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

This movie takes a confusing theatrical cut and turns it into a confusing edit, but in a different way. When I watched the original I kind of rolled with it. It has a few moments and a lot of meh. This edit doesn't really fix anything, it just moves the pieces around. Frankly, the whole Kylo Ren arch is the best part of this specific movie, and the way it's handled in the edit, with Rey killing him on the Death Star because of a distraction, is very, very anti-climatic. If I had my way I'd have a version with Kylo both turning AND surviving. Yeah, I'll leave others to wonder how to deal with that sucker. But I just hate that every dark-sider that turns needs to be killed off. I mean, where's the upside in turning to the Jedi's, then? If my prize is dying, might as well ride it out with the dark side.

I did enjoy watching the Rey scene with Palpatine as an alternative ending, but I think I prefer the ending with Kylo Ren in it. In any case, this move is pretty messy and pushes the good will of the audience. The edit, unfortunately, is unable to fix it properly. To summarize, I like the little edits that make the movie more watchable -still no Lea!-, but the big edit is where my biggest beef lies.

I'm just coming off the review for "The Last Jedi" as I watched both of these edits back to back. With the hurdles and hoops the editor had to jump through to make a cohesive story and bring it back to feeling like Star Wars again is something to be applauded. I understand some limitations with Luke on this one, and while it was a bit jarring I can't knock the editors on that as they had no hand in the filming aspect. Again this is the only version of the movie I'll watch from now on. I would really like to see this editor make an edit of "The Force Awakens" to see how they could weave the entire Sequel Trilogy together without any of the unneeded fluff.

I enjoy DonKamillo's anti-cringe of "Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker". It is better now... but I personally think Ep. 9 is mostly garbage in the first half and I hate the film overall. There's just something about Abrams directing of it that bores me to tears.

(Spoiler) I particularly enjoy how the death of Kylo is handled in this cut. I feel from this point on many parts of Ep. 9 including the epic last battle can be salvaged. I think one can take the core masterpiece that was DonKamillo's "Star Wars: The Last Jedi: The Anti Cringe Cut" and wrap parts of Ep. 7 and Ep. 9 around that and turn the sequel trilogy into 2 movies or even 1 epic movie. I've seen attempts made on the Prequel trilogy doing this same type of thing with good results. I like the idea of the original trilogy being the only trilogy in the star wars saga and everything else just side stories. Just my two cents.

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!

(Quick words of note, this review will contain some spoilers for both The Rise of Skywalker and this edit. If you somehow have not watched either the original movie or this cut? I'd recommend doing so right now. Also this is a summarized version of a much longer review I made on originaltrilogy.com. If you would like to read the full review? Please follow the link here: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/FanEdit-Reviews-Post-Your-Reviews-Here/id/74322/page/9#1483342)

I felt like this was a necessity. I watched the Anti-Cringe Cut of The Last Jedi so it only made sense to also watch and review the Anti-Cringe Cut of The Rise of Skywalker, especially since it bills itself as a sequel to that edit instead of what I find is the norm for edits which is that they're designed to where you can watch it without watching the previous edit but watching the previous edit could enhance the viewing. Now quick thoughts on the previous cut, it really wasn't that great. It had some really cool ideas and moments and a lot of ambition but it suffered greatly from over-ambition resulting in very awkwardly done cuts, choices that put strict adherence to certain franchise "laws" over the story and characters and various decisions that resulted in more plotholes and contrivances than what was present in the source. That being said, that easily could be changed or improved upon in a sequel and since certain edits have resulted in these two being companion pieces to one another? I thought I might as well look at this.

And to give my general thoughts, this was... unfortunately a mixed bag. That being said, I’ll give it credit and state this is much better than the Anti-Cringe Cut of The Last Jedi, that it shows a ton of potential and that it makes a lot of choices that build off of that cut in ways that makes me soften my view of it at least in terms of when I look at these as two parts of a larger whole. There’s a lot of really impressive editing here that streamlines plenty of scenes in ways that don't disrupt anything, one particular edit involves altering Luke to where he looks more alive which is done so startlingly well with so few seams that it makes me really wish to see more editors take a crack at this concept and refine it and some of the scenes on their own bring really striking visuals like Ben fading with Han, the multiple Reys screaming as Palpatine steals her life-force and the image of Rey accepting the darkness in her by constructing a red lightsaber, making her one of the first Jedi I think to do so at least in this new canon. The movie also does a good job of maintaining most of the character arcs of our main trio.

However, it also has a ton of glaring negatives that really bring it down like the TLJ cut from editing choices resulting in wonky all over the place cuts that screw up the pacing and wind up calling attention to how it would’ve been better to just leave certain aspects stock for the sake of having the story flow more naturally such as what happens with Ben being taken out of the picture early which results in so much of Rey's fight with Palpatine feeling rushed, certain ideas just being either way too ambitious like cutting Rey's Force Jump to slice Kylo's TIE which results in quite possibly one of the worst instances of a PNG being edited over footage I've ever seen or it's not conveyed properly like with how it cuts out Kylo telling Rey she's a Palpatine to remove the connection but it doesn't remove the line about her having his power and it doesn't remove Kylo explaining that they're a dyad in the Force which in turn results in me feeling rather lost without the change list about if Rey was still a Palpatine in this or not. There are also a great deal of odd audio glitches and jumps and in one instance, the change of making Leia's blade yellow is not only incredibly noticeable but in the Exegol sequences the wrong saber gets colored yellow.

I applaud the attempts made to change things up more drastically than certain edits and unlike the previous, I will grant it that I didn’t end this viewing feeling kind of angry due to certain decisions made but overall? While it has tons of great ideas and I don’t feel like my time was wasted? This is far from being the ideal edit of this movie and I’m probably not going to be rewatching this ever again unless I can think up a good reason to. I do applaud DonKamillo for his efforts though and I hope he keeps on making more edits and that those who enjoy this edit keep enjoying it and that those who haven't seen it are willing to give it a try.