fumanstan

Personally, none of those are crazier to me at all. I think the Leia stuff stands out to me because of the way it was presented with the cliched slow reveal and "fake out" to make it look like she was dead.

Rob V

So basically Force moves in general... can you imagine if Vader was blown out of his Tie-Fighter in Episode IV and he space flew to Star Destroyer, just landed in a docking bay and got back to work? lol... Empire would have never been made.

nando820

yeah i get what they were going for with Leia but it came off very weird

milo bloom

We all know that exposure to the vacuum of space doesn't kill you instantly, right?

2001: A Space Odyssey taught us that. Kubrick and Clarke were very clear on the science, you can be in space for several seconds without dying. It's gonna hurt, but you can still live.

kefrank

I think what strains credibility in this case is that she didn't just get sucked out into space because an airlock door opened or something. She endured the trauma of an explosion just feet away from her and was apparently knocked unconscious at least momentarily from that trauma, but still managed to gain enough consciousness, muster enough force energy, and pull herself to the door before the vacuum of space killed her or even did any apparently significant damage to her.

But I keep telling myself at the end of the day, Star Wars is light entertainment so let it go. I think the bigger issue with that scene is just the way it's executed.

fujishig

Outside of anything under the filmmakers' control, there was also the death of Carrie Fisher and thus the expectation that they would find a way to end her character in this movie.

fumanstan

Yup. I think I would have been less bothered if she was just injured and struggling but clearly alive while in space and then pulled her self back in with her last bit of strength.

JTH182

Quick and dirty second viewing review: It is much better the second time. There are still things I would change or cut completely, but I enjoyed it more than opening night. I also think Episode 9 will make this film better in the long run too.

Franchot

In my opinion, that would be a very unsatisfactory ending for such a legendary character. Maybe I'm being insensitive, but knowing that Carrie Fisher had died before the final edit of the film was done, I would have had her character die in the film and alter the shooting script accordingly. I doubt it would change the final story significantly going into Episode IX because Johnson's screenplay took so many left turns in TLJ, what does it matter? Then again, knowing that Carrie Fisher had passed away and many were expecting Princess Leia to die in TLJ, this was Johnson's attempt to throw in yet another left turn for misdirection's sake.

Brack

Principal photography was finished in July of 2016, so I don’t see how you could just re-edit the film without major reshootings.

bluetoast

And if you travel in space long enough, you see lots of moving lights and eventually turn into a baby.

mcnabb

From what I have read from Rian Johnson's interviews regarding the handling of Leia and Carrie Fisher's real life death. I think he said that he felt the most respectful way to deal with it was to give her the whole movie, instead of killing her off midway through. TLJ would be sort of her swan song that culminates at the end with a reunion with Luke and the passing the torch to Rey.

But this is also a metaphor for this trilogy meaning, "It's not my problem cause I'm not directing the next movie." JJ started the Mystery Boxes, and it was RJ's problem in Episode 8, and now Leia's death is JJ's problem for Episode 9.

I honestly think the only thing you can do at this point is set Episode 9 about 2-3 years later and announce in the crawl that Poe Dameron has taken over as Resistance leader after the death of Leia. And then they can expound alittle bit more at the beginning with Rey, Finn and Poe talking about how tough it has been without her leadership, etc.

milo bloom

Use a body double and a tiny smidge of CGI to have Leia be the one to pilot the ship used as the lightspeed battering ram, and then re-shoot Laura Dern to have Admiral Holdo take over the Resistance.

The last scene with her on the Falcon could be her Force ghost comforting the others as they escape.

Jay G.

We'd have missed out on her reunion with Luke then.

Noonan

Fixed

Jay G.

I don't think you understand what a hologram is. Luke actually physically interacted with Leia.

Noonan

Ok, force projection then?

I didn't get the impression he had any type of physical form on the planet.

lopper

If you think people are flipping their shit over Space Leia, this would drive people to suicide.

Jay G.

His physical body wasn't there, but he could physically interact with people and things. For all intents and purposes, he was there on the planet, and Leia saw and talked with him one last time.

Finisher

It's just a ridiculous scene and shouldn't be in the movie.

Now, regarding 2001 and surviving in the vacuum of space:

"Jeffs points to Air Force experimentation on chimpanzees as evidence. Back in the 1960s, the Air Force conducted a series of tests on chimpanzees, among which they inflicted sudden decompression on 17 subjects and left them in a vacuum between 5 and 210 seconds. All but one of the chimpanzees survived and recovered from the experiments with no noticeable cognitive or nerve damage. The only subject that died, who was exposed to a vacuum for 90 seconds, was an older chimpanzee with high blood pressure and a heart abnormality."

https://filmschoolrejects.com/could-...-d5f0a873f302/

Big Boy Laroux

I still cannot fathom why they didn't use Leia to blast through the ships at light speed. that would have been the baddest-ass (bad-assest?) death in Star Wars history. And an amazing sendoff for Leia (not to mention it holds way more emotional weight than seeing Laura Dern doing it, who we knew for an hour). Yes, there's of course the argument that they didn't know she was going to die in real life - but my point is that should have been the idea from the very beginning, whether Fisher had passed or not.

kefrank

Are you sure he could "physically" interact with people and things? I agree he interacted verbally, but my impression was he made himself to look like he was physically interacting with people and things, but he wasn't actually doing so. The filmmakers made a point of showing that his feet weren't really digging into the ground (no salt marks), that Kylo Ren couldn't/didn't interact with him physically in the duel, and that the dice he supposedly put in Leia's hands were just a projection that faded. Leia gives him a knowing glance when that supposed physical interaction happens and in hindsight it seems to be her acknowledging, "these aren't physically tangible and neither are you".

My memory might be omitting some things though.

fujishig

I thought the rumor was that the next one would be Leia's movie (the first one being Han's and the second being Luke's). You could argue that they should have offed Leia and kept Luke around, but if you take her real life death out of it, it makes sense for her to live on and to still play some part in Ben Solo's story.

And you would get a ton of complaints that Leia committed suicide after she just was saved from the dead.

I don't think Luke's projection physically interacted with anything either, why would it?

kefrank

I'm sure the biggest reason, as others have pointed out, is that without other significant changes to the script, there would have been no reunion with Luke. I'm sure people would have complained if Luke and Leia never came together in these sequels. People already complain that Luke and Han weren't together again. All that said, I agree that would have been an awesome way for Leia to go out and it carries less weight with Holdo doing it.

Big Boy Laroux

Oh, i am assuming that the mary poppins scene would have been cut entirely if Leia were the one to go out with the light speed ship destruction.

I don't understand why the forces that be even wanted to keep fisher around for all 3 movies (let alone the rumors of making IX "her movie"). She was by far the worst actor out of the three (currently, not in the OT), so logically, you'd want to keep her in fewer movies/scenes. Well, logical to me, anyway.