Review Detail

I had a lot more fun watching this movie than watching the Disney+ miniseries. These Disney series give fan editors a good substantial amount of material to work with so they can really take the best parts and craft the cleanest version of the story. I feel for editors who try to fix a traditional 90-minute movie. You can easily just end up with an episode of a tv show. For example, a friend of mine made a fan edit of “Escape from LA” and ended up with a 50-minute movie. The 2 ½ hour Spence edit is similar in length to "Captain America: Winter Soldier," so it fits into the series well.

Speaking of that film the biggest criticism I can give to "FATWS" is that Captain America Steve Rogers isn’t in it! I’m sure I will say the same thing about the upcoming Captain America movie. There was obviously nothing that the showrunners or a fan editor could do about that. My second critique would be the main villain of the series (Flag-Smasher, played by Erin Kellyman) was not very well cast. The showrunners could have done better but for a fan editor, it would be difficult if not impossible to cut her out. I also am not a fan of gender or race-swapping characters. However, I liked the trims made in this edit and I didn’t hate her as much. Her cockney British accent was difficult to understand at times. This edit did not have subtitles but it did feature surround sound which is highly appreciated for those of us with a home theater. I did really like the other villains, Baron Zemo (played by Daniel Brühl) and U.S. Agent (played by Wyatt Russell).

I have not watched the series since it came out so I can’t comment too much on what was specifically cut, but I didn’t miss any of it. I remember when it was first released that one of the main criticisms was that, because it is basically a 5.5-hour movie, waiting a week in between episodes totally killed the momentum and lessened the pleasure of watching it because it’s easy to forget what happened last time. This is unlike “Wandavision” which was clearly set up to be a weekly series. You probably couldn’t do much better than this to make "FATWS" the movie it was intended to be. The only thing I may have trimmed or removed completely was when Falcon gets on his soapbox at gives a lecture about race near the end. He was just a mouthpiece for the writers and he goes on and on about it. But other than that I really enjoyed this edit and recommend it. The audio and visual quality were excellent and professional.