Review Detail

I recently got “Solo” as an early birthday present, so one of the first things I wanted to do was to download Digmodification’s edit -- a “Star Wars” edit so well-received that it’s currently second only to Adywan’s “A New Hope Revisited”!

The acclaim is well-deserved. Dig’s editing is seamless. I usually didn’t even notice a scene was missing until thinking about it after the movie was over. I don’t even know how he managed to cut the opening sequence in such a way that the “Solo: A Star Wars Story” title is missing without feeling like I’m missing any of the action, but he did.

(Also, bonus points for that cheeky Fox-Disney logo!)

The bit with Han’s last name never bothered me as it did a lot of folks, but I’m glad that it got changed here so that I can watch this with others without having to cringe while wondering how they’ll react to that line. Other characters had cringe-inducing dialogue that I didn’t like myself; those lines have also been removed or toned down.

I have one quibble, in that a few of my favorite humorous moments got cut. In particular, we don’t get the Falcon taking off from the beach, even though Lando still asks for his cut later, and Han still calls him on abandoning them. Since we didn’t see that, that’s the only cut that’s outright noticeable in the course of the film itself.

But as I always say at the end of my day: It’s not my edit. This is Dig’s vision, and he successfully saw it through.

“Solo” is actually one of the better “Star Wars” movies in my opinion, but the fan community (of both Star Wars and fan edits) needed a version with tweaks here and there so it could be embraced by the community without embarrassment. I’m happy to report that this is that version.