Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Complete Edition

For anybody who wants to live in the world of Close Encounters for a little longer this edit is certainly worth their time. Watching any of the three official versions on their own is a great experience but knowledge of extra material always left a desire in me to see what was being left out, even something as mundane as a few amusing seconds of product placement!

Wraith has solved that problem, the three versions providing three degrees of completeness. Having seen the 137-minute director's cut first and most often, the additional 8 minutes (for version sans mothership interior) feel in no way unwelcome, while not strictly necessary these scenes add to the world-building and give the film a more complete feeling.

Unsurprisingly, there are no noticeable joins where scenes have been spliced together, from now on I consider this my go-to version.

This is a fantastic version of one of my fave films of all time. For years I’ve thought that I remembered scenes incorrectly and probably in the wrong order. This version has corrected my thoughts of premature memory loss thankfully by restoring everything in an almost seamless way.
The quality time and pains that Wraith has gone through to create the brilliant version are quite remarkable. It looks just as good, and in some places a lot better than my UHD official version of the directors cut!
I recommend all CE3K fans to check it out!

Having grown up on and watched the different versions of this movie over the past 30 years I can definitely say that this versions feels like the Complete Story.

and to be perfectly frank I take absolutely no issue with it. There is some jumps in visual quality but that is to be expected when working from three different sources and Wraith did an admirable job with it. Audio was perfect - no issues with music or being able to understand the actors when they were speaking.

Fantastic edit that brings together all the content of Close Encounters. I never know which version to watch, but now I do.

I found this in MP4 format, so I copied it to a USB stick and played it off my Blu Ray player's USB slot. I projected it on a 100" screen with a 4K projector with a DD7.1 audio setup. It's been long enough I couldn't automatically pick out what Wraith had added back to the film/integrated to the film,. There were a few noticeable frame skips/jumps that I later realized were probably related to lower quality scenes that Wraith added. I think this is a compelling edit of the film, worth the download and if you're a fan (which I am, ever since first seeing it around 1981 or so. My parents did not bring me to see it in theaters unfortunately. That was Star Wars' release year which I DID see in the theaters). This movie engenders a feeling of wonder in me, especially because of some of teh actors involved. Dreyfus really is compelling in his compulsion and the relief and wonder he shows at the end. The extra bits added in didn't seem to make any narrative issues and seemed to be worth it.

My only negatives on this are that the sound mix was lackluster. Not only did I have to push the volume a lot, but there was little in the way of use of the surrounds that I could hear. It wasn't terrible, it just wasn't as good as I would have hoped.

Thanks so much to Wraith for all the hard work.