Release the JJ Cut

I vote no. 

Also, don’t do it. Please!

There is enough chatter on the web about this subject at the moment that I thought I needed to address it.

The shill media is pretending that this Astroturf campaign by Bad Reboot is an actual thing.  As far as I can tell it started with a lengthy Reddit post. And it came from the offices of Bad Reboot.

J.J. Abrams is first and foremost a politician. That is his primary talent set. His secondary talent is being a cinematographer who understands special effects. But Hollywood politics is where he really shines.  There is no question at all in my mind that J.J Abrams approved every word of the following post.  It is amazingly self-serving.

You can also tell it was an authorized leak by Bad Reboot because it wasn’t leaked to Doomcock first.  His connections are all with Lucasfilm, which means this didn’t come from that camp at all.  The leaker would have gone to Overlord DVD first if that was the case. 

Here is the post, buckle up:

• JJ always treated everyone on and offset with respect so my source’s agenda is that what Disney has done to JJ and how much they screwed him over should be something people are at least aware of, whether you like him as a filmmaker or not.

I’m not like Joss Whedon!  I swears, I’m not!

• Disney was one of the studios who were in that Bad Robot bidding war last year. Disney never had much interest in BR as a company but they did in JJ because they saw WB (who JJ went with in the end) as a major threat.

In no universe did Disney consider the stumbling, bumbling WB a threat.  Not in 2019, certainly.  

• JJ is very successful at bringing franchises back like Mission Impossible, Star Trek and Star Wars. WB is struggling with DC and aside from Wonder Woman, DC is still seen as a bit of a joke in its current state by the GA.

J.J. is very good at glomming on to an existing film franchise that is about to be rebooted.  He’s never created one of his own. Ever!

• WB wants Abrams for some DC projects. My source said that this generation’s Star Wars is the MCU, and Marvel’s biggest threat is a well operational DC. They want to keep DC in the limbo that they’re in right now. Abrams jumpstarting that franchise with something like a successful, audience-pleasing Superman movie makes them nervous. Their goal is to make JJ look bad to potential investors/shareholders.

J.J. is the new Spielberg!  He’s a super genius!  The truth is, he is going to fall flat on his face with his race-bent Superman.  There is no pre-existing fan base for it.  And this is the first mega film he’s ever helmed that didn’t have prefab fans.  Also, the MCU is out of gas but that’s another subject altogether.

• My source mentioned this shortly after the premiere: “The TROS we saw last night was not the TROS we thought we worked on”.

There is an once of truth to that.  TROS was a patchwork Frankenstein of a movie, it was constantly being pulled apart and sewn back together in the editing room depending on what the test audiences said from one showing to the next.  There was no guiding vision at all.

• JJ was devastated and blindsided by this. He’s been feeling down over the last 6 months because of some of the ridiculous demands Disney had that changed his movie’s story. While the scenes were shot, a lot of the changes were made in post-production and the audio was rerecorded and altered. My source said they’ve never seen anything like this happen before. He’s the director and he wasn’t in the know about what they were doing behind his back.

Bullshit.  He was a very active participant right until it was rushed out to the theaters.  Like Dr. Frankenstein before him, he is now denying his abhorrent creation.

• Apparently, JJ felt threatened over the month leading up to the premiere.

By whom?  Jon Favreau?  Well, that would actually be understandable come to think of it.  The Mandalorian premiered a month before The Fall of Skywalker.

• Rian was never meant to do IX despite some rumors that he was.

That is actually true.  A verifiable fact has been thrown in to add veracity to this leak.  Although the fact that he is being called Rian indicates sympathy.  Roundhead Rian is still a hero to Hollywood SJWs.

• JJ was brought back by Iger, not KK. Disney insisted on more fan service, less controversy.

Also, true.  Kennedy’s chaotic and destructive tenure as the head of Lucasfilm was utterly apparent by then.  It says nothing good about J.J. that he couldn’t see that the mess Johnson had left behind was a complete mess.

• JJs original agreement when he signed on was indicating he would have way more creative control than he did on TFA. It became evident this wasn’t the case only a couple of weeks into shooting when the trouble with meddling started.

Now we have a truth being mixed with a lie.  There is no way that he didn’t know that he would have no real creative control.  There was too much riding on this film and Disney is too well known for its micromanagement.   It’s a tradition with that company going back to Walt Disney himself.

• JJ wanted to do some scenes he thought were important, but Disney shut it down citing budgetary reasons.

*snort* Important?  How many planets did he feel needed blowing up this time?  The truth is all he can do is flash and thunder that signifies Jack shit. There is no such thing as a dramatically integral scene in a J.J. Abrams film.  He probably was desperate to insert mystery boxes and Iger said, no. 

• May 2019: JJ argued that those scenes were crucial. He had to let go of one of the scenes. The other scene he insisted on was approved at first. He did reshoots and additional photography in July. The new scene was shot at BR in October

Mystery boxes that get cut are a horror beyond imagination to Bad Reboot.

