The Chosen One Twist – SWR #273

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We learn who was the REAL Chosen One?! Discover what new Rogue One revisions have been revealed; alternate endings, differences in characters, and so more! All on this week’s episode of the STAR WARS REPORT! 

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Topics:

• Digital release of Rogue One
• Rogue One Revisions by Anthony Breznican of ew.com
  • That TIE Fighter in the trailers
  • The planet of Dantooine
  • ANH cameos
  • Getting the Death Star tapes to their ship
• Alternate ending: Some characters lived including Sgt. Jyn Erso (ew.com)
  • A rebel ship came down and got them off the surface,” Whitta says. “The transfer of the plans happened later. They jumped away and later [Leia’s] ship came in from Alderaan to help them. The ship-to-ship data transfer happened off Scarif.”
  • Darth Vader was still in pursuit and began attacking Jyn’s shuttle as the Rebels tried desperately to transfer the information from the data tapes to Leia’s vessel. Finally, Vader was successful in breaching their shields and destroying the craft.
  • The audience would have been left fearing the heroes were dead. But as Vader’s Star Destroyer ventures off to chase Leia’s Tantive IV, we would have remained focused on the shuttle fragments floating in the vastness of space
  • “They got away in an escape pod just in time,” Whitta said. “The pod looked like just another piece of debris.”

• Bonus Vader scene where he kills an Imperial officer (ew.com) (wired.com)
  • Instead of lying wounded on a transmission platform while the green beam of the Death Star literally incinerates him on its trajectory into the planet, Krennic found shelter from the blast. In what sounds like a type of epilogue to the story, we would have seen his rescue by Imperial forces.
  • “They tore him out of the rubble and they brought him back,” Whitta says. “When they’re going over the ruins, he somehow survived.”
  • “It’s a bit of a reach,” Whitta says, “which is why it isn’t in the finished film.”
  • Had the filmmakers continued pursuing this storyline, Krennic would have been recovered along with presumably other valuable artifacts belonging to the Empire’s special weapons division.
  • “He survived the blast and they pulled him up and brought him to the Star Destroyer to report to Vader,” Whitta says. “He’s all beat up, his cape’s all torn up and stuff, and he thinks he has survived.”
  • Except this time, Vader isn’t just wielding deadly puns.
  • Krennic thinks he has endured. He thinks he has served valiantly for the Emperor. He thinks he has done everything right, everything within his power … right up until an unseen force squeezes off the air in his throat.
  • “Vader kills him for his failure,” Whitta says.

• Jyn’s mother was a slain Jedi (ew.com)
  • “The prologue, at one point a long time ago, was going to be the Empire coming to kill the Jedi,” says director Gareth Edwards. “And Jyn’s mom was going to be a Jedi.”
  • “We were witnessing one of those kills and Krennic would be the person sent to do it.”
  • Star Wars is full of lost children, striving to survive on their own, relying on the care of others: Luke, Leia and, in a darker sense, Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader himself. In The Force Awakens and the animated Rebels series, Rey, Finn, and Ezra Bridger also fit this archetype of the abandoned innocent who finds a new family in a fight against the forces that stole their loved ones.
  • The fatal flaw in the concept was that Jyn was never going to become a Force-wielder, so the filmmakers feared her Jedi mother would become a distraction. A tease without a payoff.
  • “Our instinct told us that we wanted a scene where Jyn is orphaned because of what Krennic does, which sets her on her path of being a child of war,” says Edwards. “The problem was that the second you make her mom a Jedi you spend the entire movie questioning whether Jyn is a Jedi or not. Eventually, we came up with the idea that her father should have designed the Death Star. That became a stronger way into the stealing of the Death Star plans. We let go of the mother being a Jedi, and she became just a rebellious mom.”
  • In the abandoned Jedi prologue, when Krennic and his Deathtroopers arrive at the Erso homestead, they would have ended up facing not a jittery Lyra Erso slinging a blaster, but a calm, collected fugitive Jedi, drawing her lightsaber to protect her daughter — and her husband.
  • “Her mother was a Jedi Knight who was hiding out. But her father was still the scientist,” said Whitta. As the story developed, Galen Erso’s involvement in the Death Star and the manipulation of Kyber crystals, which are the key element in lightsabers and the Imperial battle station’s planet-killing laser, became Jyn’s other motivation.
  • “We just had to pick a lane,” Edwards says. “We ended up feeling like her father should be the reason this thing existed. The guilt for that felt like better motivation in stealing the Death Star plans.”
  • So, Jedi Mom was cut.
  • But wait.
  • If Jyn’s mother was a Jedi back when the order was still strong, then how could she have a husband and a child? Attachments were forbidden!
  • “You could ask the same question about Anakin,” Whitta says. “[Jyn’s mother] wouldn’t have been the first!”
  • But seriously … this was a plot hole they never quite figured out.
  • “You’re talking about ideas that were killed,” Whitta says. “I can’t fully defend them because part of the reason why we got rid of the idea was because people would ask questions like that.”

