It's been ages since I last saw ep 1 and, while looking for the despecialized original trilogy, I came across the prequel fan edits. "Eh, why not?"
Gotta say, I was expecting the pacing or the story to kinda fall flat, but this was a very enjoyable watch. There's a lot that was cut, nearly all the "whimsy" was removed, also the whole underwater trip when the jedis first land on Naboo. This leads to the Gungan alliance being a "jar jar ex machina", but it worked well enough in my opinion. Other than that, I think the movie works really well in every aspect.
The torrent I got also comes with a .docx that lists the whole movie script with all the stuff that was cut in red, and new additions (very few) in blue. A smaller list of changes can be read here - Besides removing a lot of jar jar's antics and any references to midichlorians (I personally never cared about that), one notable change near the end was making Anakin blow up the command ship before Padme and her group capture the Viceroy, so it makes it seem that the droids being deactivated is what allowed them to complete their objective.
One thing that I noticed during the final battle was that the Trade Federation pretty much dropped the blockade, as they only left one command ship in orbit, compared to the dozens at the beginning of the movie. I guess that was because the land invasion worked, so there was no further need to keep the orbital blockade.
PS: I couldn't stop laughing when Obi Wan fell because of that fucking meme
PPS: I always liked how Naboo looks, but this time I really paused to look a bit better at the architecture, and it has such a nice mix of mediterranean marble of yellowish tones and cyan roofs. With the current image quality and all, it was much easier to pick out "ancient CG" and in many places it looked like a "old last gen game", but it had that late 90s charm that warms my hearth with nostalgia.
PPPS: The worst part about watching SW as an older person is seeing all those damn walkways without a single guardrail anywhere. Coruscant is even worse, that transport vehicle full of VIP heading to the senate is fully open without so much as seatbelts.
PART 4 of 5
-----Kenobi says “there’s no such thing as luck”, Jinn says “nothing happens by accident”.
Argument. If nothing happens by accident, then Binks is a Sith Lord.
Counter: Besides the lack of logical determination, if nothing happens by accident, then Binks never being definitively revealed as a Sith Lord happened on purpose because Binks isn’t a Sith Lord.
-----Jar Jar controls a guard.
Argument: Just in case this one guard acts up, Jar Jar performs the never before seen move of freezing a guard by tapping its helmet.
Counter: The guard is already not moving. None of them are moving. Why would he only choose one guard to make sure doesn’t move with a secret move that there is no evidence for?
And again, openly perform some kind of Sith trick while around Jedi, who could sense him while he is supposed to want to stay hidden.
Oh, and lots of things happen in this movie by accident. Robots being in different positions than they were in a previous scene, hair lengths, hairstyles, there are tons of accidents in this and every film.
-----Jinn says “there’s something else behind all this”
Argument: Binks is standing behind them, and by something, Jinn means someone, and he means Binks because actually Jinn knows he’s a Sith.
Counter: there are lots of people behind them, all of Amidala’s handmaidens are behind them, and Jinn could literally be talking about anything else besides Binks. Any thing else.
-----JJB is the only Gungan who can jump ten feet in the air
Argument: he’s a special jumper, so he’s probably a Sith Lord.
Counter:
Binks jumps into water. We don’t have the opportunity to see any other Gungans jump into bodies of water and find out if jumping into water is atypical.
Binks jumped and did several flips and twists. Best was known as an extremely acrobatic actor and did lots of flips and twists for Binks. Shame to waste all the flips and twists.
Ten feet seems much more frog-acrobatic derived than Force-derived, which can be much higher.
He performs the jump in front of two Jedi watching him because he’s trying to stay hidden?
Nah.
-----Jar Jar drops his accent sometimes and uses standard words like “my” “you” “your” instead of “meesa”, “yousa”
Argument: because Binks sometimes says you and sometimes you-sa, his entire speech is a ruse and he actually can speak standard well. Hiding his skill at standard language is evidence he’s a Sith.
Counter:
Other Gungans, including the chief, alternate between saying “you” and “yousa”, “de” and “the” or “with” and “wit”. If using Gungan and standard accents interchangeably makes you a secret Sith, then we have Darth Nass and Darth Darth Binks. Oh, and Tarpals has a very strong Gungan accent in the city but begins speaking very cleanly on the battlefield. So Darth Tarpals.
