War of the Stars II: The Future in Motion

So, in the alternate universe where Star Wars was War of the Stars, it too was an outstanding success. So, with a higher budget, the broke out of the Grindhouse and made... something truly amazing. While perhaps not as hysterically funny as the original, this is an amazingly unique take on Empire and Jedi. It preserves the altered character personalities and plotline of the previous edit, and takes them in some really interesting directions. The use of footage from a variety of sources, a lot of very impressive special effect work, and a quality new soundtrack only enhance this altered reality version of these movies. This is a worthy followup. Another must-watch.

This is, possibly, my favorite fan edit of all time. (It gets stiff competition from Slark's Doc Savage, but that's another story for another day.)

Beyond being a great edit, it is also a fantastic film in it's own right. It takes everything that is good about the Star Wars universe and mashes it up against everything that is good about bloody, messy, self-indulgent cinema.

Without giving too much away, Bobba Fett plays a much bigger role in this film than he did in the originals, and that's Awesome.

There were a few scenes where the Audio was different enough from the vocals to be distracting, but not distracting enough to detract from my enjoyment of the film. A conversation between Luke and Yoda comes to mind, but it is easy enough to overlook. In fact the only real moment that suffers heavily from this is Leah's last line. ("It's not like that")


I can live with the flaws, and I've seen worse in commercial movies (especially when they try to bowdlerize expletives for television) so I won't dock him too many points for that.



The story itself is fresh. It is surprising, it catches your attention. Some of the choices that were made are so inspired that I found myself wondering why Lucas hadn't done them to begin with.


Simply put, this edit took some of my favorite moments from the history of cinema and combined them in a way that makes perfect sense, to tell a dark and gruesome story that left me wanting more.


And the ending, well, that was a hell of a punch.

What can I say? TMBTM played a blistering main set with TWOTS, answered the call for an encore and blew the audience away with TWOTS2. We leave dazed and awed, jaws agape over the ride we just took.

This is what fanediting is all about.

April 22, 2012 @ 5:04 am

Watched this for the second time today. I’ll try to keep my thoughts brief and not spoil any surprises.

War of the Stars II succeeds in its own right and is a wonderful follow up to the first edit. There were many times I was blown away by how TMBTM changed things. The opening sequence lets the viewer know right away that this is a sequel to WAR OF THE STARS, not just a fanedit of ESB and ROTJ.

I personally loved that this was not a Grindhouse movie and that some of the added scenes and effects didn’t have the same consistent look throughout. It added to the mythology of it all, as if the director of this movie blew his budget on two sequences so had to go cheap with some other effects. And maybe even the original director never fully finished the movie and some scenes were re-shot by someone else.

TMBTM has succeeded in making a truly great sequel to War of the Stars without falling into the trap of making a carbon copy of the first one.

A lot of hard work went into this making this and it paid off well. 10/10.

April 30, 2012 @ 3:12 am

***SPOILERS***

TMBTM, you’re a genius. A genius. This was probably the most brilliant edit I’ve ever seen. Personally, I thought it was a ton better than the first WOTS, which I only gave 7/10 (maybe it was just not for me). I was wowed the whole time I watched this.

Technical quality – 10/10 – it was a tad fuzzy and some added scenes had worse quality than others, but given the type of edit this was it did not affect the viewing experience at all.

Editing – 10/10 – that rotoscoping and 90 new SFX shots… WOW. Just wow. I don’t know HOW you did the stuff you did, but it turned out wonderfully. My jaw was dropped the entire time I watched the before and after video – some of it was stuff that I didn’t even notice when I was watching because it was so seamless.

Entertainment – 10/10 – as I said, this is probably the cleverest edit ever. The new opening explaining Vader’s survival is just beautiful. Then there’s a marathon of one jaw-dropper after another: the new snow creatures on Hoth, Yoda’s new entrance, the wonderfully color-corrected deleted scenes, the new sequences with Boba Fett, the revised Tatooine rescue, Boba’s explosive new death, and the ending… oh, the ending… I’ve already given a couple things away in this review, but I don’t want to give this away… all I can say is that it was splendid – the rotoscoping was perfect, and it was just a brilliant idea in general… WOW. Wow, wow, wow. There were plenty of other things that amazed me, so many that I can’t even remember them all to list them. There were only a couple issues I saw: one, sometimes the new footage looked too obviously animated, but that’s ok. And sometimes the new lines did not go along right with the lip movements. There were only 4-5 times where this really stood out. As long as you were doing that much rotoscoping, maybe you could have just modified their lip movements a little bit. But it’s ok. Overall, this is still a stunning edit, two hours of sheer amazing. Thank you, TMBTM, for this fabulous fanedit experience. It was crazy insane awesome.

Presentation – 10/10 – cool cover art. The menu was nice and creative. The before and after montage was really interesting. Good job overall here.

Overall – 10/10