Star Wars - Episode I: Return of the Sith

My first fan edit review!!! Having spent a lot of time editing The Phantom Menace myself (work in progress), I can really appreciate the technical difficulty of this very aggressive edit. The transitions were excellent between scenes, particularly the audio.

The good:
Overall it was a technically excellent edit. There were some transitions that were obvious, but overall they were seamless.
A very bold move to completely edit out the Gungan home world, something I hadn't considered doing, but it worked really well.
I really enjoyed the pod race sequence, which is ridiculously long in the original release. Your edit is seamless, well paced and the perfect duration.
You made an excellent job of making the Neimodians a more menacing threat.
I loved the absence of Sidious. I'm still not sure whether I prefer it to the original, but its a very interesting take on the film.
Excellent job on editing out all Battle Droid dialogue.
Superb final battle sequence.... no Jar Jar antics and your cut of Anakin destroying the droid control ship was excellent.

The Bad:
The cut is slightly too aggressive for my liking, and some parts of the film, particularly the opening 20 minutes, seem very rushed.
I didn't feel any added tension from your recut of the Tatooine sequences. I never felt that our heroes were in any more danger than the original film.

Review by geminigod — July 29, 2012 @ 7:05 pm

In short, this is one of the best and possibly most minimalist edits of episode 1 that I have seen. Will it replace Shadow of the Sith or Phantom Edit as my favorite? I am undecided… Seciors clearly has a great eye for pacing, cheese, and a sense for dramatic storytelling. This version is pared down extremely close to the tipping point, I think, between cutting too much and not enough. There are few movies where this balancing act is more difficult than in Episode 1.

Unfortunately, the never-ending challenge of Episode 1 is that simple cutting and re-arranging are not enough to make this movie excellent. There are still a handful of scenes (won’t bother naming) that are there and can’t be fixed without some highly technical and creative work. The good news is that the cheese is at a bare minimum and like Neglify said, I found myself actually interested and enjoying the movie for the most part.

Once upon a time I would say the video quality was good, but now with an HD source out there, it falls a little short on that mark.

From an editing standpoint, it is very solid, especially given the large volume of work done on this movie, and even more especially given that I believe this was Secior’s first foray into the world of fanediting.

There are two technical skills that appear to be a little lacking here, which would be nice to see improvements on in any future edits. 1) Music score editing. There were a couple times when the music cuts were a little too hard and pulled me out of the moment. 2) The DVD menu is not very professional in appearance and the music loop cuts off rather annoyingly when the loop resets.

Seciors gets major props for jumping into the fanediting arena with one of the most difficult movies to edit and the most frequently edited movies. His version is original and a welcome addition to the fanedit.org episode 1 catalog. Seciors almost succeeded in making this movie good, which is no small feat.

FANEDIT RATING (considering changes made)- 9/10

MOVIE RATING (considering the movie as a whole as if it were a new release I was watching for the first time) – 7/10. (Original theatrical version was 4/10, so this is an impressive improvement!)