Review Detail

From a technical viewpoint, this was exceptionally done. Apart a couple nitpicks, the edits were seamless and drastically improved the viewing experience. The only drawback from cutting the Canto Bight and Poe's mutiny subplots is that it means Finn and Poe don't do a thing for the entire hour between the second FO attack and the Battle of Crait (heck, Finn doesn't even show up on screen for that entire time), though it's an acceptable trade off when said subplots were poorly written and for the most part made them look bad anyway.

As for the viewing experience itself, the movie was... all right. I don't want that to sound like I'm trashing on it; the fact that I went from "This movie is utter freaking garbage" to "Hey, I actually enjoyed it" is a massive step up in quality. And it definitely speaks of your abilities as an editor.

The action scenes in the first and third act were far more entertaining with all the fat trimmed, and there were some interesting ideas brought to the surface that were buried before beneath the bloated mess that was the original. There were, unfortunately, a few major story elements that brought it down. I still hate how Luke turned his back on everything just because Ben fell to the dark side, though in fairness you did remove the most offensive parts of it. The Resistance ships "running out of fuel" is still unbelievably stupid. And it still makes no sense that Palpatine is actually alive, though again in fairness moving it from the beginning of IX to the end of this one does improve the reveal. And it does serve as a perfect dark ending: it seems like the heroes gained a small but important measure of victory by escaping, but then we learn they're in even greater danger than we thought.

All in all, it's probably as good a movie as you could possibly make it with the footage available, short of a full scale fan redub. I'd put it in the same category as The Force Awakens. It's not on the same level as the Original Trilogy, but it's good in it's own right.