Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (Extended Edition)

If I didn't know, I would've never guessed this was not the official release. I don't know what else to say, only that this is now my preferred version of the film.

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I love that new movies are made in the Star Wars universe, though they're not as magical for me as the original trilogy that I grew up with.
While watching TLJ in the cinema, I was thinking what to trim and change to improve this movie. To my pleasant surprise, the studio released a bunch of (mostly) finished deleted scenes, which can help tremendously to re-write the narrative. To my even greater surprise, I love the Extended Edition!
Before, I thought TLJ needed the deleted scenes to REPLACE original scenes. Now, I see that fleshing out the story with these deleted scenes improves the weaker scenes even without trimming them. Looking at the flow of the narrative, I'm even okay with keeping the Spaceballs-like ironing. The subsequent scene is now so quiet and tense that the burst of trumpets and steam is a good setup.

The video and audio transitions are excellent. The addition of incidental music to smooth over some transitions really helps make them invisible. The included bits of casino B-Roll are seamless, and the Fathier Chase is cut better than either the theatrical OR the full deleted scene.

My only criticism of this edit is that the audio is needlessly reduced to mediocre resolution stereo. The movie AND the deleted scenes come with high bitrate 5.1 audio. Movies like Star Wars benefit so much from spectacular sound to match their visuals, it's a shame that ebumms chose to / had to downgrade the audio. Despite this one gripe, I am happy to confirm that:

This edit improves, and clearly replaces, the theatrical version.

I got exactly what I was expecting. The additional scenes are very well integrated and (apart from a single unfinished effect) blend seamlessly with the rest of the movie. I would definitely recommend this to someone looking for an extended edition of TLJ, as well as as a master for a fan edit that would use some of, if not all of, those scenes.