Some creep made an overtly sexist edit of The Last Jedi, and even they think it’s awful
The following contains spoilers for both Star Wars: The Last Jedi and a horrid, misogynistic fan edit of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Although some people claimed that they didn’t like Star Wars: The Last Jedi because of how it “tarnished” Luke Skywalker’s legacy or because it shot down their theory that Rey’s parents would be Wedge and Mrs. Wedge, a lot of people hated the movie for a much simpler reason: It had too many competent women in positions of power. That’s the sort of thing that is just terrifying to loads of random assholes, many of whom were furious that J.J. Abrams, Rian Johnson, and Lucasfilm would dare make Star Wars movies that aren’t targeted exclusively to teenage boys. Rather than simply expressing his frustration on Twitter or in the comments below an article about Star Wars, though, one enterprising creep decided to put their frustrations to “good” use and edit The Last Jedi into a movie that’s a bit more palatable to misogynists, racists, and overall idiots.
The result, as noted by this Reddit post, is titled The Last Jedi: The De-Feminized Fanedit, and it recently started popping up on torrent sites. In the description for the download, the anonymous creator (because you definitely don’t want to put a name on something like this) says that they essentially cut out anything that reflects positively on a female character or indicates that they’re on the same level as the male characters in any way, resulting in a feature that is—hilariously—just 46 minutes long. That’s pretty funny, considering the real movie is more than 100 minutes longer than that, but the funniest part is that even the anonymous creator seems to recognize that their monstrosity kind of sucks.
“You will probably enjoy it most when you view it less as a blockbuster movie and more as some kind of episode from some non-existent mediocre Star Wars series,” the creator says, explaining that they had to go off of a bad source with technical issues just to create their terrible thing. Also, the person adds that “there are plot holes and continuity errors,” indicating that they unsurprisingly fucked up the whole plot by cutting out a bunch of integral characters in service of making something that creeps could watch “without feeling nauseaus [sic].”
As for what this visionary of sexism specifically cut out of The Last Jedi, the list is exhausting both because of how elaborate and for how fucking shameful the edit is. For starters, they completely cut Laura Dern’s Admiral Holdo out of the movie, meaning the “Holdo Maneuver” is carried out by Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron instead—so he dies halfway through the “movie.” Also, General Leia never “scolds” Poe, because he’s a perfect man hero who can do no wrong, and she gets killed by Kylo Ren (who is “much less conflicted”). They also made it so that Captain Phasma gets beaten by Finn in one hit because “women are naturally weaker than men,” Rey isn’t “superpowered,” and Paige Tico (the sister of Kelly Marie Tran’s character, Rose) doesn’t get to heroically bomb the bad guy ship in the beginning.
Sexism aside, a lot of the edits just make the movie objectively worse, like the aforementioned choice to cut everything that makes Kylo Ren an interesting villain and also the inexplicable decision to have Luke actually die in the big laser onslaught at the end—robbing him of the best thing he ever did. Worst of all, though, the anonymous creator makes several racist comments about Tran, who is super cool and doesn’t waste her time making extremely stupid edits of Star Wars movies.
Basically, it seems like the message here is that this amateur filmmaker believes that interesting characters, big stakes, and satisfying arcs are for girls, which makes you wonder if they ever actually liked Star Wars in the first place.