Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker: Anti-Cringe-Cut

After viewing TLJ. Anti-Cringe edit it was a must to jump to Donkamillo's work with its sequel. I tremendously enjoyed the editor vision on The Last Jedi killing Leia and sparing Luke for this one. However, those decisions brought consequences for the current work. In terms of narrative, I would love to see Donkamillo's story in theaters. Unfortunately, given the available source material it makes too difficult to apply drastic changes with the fate of central characters (i.e. Leia, Luke, Kylo) without compromising the overall quality of the work. I would not like to sound negative or giving the impression I am undermining this edit. It's the most aggressive and ambitious edit out there about the SW sequels and I certainly enjoyed it a lot. As I said, very powerful ideas that sadly imo cannot be depicted in the way they should because of the source material.

I certainly look forward to more edits from Donkamillo's in the future! Thank a lot for sharing your work!

It improves a lot the theatrical version, the plot doesn't feel all over the place, it has some bold decisions like keeping Luke alive, 3PO's memory, killing Kylo (there was a small twist when he's talking with Han with his wound healed then it turns out he's a force ghost). The whole 'I need a hero' scene of Kylo rushing to save Rey and their kiss were some of the movie's most cringey moments, thanks for cutting them. I only liked the Matrix jump and the evil 'Bilbo' Rey but I agree these were expected to be cut. Amazing work, looking forward for your upcoming projects.

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 I mentioned during my review of ep. VIII, I was not able to bring myself to watch the source material and the same goes for ep. IX. So I will not be able to offer a true comparison to the theatrical release. But given the non-canonical woke mess Disney produced I hope this won’t be held against me.

For me this was the most cringe out of the sequel trilogy and I’m not sure if that’s because Don Kamillo did such a great job when cutting cringe from ep. VIII or if this movie was just that much worse, because Metacritic would have me believe that this was the slightly less reviled film when compared to it’s predesessor.

Two things that had me cringe hard were the use of tread-speeders when sand-speeders were already a thing how many decades ago in a galaxy far far away? This is going to take quite a bit of work in CGI or a well trained AI to replace. So I was kind of surprised Don Kamillo left these in.

I was also shocked that he left the “broken death star” debris. This totally broke any sense of immersion into the story for me and reminded me again that Jar Jar Abrams had zero love for Star Wars. I didn’t expect all the shots filmed inside the debris to be cut. Just the line where Rey says “Death Star”. That way we could just assume it was some random imperial ruins.

There is still too much wrong with the film that I’m not really sure any amount of editing can fix. I live in hope that one day in the not to distant future someone empowered by AI and a clear creative vision can give us a sequel trilogy finale that could more easily pass for cannon.

Until then, this is probably the definitive way to watch this film. I can’t say I got through unscathed, but I’m sure this cut spared me a lot of pain and suffering over the original. Only a Sith could weaponize Star Wars into a post modern propaganda machine. So it is indeed the work of a Jedi to correct history and salvage the timeline. Gracias Don Kamillo and may the force be with you!

I wasn't expecting much. I mean the originals are such utter rubbish.

I was delightfully surprised. I actually watched TRoS anti-cringe first as I couldn't bare to believe a good cut of TLJ can exist. But TRoS was so well done that I went back and watched TLJ too.

Together these movies do so much better than a "best of what's left." They actually salvage the movies. No need to retcon anything in TRoS because it's not there in the first place. Nothing stupid in TRoS anymore... 'cept the bare minimum Emperor.

I'd love to see version 2+ of these as I still think there's more that can be done to improve.

Top work! I've actually put these in my Star Wars collection to show my daughter, who will now never have to go through the pain of the theatrical releases.