• Bodhi was a crazed, imprisoned engineer named Bokan working for Saw Gerrera (ew.com)
  • “His name was Bokan, and he was actually Saw Gerrera’s engineer, living on a planet with a strong electromagnetic field, which meant that electronics were never working,” Ahmed says. “He was actually an Imperial engineer who had been kidnapped and kind of had Stockholm Syndrome. He had been living there for so long, he kind of lost it, like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now.”
  • Actually he died slightly differently before, in that whole sequence of him running around with the plug. There was actually this one shot that was about a minute long, and it was basically Bodhi ducking and diving from Stormtroopers to try and like get the plug to where he wanted it to go while Chirrut and Baze were kind of flanking him.”
  • “Every time he’d get sprung by a Stormtrooper, Donnie would come out and Bang! then they would go down, and then Bodhi would have to crawl and jump over somebody, just to be caught again.Then Chirrut would pop up. It was almost, kind of an extended slapstick comedy sequence.”
  • Things got dark fast, however. “When he was running into the ship, he was shot and badly injured,” Ahmed said. “He has to crawl his way back onto the ship, and it was quite extended.”
  • It’s right that it was truncated because it makes his death more unexpected,” he says. “It also allows some of the time that was taken up by telling that story [to focus on] the emotional story: what Jyn is going through there, and Kaytoo’s sacrifice. They opted to make it a more emotional film instead of just the bells and whistles kind of thing.”
    • BODHI’S UNTOLD FAMILY STORY:
  • Ahmed also revealed some pieces of Bodhi Rook’s history that never made it onscreen. “Bodhi grew up on Jedha. It’s been a troubled planet for a long time. It’s occupied by Imperial forces, and I was thinking, ‘What makes you want to be a cargo pilot and just fly long distances for the Empire?’ I always imagined he was supporting maybe a single mother.”
  • In his mind, Bodhi was the only child from a poor family who agreed to work with the Empire because his mother was sick and had no one else to support her. “He’s taking a job, which a lot of people wouldn’t take. They’d think he was a collaborator with the evil forces,” Ahmed says. “He’s in a position of necessity rather than privilege, and I also think the desire to kind of fly and escape is a strong one. He’s someone who’s always kind of dreamed of escaping and leaving his home world behind, which also speaks to his ability to turn away from the political reality of Jedha.”
  • Then something happens that changes his mind and makes him turn against the Empire and try to help the Rebellion.
  • “In my mind, I think he would have lost his mother not too long ago, before we meet him, and that, in a weird way, makes him reassess,” Ahmed says. “It liberates him more. What he’s doing with his life, given that we’re only here for a short period of time?”
• Email from listener Nate!
• Reactions to Rebels “Twin Suns” and executive producer Dave Filoni talks (io9.com)
  • Time to end Maul before the OT
  • The inspiration for the fight was Kyuzo, the master swordsman in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.
• Just who is the Chosen One? (Audio of Pablo explaining how it’s Luke to Kenobi, yet still Anakin )
• And more!

 

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