Star Wars: Abridged III - The Resistance

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.

The Sequel Trilogy feels oddly like films made for people who haven't seen Star Wars before. They are big, and bombastic, and bloated. However, although the story was for the most part a sad deconstructionist reimagining of the Original Trilogy, I did find some enjoyment in the outdoor shots, the effects, and the setpieces. Subjectzero's 3-in-1 takes the deconstructionism out of the trilogy and leaves its strengths mostly intact with a new story that works pretty well. It feels very experimental and there is room for improvement (was very distracted by a grammar mistake in the opening crawl), with some out-of-place shots here and there and some framerate stutters. That said, there were some great, inspired ideas here, and I enjoyed this edit more than I do the originals. Would love to see a '2.0' or 'revisited' version if it ever happens.