Review Detail

I just wanted to drop in and say how much I enjoyed this edit! Even though I liked The Force Awakens a lot, I was never enamoured of it, especially in its third act attack on Starkiller Base. I felt the rhyming with Episode IV became too evident and plain unnecessary. Going in this edit, I was skeptic that such an apparently minor restructuring could transform this movie into an absolute blast. Pushing the Starkiller Base firing back to the third act drastically helps the movie. It not only breaks the mirror-structure, but it also injects the background to the Sequel Trilogy with so much more logic, and the emotional payoff comes along with it. The addition of the Leia deleted scene also helps this drastically, and also builds off of the character we see during the Hosnian Prime destruction. I also loved the incorporation of the Rathtar snippet in Rey's vision. Congratulations.
Truly, this is the edit of Episode VII.

Nonetheless, I must say there are two visual imperfections that brought me out of the movie. After the crawl fades away, the starfield seems to change in size instead of simply brightening and panning without resizing. I don't know If this was an issue in the original movie, though.
The other one is the fact that black bars on the left of the frame appeared every once in a while. I don't know why this happened, but I hope you can fix it before you release a V4, which would be the absolute definitive The Force Awakens edit.
I cannot recommend this edit enough! Well done!