Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Episode III: Children of the Force

Great work! your masterful editing skills are now completely seamless. If I hadn't seen the show before I would be totally unaware of your skilled hand at work. Please keep it up!

Smudger's Clone Wars fanedits are probably the most enjoyable fanedits all around I've seen so far. I've watched the first two parts and this 3rd part continues strong. However I don't personally think it's as good as the first two are.

The first part (Ryloth) is nearly perfect. I've always enjoyed the grand battles in Clone Wars and it's amazing how well they're done. Pacing, dialogue and the edit overall is very good. However after the strong start the Bane story starts to cut in and takes over for the latter part of the fanedit. The story is good, Bane is a great character and all but I felt exhausted towards the end. I feel the Bane story could have worked better as a separate fanedit or at least needed a bit of trimming.

Smudger has been doing good job editing out childish/stupid dialogue and character and the trend continues strong in this one as well. However there are some lines I personally would have edited out. For example at 00:08:02 when the admiral says "It's too late" and Anakin yells "Run for iiit!". The latter part feels a bit too childish for me. But then again the whole Clone Wars has full of those upbeat liners :)

There are some very small nitpicks about the video and audio. The scene transitions were quite good in this one. Only once or twice I felt the image cut too fast or in the wrong time. HD video quality and file size are great. So often the HD fanedits are too low in quality.

The audio somehow seems to lag a bit in the .m4v version at least, some ~100ms to be more precise. It's the same in the previous fanedits too. It may not be the same for everyone as people have different video players. It's all ok though as I'm used to shift the audio in my player. This really is a very small nitpick as it's barely noticeable.

Overall I'm very happy of smudger9's Clone Wars fanedits. They are so good and I wish that all Star Wars fans who didn't like Clone Wars initially could see these. They really make already a great series even better.


In a nutshell Episode III: Children of the Force was a lot of fun but a bit overwhelming experience due to its length and extensive Bane story arc.

I have been immensely enjoying Smudger9's Clone Wars series so far, and agree this one is by the far the best yet. Whereas the first one suffered from action-overload and the second from an episodic narrative, this one felt cohesive, in large part thanks to Smudger9's awareness that Cad Bane needed introducing during the first act, and his weaving together of two separate instances where the Jedi had reason to admonish Ahsoka to smooth the transition between conflicts. The Ryloth arc served to give Ahsoka some much needed character development, (as other reviewers have demanded), and the Bane arc, being one of the tv series strongest, will always stand tall on its own.
Technically this entry is as smooth as we've come to expect, even alternate dialogue dubbing went unnoticed this time around.
The attempt to tie the Hostage Crisis and Holocron Heist episodes together created an exciting and highly entertaining section of the film, but as Bane began his solo mission to retrieve the holocron I did find myself wondering what the whole hostage crisis had been for. Was it merely an attempt to distract everyone from his true intent? I asked Smudger9, and the answer is yes. Considering the strengths of that episode I don't fault him for including it, but it seems a poor decision on Bane's part. His agent was already equipped to enter the Jedi Temple undetected and the "distraction" did nothing to help but alert many people to the present danger. What's more the many bounty hunters Bane called on to help him achieve the hostage situation seems all the more unnecessary in this version of events. As a strategy to force the Chancellor to meet his demands and release Ziro it was genius, but as that motive was wisely cut from this film, it was left making little sense.
That said, all in all Smudger9 has delivered his best episode yet, and addressed numerous points his audience has raised in his last entries by delivering a story that largely followed the same characters (thus eliminating episodic syndrome), tying arcs together, and including a stronger focus on character development and non-action scenes, to give those there are more weight and the audience less fatigue.
Kudos!

This is easily the best of the Clone Wars tv -> movie edits Smudger9 has produced. The story flows perfectly from start to finish and always feels like a movie experience as opposed to an episodic one. I've been intrigued with this series since Smudger9's first Clone Wars movie which was very well made if not slightly flawed. The second offering never quite felt like a movie in my opinion and reduced my interest in the series as a whole. But this third offering has thoroughly perfected Smudger9's Clone Wars movie formula.

The editing was nearly flawless and the overall story was fantastic. Great Job!