. Your personal opinion doesn't really factor in that much. I'm talking about a global phenomenon.

Obi wan really doesn't need 3 scenes where he still can't figure out where the dart came from or how to find kamino. Not to mention that Kamino and the army being a secret go nowhere.

He's following a trail. Moronic though it may be, it's still in the classicist mystery storytelling mode. The last sentence I of course agree with. Why would you take over a secret army without asking any questions.

If a free lunch doesn't even exist, why would a free secret army exist? :)

Bingowings said:

George is so determined to paint the Jedi as being dumb he actually goes to great pains to show that even a child could figure out the mystery and the Jedi can't.

That really needs a rethink.

 

That's not the main problem for me. A child might think out of the proverbial box, etc. The real problem shows up when the Jedi think they can basically take over a clone army with no one caring about it, with no questions asked, and just accepting on blind faith that they have no ulterior motive.

The former is being a little slow - even good detectives can be a little slow every once in a while. The latter is letting your world go to pieces because you're a bloody idiot.