Something Weird Is Up With Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Editing

Disney Plus’s new Obi-Wan Kenobi show has a lot going for it, namely Ewan McGregor’s performance free of a prequel-era George Lucas script, but if you watched the dual episode premiere yesterday, you may have found a few things…off.

You may not always notice good film editing in shows and movies, but you will often notice bad editing, and that seems to be a somewhat persistent problem in Obi-Wan, as evidenced by a handful of season that really stood out like sore thumbs. Spoilers follow.

Leia Runs

I think that young actress Vivien Lyra Blair is doing a great job as a young, sassy but wise Princess Leia Organa, but the sequence where she was running away from the bounty hunters in the woods is one of the worst Star Wars sequences I can remember seeing. And we just got the Vespa chase in The Book of Boba Fett not that long ago.

I can see some sort of situation where they used this scene to have Leia expertly use her knowledge of the woods to evade the bounty hunters for a short time, but that’s not how this is cut. The bounty hunters keep stupidly getting blocked by single branches and there are extended takes where they’re just chasing this tiny girl in a straight line and somehow cannot catch her. It’s truly bizarre and looks so goofy on film.

Jedi Escapes

Another deeply weird scene is the Inquisitor shakedown of the local bar, in which they uncover a Jedi that has been hiding out there doing good deeds. They find him, and then somehow, all three of them with force powers! let him escape after he…collapses an awning?

The editing makes it look like he simply just disappears, and I was baffled why they weren’t able to catch him. It was like they didn’t even try, and then they start asking around for information about him (information that later, Reva is able to extract directly from someone’s brain?). Just a very bizarre sequence from start to finish.

Obi-Wan Teleports

Another weird moment is at the end of the second episode. Obi-Wan is forced to reach for the Force for the first time in a decade in order to ensure Leia doesn’t fall several stories to her death. Good scene! Except again, for a weird editing moment where suddenly, Obi-Wan is suddenly next to her. I mean, I guess we can assume he did some sort of force jump that allowed him to survive that level of a fall, but that isn’t shown, and it looks like he just teleported next to her.

Some people also didn’t like the Reva roof parkour in this sequence, which I suppose is not really an editing issue, but more of a choreography thing and story decision. I think it was meant to make her look like a predator or something, but it was a little too Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for me.

Am I nitpicking? Maybe, but these moments really did stand out in an otherwise good pair of episodes. Did they for you as well?

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.