Heavy Star Wars: Episode I

I've been longing to see the Heavy Star Wars edits for a long time, and I was happy to get almost all of them a few days ago (Still gotta wait for Episode IX, though)! I wasn't sure which one to watch first, so I decided to start with Episode I for chronological reasons. This being my first excursion, I am happy to say that this edit rocks!

Beyond the much shorter and sweeter (or heavier) 77-minute running time, I'm not sure if there's much to say. It's Episode I in the style of the 1981 cult film, Heavy Metal! You know if you're going to love this one or not. Ever wanted to watch the podrace, but with Deep Purple's "Highway Star" playing in the background? If your answer is yes, then there's nothing more to say. Have fun and enjoy!

I love Heavy Metal, and I loved this edit! If this doesn't sound like your kind of thing, look elsewhere. There are plenty of other Star Wars edits in the galaxy. However, it was most definitely my thing, and I'm excited to watch seven more of these (eight when Episode IX is made)! Rock on!

Quality - Mostly good, though there is a noticeable degradation of quality on many shots due to the zoom ins. The audio bitrate also seemed a bit low on one of the songs.

Visual editing - Some really nice, creative editing. Although the quality suffers, the zoom ins work stylistically and are part of the experience. I don't know what was going on during C3PO's moment, but it was good crazy fun. The little touches on the pod race to make it seem like it was on TV were also well done.

Audio editing - A difficult edit to pull off given the way the source material is mixed, and as a result, there are numerous occasions where the original score leaks through into the new music. In some cases this can't be avoided, but I think there were scenes where the imposing audio was due to negligible dialogue which, IMO, would have been best removed.

Narrative - Fine... I guess. The Phantom Menace (theatrical) has some fun moments and can be great to look at, but it's also incredibly boring. Generally, I think the editor would have been better off cutting out way more than he did and just focusing on the fast paced nature of the edit. At the start it cuts straight to the chase with simple exposition in the form of words flashing on screen like "Invasion!" or "The Jedi must rescue the princess!" - this should have been applied much more frequently across the edit IMO and would have worked wonders for the pacing.

Enjoyment - Fun. Not all the music was to my taste and some of the resubtitling seemed unnecessarily crude, but overall I enjoyed it. Main negative for me was the pacing, in which there generally needed to be a lot less plodding.

Awesome!! Super fun to watch, definitely better than the theatrical release hahaha. Particularly, Detroit Rock City and Psycho Killer were perfect and the podrace was even more exciting. Also, the trippy C3PO sequence worked a lot better than the R2D2 one in ep IV. My only wish was that a good fanedit of the movie could have been the main source so that this could have been just as short but make more narrative sense. (Mainly would help to tighten up important scenes that were completely cut here, and cut out bad lines from scenes that were left intact here.) Also I agree with the other reviewer about more character labels, and the fact that the intro was handled really well!

Between all the TPM edits I've watched and doing my own TPM edit, I've really been through the ringer when it comes to this movie. So it takes something new to get me to watch another one. Thankfully I gave this a chance, and I really had a good time watching it.

First off, the movie is cut down to a breezy 80 minutes and I didn't notice any glaring flaws in the narrative. Cutting out the entire opening was a method I've never seen before and it worked quite well. There were some other places I wished for some trims (a few annoying bits of Jar Jar or Ani that could have easily been lost) but in general this is a reasonably edited down version of the movie.

The music choices are all well done. Some songs were not to my specific taste but that's certainly not the fault of the editor, as song preferences are highly personal. I certainly am glad this was more of a rock edit than the heavy metal edit the title promises. The music fit well and came in and left at all the right places. I also appreciated the care that was taken to reduce song volume when people were talking and bring it back up when the talking was over.

My second favorite use of music was Psycho Killer, which featured some great editing from start to finish. But my favorite was whatever the song is that is used for the introduction of C3PO. I won't spoil it here but that sequence kind of blew my mind (though it ran on a bit too long). I suspect that's a one-and-done gag but it would be amazing if C3PO could be that character the whole way through the Heavy Saga.

There were some instances of original score bleeding through. This is understandable given how difficult Star Wars audio is to work with, and the overall experience was enjoyable enough to look past it. Fixing this would have probably required full rebuilding of sound effects, which can be done but is difficult and tedious. If the editor had spent the time to do so, it would have just about made this edit perfect, but I'm certainly not one to complain. Overall the audio editing is definitely done well.

There were a few fun visual gags as well. I particularly enjoyed the many quick cuts to closer views of characters for dramatic effect. I do wish the character labels were done more often, I recall only the two Jedi and the two droids, I would have liked to see those for the other prominent characters as well.

Excellent job! Looking forward to watching the rest of the series.

This was a helluvalotta fun. Evil Ed has put together a kick-ass soundtrack to make this movie bearable. My only nitpicks are a few audio transitions that weren't perfect (but also weren't ugly) and the fact that I was watching Episode I.