Review Detail

I actually was a fan of this movie when I first saw it - I know some people absolutely hate it, and I totally see the reasoning behind that point of view. As the years have gone on, I have seen more of the flaws and one of the most glaring issues was the way they tried to shoehorn Leia into the film using old footage.

This edit does a fantastic job getting rid of that entire problem. Having Leia die at the very beginning is genius, as she doesn't really have any impact on the plot. I then love how later when Kylo and Rey are fighting, at the point when Leia originally dies, it creates more drama because it seems like Kylo is naturally drifting back toward the light while Rey is drifting toward the dark side. I really liked that dynamic and the scene really works well once Leia is removed.

I am a big fan of removing Rey as a Palpatine - my only worry is going forward, when new movies come out, will this version of the story flow into whatever comes next? I guess we will have to wait and see - but perhaps a future version where she is still a Palpatine? Wishful thinking, but totally respect why Spence went the "no one" route. And for the time being, this is perfect!

The only reasons I took a couple points off for narrative was since the terrible Leia scenes were removed at the beginning, it did seem to make the first act fly by almost too fast. I felt like it was 5 minutes in and Palpatine has returned, Leia is dead, and the crew is already having the speeder chase in the desert. While I know the actual movie is fast-paced as well (not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion) a viewer perhaps not as familiar with the source material may have a hard time keeping up with what is happening. Not sure how that can be fixed - it is just a problem with the original story. You've made it better, so I guess I'm taking points away from JJ Abrams and not you. =)

Two small other narrative things that perhaps AI can fix in the future - when Rey runs to look at the ancient text - I thought it would be awesome if she whispered something to herself like "luke almost found Exogul" just to hammer home that she is using the books to follow Luke's trail. The viewer eventually will of course pick up on it when Lando explains they were looking for Exogul, but it goes from the briefing to Rey saying "I'm going to start where Luke's trail went cold" - what trail?

Then maybe a line when Lando finds them - since the line "Leia sent me a message" is cut - saying the "resistance sent me a message' just to explain why he is there.

I only suggested those because the AI lines you did add were amazing and sounded like they were originally in the movie!

These are SUPER nitpicky and I LOVED this edit. Highly recommend it! Thanks for making this movie a lot better!