Review Detail
8.8 42 10
(Updated: December 31, 2020)
Overall rating
7.8
Audio/Video Quality
9.0
Audio Editing
9.0
Visual Editing
9.0
Narrative
7.0
Enjoyment
5.0
I owe DonKamillo a review for this one, but it's a hard one to quite put into words. His TLJ edit, though not my favorite, is really great work. This one... is as good as it gets? I'm of two minds; on one hand, I want to commend the effort to make something out of this cinematic malpractice, on the other hand, a corpse will eventually smell, no matter what you do.
As a fanedit, it's a valiant effort; small cuts to tighten the pace, trying to maintain continuity with the TLJ "Anti-Cringe Cut" and, well, that's the thing; The Rise of Skywalker is such a condensed disaster, I couldn't even tell you what has been edited in the movie without reading the list of changes.
I know, this isn't the most helpful review and it's not a reflection on DonKamillo's talent or efforts here; I just want to make sure that, if you watch this, you know what to expect. Some movies are so consistently bad, they're impossible to fix. It's a problem that, surprisingly, the Prequels didn't have, because for all their bad dialogue and questionable action sequences, you could tighten them up and come out with something enjoyable. TRoS is dense; you can't remove any major scenes without losing significant details and you can't space them out to breathe, because they never shot anything quiet or character-building. What DonKamillo does here, in effect, is cut out a lot of the extraneous information that don't contribute anything to the film, making it a little less of a headache. For example, Poe and Zorii don't know each other beforehand in this version of the film, which is good, but at the same time you can't cut out Zorii entirely, because her three minutes of screen-time are necessary to further what passes for a plot here, despite the fact that she's otherwise a superfluous character. That kind of thing.
From a technical perspective, the edit is good. I didn't really notice anything, it looks as pretty as it should with seamless transitions. The only bit that pulled me out was Luke's scene and his de-ghosting-- but I'm the guy that needs fifteen minutes to do a simple jpeg edit on Gimp, I'm not going to be the one to complain about this type of thing.
Ultimately, it's hard to rate the enjoyment of an edit like this, because the source material is just abysmal. I'd like to say that this is a better version than the theatrical, but I honestly never want to see anything related to TRoS in general, ever again. If, for some reason, you're enough of a SW fan to want to put yourself through this nipple-clamp of a movie again, then I can at least say that the "Anti-Cringe Cut" is the significantly less painful version of it.
As a fanedit, it's a valiant effort; small cuts to tighten the pace, trying to maintain continuity with the TLJ "Anti-Cringe Cut" and, well, that's the thing; The Rise of Skywalker is such a condensed disaster, I couldn't even tell you what has been edited in the movie without reading the list of changes.
I know, this isn't the most helpful review and it's not a reflection on DonKamillo's talent or efforts here; I just want to make sure that, if you watch this, you know what to expect. Some movies are so consistently bad, they're impossible to fix. It's a problem that, surprisingly, the Prequels didn't have, because for all their bad dialogue and questionable action sequences, you could tighten them up and come out with something enjoyable. TRoS is dense; you can't remove any major scenes without losing significant details and you can't space them out to breathe, because they never shot anything quiet or character-building. What DonKamillo does here, in effect, is cut out a lot of the extraneous information that don't contribute anything to the film, making it a little less of a headache. For example, Poe and Zorii don't know each other beforehand in this version of the film, which is good, but at the same time you can't cut out Zorii entirely, because her three minutes of screen-time are necessary to further what passes for a plot here, despite the fact that she's otherwise a superfluous character. That kind of thing.
From a technical perspective, the edit is good. I didn't really notice anything, it looks as pretty as it should with seamless transitions. The only bit that pulled me out was Luke's scene and his de-ghosting-- but I'm the guy that needs fifteen minutes to do a simple jpeg edit on Gimp, I'm not going to be the one to complain about this type of thing.
Ultimately, it's hard to rate the enjoyment of an edit like this, because the source material is just abysmal. I'd like to say that this is a better version than the theatrical, but I honestly never want to see anything related to TRoS in general, ever again. If, for some reason, you're enough of a SW fan to want to put yourself through this nipple-clamp of a movie again, then I can at least say that the "Anti-Cringe Cut" is the significantly less painful version of it.
User Review
Format Watched?
Digital
T