• The “ending that will blow your mind” was a part of this. Older actors were included like Hayden, Ewan and Samuel and anyone who wasn’t animated. The force ghosts weren’t meant to be voices because they shot that footage on camera. The actors were in costumes. Rey was supposed to be surrounded by the force ghosts to serve as sort of a barrier between her and the Sith surrounding them.

What happened to you Keven Smith?  You used to be so cool.  And then you became the biggest whore in Hollywood.

• My source thinks but can’t 100% confirm that this is because of China. It’s an office talk of sorts. Some VFX people claimed they got a list of approved shades of blue they could use on the Luke force ghosts. Cutting this out was when the bad blood turned into a nightmare for JJ because the movie he was making was suddenly unrecognizable to him in almost every way.

This one sounds true.  The legendary flair smythe would likely lose his shit over details like this.  No idea about China either but I can see details getting scrapped depending on Han test audiences.

• My source knows JJ well enough to know that he’s just not the yelling type but apparently in a meeting he yelled something along the lines of “Why don’t you just put ‘directed and written by Lucasfilm’ then?” My source wasn’t present for that exchange but knows some who were.

Status; likely.

• Disney demanded they shoot some scenes that would have things in it for merchandise. “They fly now” is one of them. It’s also JJ’s least favorite scene. At a November screening of a 2:37 cut, he cringed, groaned and laughed when the scene was on.

That sounds like a lie to me.  J.J. has been getting dragged about that scene for a long time now and it absolutely feels like the kind of cool visual over common sense scenes that he is famous for.  Or did Paramount insist on the switchblade Katana in Star Trek?  He is now disowning it and blaming Disney.

• My source says that JJ was most likely not joking when he said “you’re right” in the interview where they asked him about TROS criticism.

• JJ’s original early November cut was 3 hours 2 minutes long.

Maybe?  It hardly matters.  Padding a fundamentally bad story doesn’t turn it into a good story.

• In January, JJ suggested that they turn this into two films. My source told me this well before Terrio mentioned it in an interview a couple of days ago. When Disney said no, JJ was content with making this 3 hours long.

I know this one is true.  Abrams wanted to split the film up and Iger said, God no, we just want this thing finished.

• Over a period of 9 months JJ started realizing that one by one his ideas and whole scenes were being thrown out the window or entirely altered by people who have “no business meddling with the creatives”.

Oh yes, the brilliant artist being overridden by the heartless corporation.    If he actually was as good as he claims to be then he wouldn’t have touched TROS with a thousand-foot pole.  The mess Rian Johnson left was an absolute franchise destroying mess.

• They were not on the same page when it came to creative decisions and it became obvious that Disney had an agenda in addition to wanting to please shareholders. Disney could “afford messing up IX for the sake of the bigger picture” when it came to protecting things unrelated to IX.

Sinister decisions were being made for sinister reasons!  Disney probably did want to save the franchise and they had finally worked out that J.J. wasn’t going to be able to do it.

• The cut JJ eventually and hesitantly agreed to in early December was 2:37 minutes long. It wasn’t the cut we saw which he wouldn’t have approved of (and which is 2:22 long). Apart from the force ghosts, there were other crucial and emotional scenes missing. The cut they released looked “chopped and taped back together with weak scotch tape” (JJ’s words).

That was everyone’s words.  Also, the idea that force ghosts would have made things less laughable, is laughable.  J.J. just thinks that the Star Wars fans would have liked to have seen them so he is complaining about not being able to use them.

• The movie opened with Rey’s training. Her first scene with Rose was shortly after Rey damaged BB-8 during the training. Rose made a silly joke about how Poe is going to kill her for damaging BB-8. There was a moment where Rey took a minute to process what just happened when she saw that vision during training. She looked distressed and worried. The next scene was noise as the Falcon was landing and Rey runs over there. Those two women who kissed at the end were visible in this shot and they were holding hands. One of them ran towards the Falcon as it landed.

This was one of many, many openings that got scrapped.  I don’t know why J.J. seems so fond of it. 

• Kylo on Mustafar scene was 2 mins longer. There was a moment where Kylo seemed a bit dizzy and his vision was shown as blurry for a second. Almost as if time half-stopped while everyone in the background was slow-mo fighting. Kylo hears Vader’s breathing, then shakes his head and time goes back to moving at a normal pace and he jumps right back into the battle (the scene from the trailer where he knocks that guy down which did end up in the movie later).

Mystery box crap.  Of course Abrams is upset it got cut.

• They cut some of the scenes from the lightspeed skipping segment. Some of the planets that were cut were Kashyyyk, Naboo, and Kamino.

Who the fuck cares?!?!  It was the lightspeed skipping itself that was completely retarded.  It broke forty years of canon for a cool visual. It was hot garbage that looked pretty.

