Star Wars: Abridged III - The Resistance

This is a mostly pretty good edit of the sequel trilogy, but I did have some issues with it. Before that though I will say the first act and the final act are really good. The cuts work really well and it leads to a really good conclusion. Where I feel the edit suffers most though is in the second act. I just don’t think the Rey stuff works well without Luke being there it just feels kind of off, and I feel there needed to be a bit more information as to why Rey is on Ach-To. However, that being said I’m not really sure how it could be rectified, and the stuff with Canto Bight works decently enough. I really wanted to love this edit, but those flaws kind of held it back for me. Still the audio and visual editing works really well and while I can definitely tell in the final act that a bunch of stuff had been stitched together, the narrative worked so it was really easy to look past it. Despite my issues, I’d definitely recommend this edit as an alternative to the trilogy if you either didn’t like it or hated Rise of Skywalker as most of this edit is comprised of stuff from episodes 7 and 8.

This is my first review and my first abridged Star Wars sequel viewing of the offerings in Fanedit. I found this to be very enjoyable and it fixed many of the problems I had with the too-many-cooks syndrome the sequel had. Now the story has been shaved down to a bare-bones version and many of the [ to me ] irrelevant plot points and bloat have been removed it flows much better. I can see that working with set-in-stone edited movies creates some narrative and editing choice problems for the Fanediter here but they are overcome really well in my view and the editor has achieved a great deal of coherence in this edit. This new single movie flows so well that it hides how much work probably went into making that happen. Also, there were some newly created scenes that were added to help with the plot. I enjoyed the ending much more than I did the original and came away from the experience very satisfied to finally see the movies in a new more pleasing light. There are many characters completely gone and many plot arcs have completely gone, the movie now focuses on the main characters and tells their stories which to me is a great boon, also I felt Luke was handled in a much more positive way and I felt his presence more strongly even with his reduced role here in this edit than in original version. There are all the inevitable oddities in this type of edit, costumes not matching scene to scene and dificult chioces or no choice in where and how to edit certain sections, etc, but these things are beyond the control of an Editor and so I don't count or consider any of that in my estimation of the work. Thanks to the Editor.

Granted, abridged might not be the correct word for what has been created here, but that doens't bother me, it's very entertaining.
The story created here is actually very creative and feels more natural than the original movies. I appreciate how the story is actually pretty good and created around the source material in a clever way.

Yes, there are a lot of continuity errors, but I expected that going into this edit. You just have to appreciate the bold choices and the creative vision of this edit and accept that there will be errors, visual and audio.
I did miss the OT characters a bit, but the few times we see them, it's in a very natural way. And finally the kids on Canto get some well deserved closure (shame on you Disney, for leaving them hanging).
There's one moment I paused the movie and rewinded it a few seconds, just to hear it again. I wonder how the editor created Rey's full name as said by Snoke. That was cool.

But video quality is as good as the originals come, same goes for the audio.

An interesting viewing experience to be sure. The edit was pretty narratively coherent and as someone who enjoys Reylo, I appreciated it being the backbone of Rey and Kylo’s dynamic (even though they were enemies in the end in this edit.)

Still, by its nature it feels very Frankensteined together, and it affects the immersion quite a bit when a character goes through several outfit changes in a single scene.

Overall, a creative concept and fun narrative alternative to the ST

This was an audacious undertaking, pulled off with reasonable success. I'm astounded at how well the editor has blended the three films together given how disparate they are from each other.

The edit is narratively coherent with only a few inconsistencies and plot holes. There are two striking things about how the edit is structured - firstly, that the storyline focuses almost singularly on the cast of the ST, with barely a nod to the OT characters beyond what's relevant to the second thing, which is that the edit opens with a pre-titles vignette giving the bare bones of some backstory which happens outside the scope of the story (largely due to the lack of available material to portray it) but is pretty essential to understanding one of one of the main subplots.

In principle this is all fine but I was left wondering a lot of the time what happened to them and why they weren't in among the action (like the end of Blake's 7, only the fate of one of them is specifically confirmed), and the inclusion of the few legacy characters that remain is a little stilted as their presence is more all the more noticeable for how little they actually do in the brief moments when they're onscreen. That said, the handling of the new leads works incredibly well. It's much more focused, coherent, and significantly less forced (though I felt certain aspects of the inter-character dynamics could've benefitted from a few more minutes' expanding on; TFA's trust issue is still very much present here).

Editing-wise mostly smooth, but there was quite a few noticeable moments where audio transitions either didn't work or seemingly weren't present at all. Sentence mixing wasn't entirely unobtrusive, with again a few audible cuts and instances where the dialogue clearly didn't match the mouth movements (if indeed the mouth was moving). The visuals don't suffer quite so much, though a stand-out moment occurred in the denouement where some really inappropriate effects were overlaid in an attempt to match a shot from what looks like Rogue One. It's not convincing and it doesn't work, and the reaction shot basically didn't serve any purpose beyond being distracting (how is he still alive?) and redundant (he doesn't actually seem to be reacting to what he's supposed to looking at), and in my view the editor would've been better advised to use a shot of him with his eyes closed (and I've seen the film so I know it exists) and straight white-out, maybe a zoom effect with motion blur if you're insistent.

All in all, if you're looking for something more in the vein of Star Wars and don't mind if the old guard sit this one out, this may well be the edit for you.