Binks speaks native Gungan, and is speaking standard words as at least a second language. Sometimes you get the words and grammar right, sometimes you don’t.
-----The droid in front of Binks is the only one whose head falls off
The argument: Binks used the force to slide the head off the droid. If he did use the force, he’s a Sith.
Counter: The droid was already inert and Binks using the force in front of everyone staring at him seems like a pretty unstealthy thing to do. The gradual slide also doesn’t look like a force removal so much as an object sliding off its mounting bolts.
-----The Telegraph claims anecdotally that Binks was a conniving mercenary before he became a goofball
Claim: If Binks had a different character arc before the final draft of TPM, he may have also been a Sith Lord originally.
Counter:
No evidence for this mercenary character
A mercenary is not a Sith, and there are tons of mercs in Star Wars.
Many characters have rewritten identities and arcs, Lucas rewrote every movie many, many times with tons of contributing ideas and alternate stories before deciding on the canon story for the character.
If being rewritten makes you a Sith, then we have Sith Luke, Sith Leia, Sith EverySingleCharacterandObject
-----After the Rule of Two is introduced by Yoda in TPM, Jar Jar and Palpatine are on screen shortly after
Argument: Because they are the two characters shown after Yoda introduces the rule of two, Jar Jar and Palpatine are the subjects of the “rule of two”.
Counter:
After the “rule of two” line Windu asks “but which one was destroyed?”, indicating that there are no longer two, but one remaining Sith. After saying the number one, the camera pans over several characters(anakin, kenobi, amidala), blurs them out and focuses on the single Palpatine for several seconds.
This shot is followed by a completely separate parade scene that is thematically and temporally divergent from the previous scene of intimate conversation with thousands of characters the night before. Jar Jar and another Gungan are in shot for a second as featured foreguards of Boss Nass among hundreds of other Gungans.
-----Because Anakin and Obi-Wan are in focus during the parade scene, there’s a parallel of the Sith rule of two between Anakin/Kenobi and Palpatine/Binks
The camera does not hold on Kenobi and Anakin as a pair as the camera held on Palpatine alone earlier(with Anakin out of focus in the background PTM 128:25), but pans past Kenobi to hold on R2 and Anakin together. Sith2D2.
Since Anakin is in the background of the shot of Palpatine but out of focus and Anakin is not yet a Sith, that could be foreshadowing of an eventual new pairing conforming to the Rule of Two. Jar Jar is not present in that scene.
These scenes are not very close or paralleled in any way, and are set up completely differently.
Yoda and Windu have agreed that the problem is no longer two, but one. At the moment, there is one remaining Sith master, with his future apprentice out of focus opposite him in line.
-----Yoda doesn’t trust Jar Jar
argument: because he’s a Sith.
Counterargument
Nobody likes jar jar because he’s an incompetent idiot who breaks things.
-----The back of TPM movie cover says “In the shadows lurks an evil force waiting for the right moment to strike” next to a picture of Jar Jar hiding behind a doorframe.
Binks is very brightly lit, there are no shadows on him.
Darth Maul is color-edited in another picture on the movie cover so that his silhouette is completely black, like a shadow.
“waiting for the right moment to strike” – Maul is fending off attacks by Jinn and Kenobi in his picture, literally waiting for his moment to strike, which he does successfully pull off in the movie.
In our introduction to Maul, he is waiting with his head bowed in a cloak, shadows pouring over his face before he strikes.
There are three other lines specifically referring to Palpatine, Jinn, Kenobi, and Palpatine as close or closer to Binks’ picture than the quote about Maul.
This line clearly references Maul or the Sith together.
-----Jar Jar is in or the cause of every scene in TPM
Argument: if you first believe Jar Jar is Sith, then his presence in the movie can be attributed to his Sith nature.
Counter:
If you assume Amidala is Sith, then her presence in the movie can be attributed to Sith machinations.
If you assume Jinn is Sith, then his presence in the movie can be attributed to Sith machinations.
If you assume Kenobi is Sith, then…
A main character being in a movie is not evidence of them being Sith, any more than R2 or Chewie were Sith.