A men’s rights activist edited ‘The Last Jedi’ to remove the women. It’s bad.
ANALYSIS | ‘They took out all that crap,’ one man said
Adapted from an analysis by the Washington Post’s Avi Selk.
The following article contains major spoilers for “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” as well as the plot (such as it is) of the anti-feminist fan remake.
A men’s rights activist wasn’t happy with the original “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”
Displeased by seeing women in the film, he pared down the run time of the “Last Jedi” from 2 1/2 hours to 46 minutes, taking out “most shots showing female fighters/pilots and female officers commanding people around/having ideas,” as its creator explained.
He also renamed the film, calling it: “Star Wars: The Last Jedi: De-Feminized Fanedit.”
Some appreciated the recut.
Amateur reviewer Jay A. York, for one, enthusiastically endorsed the film to his 38 YouTube subscribers after it was released on torrent networks this weekend.
“They took out all that crap,” York said. “All the super-feminine — fem-in-in? — fem, fem, yeah, you know, feminist, I should just say feminist. They all took out all that stuff.”
Others found the remake mystifying — even some who sympathized with the effort to take a plot in which women lead armies, become Jedis and heroically sacrifice themselves and turn it into a film where most women don’t speak, if they’re seen at all.
As a self-professed men’s rights empathizer on Reddit observed, the recut “just makes no sense.” The original “Last Jedi” director was also peeved.
Here’s what the filmmaker changed, making certain scenes confusing:
The iconic opening crawl has been censored so that the name of the leader of the Resistance, General Leia Organa, is removed from the text. A generic “RESISTANCE” is instead fighting tyranny. (The creator forgot to remove Leia’s name from the Chinese subtitles that scroll across the frame for the entire length of the remake.)
Subtitles notwithstanding, Leia — actress Carrie Fisher’s final film role before her death in 2016 — has been removed entirely from the recut’s opening battle between the First Order and the Resistance at D’Qar. The recut’s creator said this made the intro sequence “very watchable and actually much cooler without all of Leia’s nitpicking.”
In one of many lurching cuts, “Fanedit” blinks from the battle at D’Qar to the planet Ahch-To, and for the first time shows a woman doing anything besides taking orders from or staring silently at men.
Luke Skywalker is somehow in the middle of training Rey (Daisy Ridley), the heroine of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” who has come to train with the Jedi master. (A huge portion of the original movie, in which Luke confronts his emotions and reluctantly decides to help Rey, has been deleted in the name of manliness.)
Rey mostly just waves her lightsaber around in the air while Luke talks at her.
“She now seems more graceful and real to me,” the anonymous creator wrote of this particular edit.
After Luke spends a few minutes telling Rey about heroic things he did in past episodes of the franchise, we cut back to space where Leia’s son, Kylo Ren, blows up her ship. In the original film, Kylo actually doesn’t have the heart to fire on his mother, and leaves the job to another bad guy. The film’s central villain is “more badass and much less conflicted” in the new version, the creator explained.
After the explosion, we see Leia floating lifelessly through space. In the original film, as The Washington Post’s Michael Cavna wrote, Leia’s unexpected resurrection made audiences — in wide-ranging responses — cheer, weep, gasp and laugh in their seats. Her coma, recovery and victory may have been the movie’s most powerful arc — especially in light of Fisher’s tragic death during postproduction.
In the recut, Leia just dies in space.
The creator also does away with Laura Dern’s character, Amilyn Holdo.
In her place, Dameron is conscripted to fill in a plot-critical suicide mission, where Holdo saves her fleeing colleagues by making a hyperspace jump with the Resistance cruiser the Raddus into the First Order’s flagship.
Ironically, Poe’s death means that his own heroics in “Last Jedi’s” finale, where he leads the remaining Resistance fighters to escape, have to be scrubbed out of the remake right along with all the scenes of female bravery. So much for male exceptionality.
