Notice of the fan edit made its way to Twitter, where director Rian Johnson added his own commentary to the conversation floating around Twitter about the movie. That left The Last Jedi at the bottom of the barrel. It’s a hundred minutes shorter than the actual movie, the cut is as linear as a bad dream and it focuses entirely on its male characters without any of the character development given to Rey-one of the The Last Jedi’s finer elements. In fact, that 92 percent drop meant Rian Johnson’s contentious follow-up limped to a miserable $2.4 million in its second weekend. The galaxy is under the tight grip of General Snoke of the First Order, and the rebellion is in trouble.
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She later makes a few appearances in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but outside of those brief appearances, not much is known about the archivist, until now.
Kylo Ren tries to wield the disappointment of Rey’s parentage as a weapon to “win her over”.
And, naturally, Episode VIII highlight Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) is nearly completely removed in favor of making Finn even more boring and clueless, which seems like a neat metaphor for this entire endeavor.
De-Feminized Fan-Edit isn’t worth your time, even as a lark. Without those factors, audiences have many more reasons to be confused with Star Wars than to embrace it, especially if the films they’d need to get caught up weren’t particularly available. “How insecure must you be that the existence of women in a Star Wars film drives you to take the time to do something like this?”
The most stirring moment of Force Awakens for many USA fans, for example, was the Luke Skywalker reveal at the very end. This film has had a bumpy production and some may argue that it should be delayed until the Christmas season that Star Wars has dominated for the past three years.
One of the biggest critiques from a certain subset of fans is that Luke is not the hero they remembered, the Jedi who would stop at nothing to ensure that good would prevail over evil. That is what the expansive fan-base of the science-fiction franchise has been debating on for weeks now. Though I applaud this forward-thinking change in direction in Star Wars, I hope that in the future we’ll be able to enjoy films, work and life without even having to notice.
The notion moves further to point out that the characterization of Luke Skywalker was “cheap” with “childish humor” at best.
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In 2015, The Force Awakens kicked off a new era of Star Wars and introduced the Sequel Trilogy’s greatest mystery: who is Rey and where did she come from?