• The scene where the tie fighters are chasing them through the iceberg – those corridors were inspired by a video game JJ used to play in the 90s called Rebel Assault 2 (the third level in the game with the tunnels on Endor specifically).

Still crap.

• Jannah was confirmed to be Lando’s daughter.

Then it needed to be cut.  A reveal like that would have needed about an hour of screen time for a proper build up.  A competent storyteller would know that.

• Rey not only healed Kylo’s face scar but she killed Kylo when she healed Ben. Kylo ceased to exist when Rey healed him. My source mentioned that some people assume it was Han Solo who healed him but that isn’t true and that wasn’t Han Solo. That was Leia using her own memories as well as Ben’s to create a physical manifestation of his own thoughts to nudge him towards what he needed to do. That was her own way of communicating that with him. And it wasn’t possible without her dying in the process. She made the ultimate sacrifice for her son and this flew over people’s heads with the Disney cut.

Turing Rey into Space-Jesus wouldn’t have actually made her less of a Mary-Sue.  

• The late November cut (the last cut JJ approved of) had scenes with Rose and Rey still. JJ wanted to give her a more meaningful arc. Disney felt that that was too risky too. My source mentioned that Chris Terrio said that it was because of the Leia scenes but this is only partially true because she had four other scenes including two with Rey/Daisy that Leia was not in.

Rose probably should have been cut completely.  Her only real purpose in the last movie had been to humiliate Finn at every opportunity.  The only real reason to keep her around would be if they were going to pursue Tico-Finn love story.  Nobody wanted to see that except Rian Johnson.

• Finn wanting to tell Rey something was always meant to be force sensitivity. 

Ha! Ha! Ha! (gasp…wheez… gasp) Ha! Ha! Ha! (wipes eyes).  All of my longtime readers know that I am very much on the record as loathing, detesting, and despising the “confession of true love” scene.  That said, I know one when I see one.  This is another instance of fans dunking on J.J. over an obvious and ultra-cringe blunder.  And J.J. pretending that he was never planning to do that at all, so there.

• Babu Frik was nearly cut because some execs at Disney thought he would be the new Jar Jar. They are really surprised that people love him this much. He was JJ’s idea and was created in collaboration with some artists and puppeteers. The personality was all JJ.

Of course, this brilliant creation was all J.J.’s idea.  Also, I got news for you J.J.  you are really over rating how much the fans liked Babu.  His toys didn’t sell at all.  He was not your answer to Baby Yoda. We were only pretending to like him out of irony.

• There were a bunch of scenes where Rey and Kylo (separately) went through quiet moments of reflection to deal with what they were going through. On her part, her going through the realization that there’s something sinister about her past. Him going through regret and remorse but trying to shut it out. My source said that the Kylo scenes were especially amazing because of Adam’s performance and how he managed to portray that inner turmoil. It provided much more context and added deeper meaning to both his battle with Rey and the final redemption arc at the end. It didn’t happen so suddenly and it was more structured than what we got.

These scenes sound like crap.  What was needed was a few scenes of Rey using the Dark Side when it mattered. And it working out really great on those occasions.  That would have opened a door to genuine temptation for her.

• The Kylo/Rey scene where he dies was at least 4 minutes longer with more dialogue. Ben was always supposed to die. Source also added that if he wasn’t, then that might’ve been in an earlier draft which they haven’t read. The first draft they read included Lando (the first few didn’t). The Reylo kiss and Ben’s death was not part of the reshoots. It was a part of the re-editing. Even the cut that JJ thought was coming out earlier this month had a longer version of that scene than what was shown in the theatrical cut.

That scene was bad enough as it was.  Milking it would not have improved it.

• JJ was against the Reylo kiss (or Reylo in general). This was Disney’s attempt to please both sides of the fandom.

I’m pretty sure he was pushing a Rey Finn romance.  Except he was the only one who wanted it.

• JJ was not happy with where TLJ took the story…

Oh, hell yes!  He spent about half of this film retconning the last one.  Luke saying, “a Jedi’s weapon should be treated with more respect,” was about the biggest middle finger I’ve ever seen in my life.

• JJ’s cut still exists and “will always exist”. We most likely will never see it unless “someone accidentally leaks it.”

This is the part that is absolute bullshit.  There were so many cuts that J.J. Abrams made that it is utterly ludicrous to say that there is one cut that is definitively his.   

The Snyder Cut was a unique situation.  

The most reviled artist in history’s name has been lost to us. He is remembered only as “Big Underpants Man.”  And it was his job to paint underwear on the nudes of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement.  

Joss Whedon’s desecration was nothing that dramatic but it doesn’t change the fact that his reskinning of Snyder’s work was utter crap. There was clearly a better film lurking beneath Whedon’s vandalism. And people wanted to see it.

There is no way in hell that The Rise of Skywalker could be salvaged with a yet another recut.  J.J. Abrams owns this one.