Star Wars: The Last Skywalker Awakens

I come at this from the angle of somebody who enjoys The Force Awakens a lot, thinks The Las Jedi is one of the best films in the whole series, and found Rise of Skywalker very disappointing, with some interesting elements. Overall, the trilogy feels very separate from each other, each movie having it's own vibe and story that doesn't necessarily gel with what came before or what comes after. This isn't meant entirely as a negative, as I believe a lot of interesting things come up in each film, but overall they don't work in harmony with each other the way you would expect a trilogy to.

What bbghost has done here is take all of the elements from this disjointed trilogy that work alongside each other, remove what didn't, then amplify what is kept to work in concert with each other. It's definitely a more coherent way to digest the main story of the sequel trilogy.

Overall, the cuts are clean, audio is solid (only 2.0 stereo though. I don't take a point off for that, but it's worth mentioning). there's a few spots where I felt things were maybe moving a little too fast due to what was cut, but that's hard to help, especially in the Rise of Skywalker section. Video quality is excellent across the board.

Generally, this is a great way to watch it, especially if you aren't a huge fan of some of the diversions in The Last Jedi. As a fan of that movie, I miss what was cut, but I would still highly recommend this edit.

Overall I enjoyed this much more than the theatrical. It’s way tighter, the editing is terrific and the IMAX escape from Jakku is a thing of beauty.

Some issues I found are quibbles:

-The scroll looks like it has been cropped too close on the right side
-There is still unexplained visible smoke in frame when Finn wakes up on Jakku.

This edit still tells the same basic story and, IMO, that story still has a lot of issues. It also doesn’t really work for me as two movies. It’s more one long movie with an intermission. And that still makes it difficult for me to sit through. There are still things here that I think can and should be removed, but that is a matter of preference. I could make a wish list of what I would want out of this series, but I can’t be sure any of it would actually work. To judge this on its own merits as a tighter and more focused version of the same story, it works very well.