Star Wars Episode IX: The Final Order

Spence has done an admirable job at excising what most find to be the most egregious central plot point of Episode IX: 'Rey Palpatine'. Unfortunately, what's left doesn't quite hold the rest of the film up in a satisfactory way for me. Several of the stretched out-shots look quite blurred out and there are some cuts and scene transitions that don't feel quite right.

Other than those minor gripes, the edit is well-constructed and thought through. I wish something along these lines had been filmed originally!

Spence took a complete and total mess of a movie and did the best he could to fix it. And in that he did a pretty damn fine job! The movie is still problematic storywise, but it's a little less overstuffed and more cleaned up. My favorite choices are these:

* Cutting the lightspeed skipping
* Killing Leia off at the start (I love Carrie Fisher but it didn't help to keep her)
* Put memories and Sith voices in Rey scenes to show the lure of the Dark Side
* Made Rey a nobody, no Palpatine connection (I dislike the idea from The Last Jedi but at least we're consistent)
* Dropped the Rey Skywalker nonsense

There's still so much this movie (and the sequel trilogy as a whole) got wrong, but how Spence turned it into a half decent movie is a damn miracle. Great work!