Star Wars: The Blackened Mantle

[Noire]

Has anyone every seen this? It's basically just another stab at a prequel rewrite, but I figured I would give it a chance and actually ended up enjoying their take. Admittedly, it takes a little bit of getting use to the way the dialogue is presented and how the backstory is shown at times, but I'd recommend taking the time to watch it all the way through.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

I like how a lot of these fan edits open on the lightsaber duel. That's a cool idea.

 

[Avery Sly Lass]

Just finished watching this, and I think they did a really good job. I appreciated the glossing over of that Medichlorian bullcrap, and how they rewrote a lot of the story. Cutting out unnecessary things like the Kamino segment, and also Dex's Diner. The Order 66/Great Purge scene always hits me right in the feels for some reason, and it didn't lose that effect in the edit. Blending the three movies together was inspired and a bold move as well. Episode II felt a little underrepresented, but it was kind of clumsy in the first place. Putting the flashbacks in places where they were relevant to the Episode III story was a masterful move, really giving those scenes weight; and what they did with Grevious was just magnificent, and made the final showdown with Obi-Wan so much better. Oh and the bits where Anakin and Padme had actual people conversations during the scenes on Naboo in Ep II made their romance seem much more believable, instead of them having talked politics or whatever the fu...dgesicle they had talked about before in those scenes.

It felt compact, succinct and generally more entertaining than any of the movies were on their own, I feel like that was because they had felt like they'd needed padding, you know? Like the whole Kamino scene was there to stretch out the run time. Sure it explained the clones, but we have to ask if anyone really cared. Looking back on the Prequel Trilogy, they seemed to not only be laden with CGI effects, but also exposition. There felt like a lot of explanations of things going on that we didn't need. Things that could have been saved for companion books, the extended universe, etc, etc. One thing that I'm... on the fence about is the cutting of the Jango/Bobba Fett bits of Ep II, sure, it was a little clunky in Ep II but... no... no wait, I don't care, it was totally unnecessary. Bobba Fett had 0 characterization in the OT, besides the fact that he preferred to disintegrate his bounties, anything besides that is EU stuff, and Lucas doesn't give a flying... fudgesicle about that.

All in all, a better movie than any of the PT.

EDIT: Oh yeah, it was lacking a lot of the usual tropes of the franchise that we're used to, like the wipe transitions and some other stuff, but I understand that those were editing limitations. They made good use of fade to black, though. Slipping in audio over the black screen. Good stuff.