Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back: Revisited

This fan-edit is absolutely incredible and perfect in every technical aspect. It takes an already phenomenal movie and makes it even more so. The new visual effects are absolutely stunning, beautiful, and seamless and makes for a perfect modernization of the movie. The redone mattes, miniatures, CG, lightsabers and lasers especially are a feast. This edit also fixes literally every single movie mistake and continuity error to be found, which truly shows Adywan's dedication and improves the movie even more.

I only take one point off of enjoyment because I wish the special edition Wampa shots were kept (which was an addition to Empire Strikes Back I actually really liked), but that's only a minor subjective gripe and not an objective flaw of the edit. And that's literally my only problem with it.

Until my edit is done, this is my go-to for watching Empire Strikes Back.

A near-perfect edit of "The Empire Strikes Back", and I only say "near-perfect" because there needs to be an edit without Luke and Leia's incestuous Sweet Home Alabama kiss! Other than that, it is technically flawless, and a wonderful marriage of the best of the original and the best of the Special Edition with even more VFX improvements. Dare I say, what the Special Edition ESB should have been!

Highly recommended, and my go-to ESB from now on!

empire is in my top 5 movies, ever. and adywan's has become my definitive version. the sfx inclusions are incredible, and subtle, which is a must when we muck with pieces of film history like this imo. the level of craft here is extraordinary.

the real prize for me is the synthesising of the best parts of the theatrical ESB and the special editions: empire with ian mcdiarmid, jason wingreen, "bring my shuttle.", and the bespin balconies is magical. thank you adywan!

my only complaint is that the changes to yoda's face bother me. the degobah sequences are the best part of this film and i love the rough-around-the-edges stuff for yoda. this is the only change that isnt seamless and takes me out of the movie.

The Citizen Kane of Fanedits

It's a shame there are no 11's to score, coz this just can't fit on a scale of 1-10 compared to virtually all edits out there.

This is beyond any reasonable expectation. I still recall the 70mm version which had many differences to the wide released 35mm prints coz I saw it a dozen times in theatres. I'd love to see that again, but give a choice between that and Adywan's masterpiece, I'd keep this for sure.

It's not just the restorations of lines, foley and more that make this soooo special. It is clearly a labor of love second to none.

I won't spoil it with specifics, however, I had to look many many MANY times to pick out the model work incorporated seamlessly into this. And the hologram work, displays, extra everything and yet NONE of it jars at all (unlike the special editions).

EXCEPTIONAL:
W

This must be the most waited fanedit of all time so it has a lot to live up to. I think it just does that and even exceeds all the expections.

There's so much added into the movie and some of it, well, most of it is Hollywood quality (and even better :) ). The Battle of Hoth is simply amazing with all its additions. Yoda has more personality with his new face expressions and now there are blaster blasts every time a stormtrooper is hit in the cloud city "battle". Now that's something that bothered me a bit... sometimes when a stormtrooper was hit, there was no effect. And talking about effects, there are tons of different kinds of effects going on background in this fanedit, and they sure are top quality.

There simply isn't any addition that bothered me in this edit. Well, I could say that Yoda was sometimes a bit goofy with his face expressions, heh. But mostly in a good way. This simply appears to be a flawless diamond.


My ONLY grief is the quality of the video (.mkv HD version). It appears to have a lot of film grain compared both to the blu-ray release or a 1080p rip of equal file size to this fanedit. It looks very mushy, on both, my projector and monitor. When it comes to HD, I want the image be clear. Now it seems there's always something going on even static backgrounds.

I'm not sure why exactly the video has so mushy look. The 720p shouldn't be the issue nor the bitrate. It should be high enough. But it looks like grain with low(ish) bitrate. Bad combination. Is it that the source material is different or does the color correction for example do something bad to the image quality when compiling? Or maybe something to do with the compile parameters. I'd like to hear some suggestions. And I encourage others do comparisons as well.

I hope the video quality gets better in the coming blu-ray release. It's not bad by all means but not just that great either.


I don't want to end this review with negativity so I simply say the fanedit itself is the best fanedit ever done. Period.