Over the 2019 holiday season I went to see Rise of Skywalker at the tail end of its opening weekend. I was planning to wait a week or two, but my friends that are fans were raving about it, so I have now seen every episode of the “Skywalker Saga” on opening night or weekend. Those released in my lifetime, anyway.

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At the time of this writing [ 1:52am Thursday, January 23 ] that final entry is still in it's theatrical release.

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I was waiting because my enthusiasm for the central story died after Episode 8, the Last Jedi. I didn’t hate the movie. I still don’t hate it, but I do hate two things about the foundation of this last set of movies:

Someone, or a committee, decided to never show Luke, Han, and Leia together on screen ever again. That’s on JJ Abrams with The Force Awakens (Ep 7).

Luke Skywalker’s now canon storyline following Return of the Jedi (Ep 6) is just heartbreaking to me. That’s a personal issue versus a storytelling issue, and I totally acknowledge that.

With time I’ve realized that made me sort of “mourn” the series.

I remember the moment I saw a clip of Star Wars for the first time. I was still in elementary school and just relaxing with my dad, laying on my parents bed, flipping around channels. We hit the Sci-Fi channel (well before it was renamed SyFy) and there it was.

Luke Skywalker fighting Boba Fett on Jabba’s barge. The closest, it turned out, we ever saw Luke coming into his own as a Jedi knight.

From there I got into the movies, started reading the books, playing the games, etc. That’s a long way of saying I have been invested as a fan for decades now.

Specifically, I was a big fan of the original trio of main characters. When the news of Disney purchasing Lucasfilm AND signing the original cast for this sequel trilogy I was beyond hyped.

There are a lot of clips of Mark Hamill himself discussing his experience signing into the three movies, then discovering that he has no dialogue in Episode 7. The end of Force Awakens was an amazing way to spark imagination about the future two movies.

So we end up with The Last Jedi, JJ passing the torch to Rain Johnson. To a degree the fans critical of the large negative backlash were right, those claiming we just didn’t like that the story didn’t go the way we thought it might. I’ll cop to that. I was (and am) simply disappointed with the way Luke Skywalker’s character was handled. It’s really that simple for me. That alone disillusioned me about the future of this new Disney owned Lucasfilm.

Seeing 2 movies worth of plot stuffed into the most recent movie, The Rise of Skywalker, validates my other big problem with Last Jedi - it simply did not serve the overall story.

Last Jedi was interested in being a more grounded character study. That’s not an inherently bad thing, but the actual plot it uses to do so doesn’t work so well in the greater narrative for me.

This is just my opinion, obviously, and I’m glad it worked for you if so!

After seeing Rise of Skywalker I was feeling validated over my concern for the larger narrative not being served. I flippantly said “let me cut Last Jedi down to the 30 minutes or so that are relevant to this third movie” and got to work with purposely lazy tools.

Using a 1080p copy of the film and iMovie on my MacBook Air, I was ready to show them. I’d show them all!

What started as a silly and snarky joke turned into a big puzzle that I enjoyed tearing apart and putting back together. At this point I was too far in while using just iMovie to switch to Premiere.

My goals became:

Make The Last Jedi more tonally consistent with the rest of this sequel trilogy - using nothing but what is in the theatrical release of Last Jedi. Many of the jokes have been removed or tightened to lose the awkward and sarcastic comedy. Not everyone is trying to be Tony Stark anymore. Audio mixing was tough in places, as again I was purposely using iMovie’s limited set of tools. There are a few places that sound awkward to me that are unaltered, so I may just be too close to that aspect as I wrapped this up.



Feature every major character while trying to portray them and their decision making more believable. Captain Phasma has been edited out entirely for the sake of time and relevance.



Feature every major plot point Rose and Finn’s adventure got the most attention here, it does miss the point about war being profitable for the .. galactic 1%? A message I endorse, but is an especially egregious aside from the larger plot. That Included cutting the cool situation where Rose rescues a bunch of animals but leaves behind the slave children caring for them.



Many scenes were moved around for a more consistent pace, with more intercutting for a sense of urgency driving our characters toward the climax. This includes chopping up some longer sequences into multiple parts intercut with other concurrent scenes.



Simply try to make some characters more likable. This was primarily Poe, Holdo, and Rose. Luke as well, to a lesser extent. His story is what it is, but there were a number of small cuts and edits for tone.

This is of course all to my personal taste, and not done as a critique so much as a fun challenge. I do have a newfound appreciation for a lot of the content, and hope some of the more creative (by necessity) edits work for others.

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watch it.

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force time me.

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disney please be cool.