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

Immensely enjoyable, to the point. Cut out all the dross. Would very much recommend to one and all.

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!

Oh boy...Star Wars prequels and now the sequels. The eternal debate/fight. Well, at least for the prequels we have a ton of fan edits, plus the Lucas' versions, so it's really hard not to find your cup of tea. Which means prequels are already saved. The sequels on the other hand, mainly episodes 8+9, have a long way to go, very few fanedit choices.

Before my review for this, I should state my brief opinion on the original so you know where I'm coming from. It had stuff I hated, stuff I was bored about and some stuff I enjoyed. My overall enjoyment was like a 3-4. I saw it once in cinema and never looked back. Before watching this I tried HAL's "Ascendant", which was a "restructure" type edit, but it didn't work for me, I needed an aggressive edit. Enter DonKamillo!

Technical wise, having also seen the Episode 8 Anti-Cringe, I was a bit dissapointed. In general the audio and visual edit was good, but as the movie progressed, especially at the section with Palpatine, the jump cuts where all over the place. And it was unnecessary, because the editor could have avoided all that if he had just left Kylo alone and not force-cut him.

More specifically, the scenes below are the ones that stood out a lot:
- Cutting Ray jumping above Kylo's ship at the desert. I mean, why? Is it better to see the ship crashed for no reason at the next scene?
- The sound of the lightsabers in Kylo's quarters where they "mind fight" with Rey. I read the reasoning behind this, but no. It was super weird.
- When Rey goes to the fallen Death Star by sea and Jannah said I'll take you there. Well, we just suddenly see Jannah and Finn at the fight for no apparent reason. In the theatrical cut we know Rey left by herself, but here they left all together, yet Rey is all alone and Jannah and Finn pop up before the duel.
- After Kylo gets the map and says "Look at yourself", the sound is almost cut off for like a second.
- I found the flashback dialogue between Luke and Rey after she stabs Kylo, a bit forced and unnecessary.
- One of my biggest problems, the fadeout of Han and Ben. I mean, that's how we end the arc of this character? A fadeout? That was a big no for me, which connects it to my next point.
- The whole ending scene that had to do with Palpatine, was "full" of jumpcuts and generally changes that where pretty obvious. Something that could have being avoided by keeping Ben there.
- And lastly, something that I mentioned also in Episode 8 Anti-Cringe, the green light in Luke's saber. You could tell it was added. I obviously understand the reasons behind it, but since I could tell, I wouldn't mind the other color.

Overall, I still suggest this version to anyone who wants an aggressive edit of Episode 9, Don's is the only one. I just hope the editor will revisit it to smooth some things out and change others. For me it will be my go to version, but that is because I don't have a choice and it's a shame not to watch the final film of the saga in a future marathon.

Thank you DonKamillo, thanks to anyone who read my review and may the force be with you!

P.S. I copy pasted some of my text from my review of the Episode 8 Anti-Cringe, because it applied here also.

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.