Review Detail

This edit does a few exciting things to improve the film's look, feel, and pacing. A title crawl and traditional Star Wars-y wipe transitions are applied, and scenes are subtly re-arranged to reduce the lame nostalgia crap and bad Disney humour. Solo is just his name now, without any explanation. Darth Maul is nowhere to be seen, and much of L3's dialogue and the bathos' back-and-forth joking is left on the cutting room floor. Colour correction and lighting are improved throughout the entire thing, allowing you actually to SEE inside the Falcon cockpit and Proxima's layer.

The one edit I find slightly iffy is the wipe into Mimban with the added Star Destroyers. Pacing-wise, it's great, and getting rid of the explanation behind the name "Solo" is amazing! But the added shot of the SDs sticks out like a bit of a sore thumb visually, as it was clearly not created by Lucasfilm. It's a minor gripe, and I admire the thought behind it overall.

Solo will always have a cloud of "what if Lord and Miller got to finish it" over it, and an edit can only do so much. There's still a lot of forgettable characters and a HIGHLY coincidental plot. But a few tasteful cuts and changes do a LOT to make this cobbled-together movie feel cohesive. The result is a primarily one-off heist movie that happens to feature Han Solo, a sleek episode of Firefly in a galaxy far, far away, and a much better way to watch this flick. And the Kessel Run is still one of the most incredible sequences in the entire series!

I'm looking forward to checking out DigiMod's R1 edit next!