The six episodes with Obi-Wan Kenobi have been reduced to a 2.5-hour film, and this improves the show’s initial presentation on a number of key points. Given that the show was originally supposed to be a movie, the re-montage may be a glimpse of what could have been.
“Star Wars” is no stranger to fan edits, especially due to disagreements over prequel films, but even in the Disney era there is its share of widely publicized reissues, such as the Star Wars versions.: The Last Jedi”, in which all jokes are removed or the role of female characters is reduced. Star Wars has always had a particularly active fan community of editors, but Obi-Wan Kenobi’s 2.5-hour editorial is the first edition of the Star Wars series to attract so much attention.
It is difficult for fan installations to compete with the production value of official films and TV series, but they can often be an interesting experiment to show an alternative version of a Star Wars movie or TV series. Of course, fan editing will never be able to truly “fix” a movie or a show, since the original edits or studio-sanctioned alternative edits will always be official versions, but the “sandbox” of fan editing really gives an interesting outlet for alternative takes and creative improvements. interpretations of officially released materials.
A less distracting filler gives Obi-Wan’s story more focus
Obviously, the Obi-Wan Kenobi series is dedicated to Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), so he also has a full character arch in the series, but thanks to a number of additional characters and side plots, Obi-Wan himself gets little lost in the shuffle, especially in earlier episodes. The first episode of the show reveals the life of Obi-Wan in exile, but also tells about the inquisitors, the search for Reva (Moses Ingram) in search of Obi-Wan, the confrontation of his own Lars (Joel Edgerton) with Reva, Leia (Vivien Lyra Blair)) rebellious attitude to formal events and much more. The presentation in the show is so loaded that it does not fully convey the state of Obi-Wan, since he is just one of the many main plot threads that are being created.
The 2.5-hour editing of the film corrects this by removing a lot of extraneous plot threads and heavy exposure, rethinking the initial scenes exclusively on Obi-Wan. The story doesn’t lose much in cutscenes, since most of them were expositionally heavy moments for creating characters or elements of the story, which in any case are explained later, but the additional respite allows the scenes of Obi-Wan’s exile to really linger and show. the boring, lonely life he leads, and his guilt and anguish over his failure with Anakin, without the constant cutting back and forth with other fast-paced plot threads.
The Riva Arch is smaller, but more efficient
A lot of unnecessary scenes have been removed in the montage, but the same general plot has been preserved, with the exception of Reva. While Reva survives to the end of the show, a 2.5-hour montage leaves her presumed dead after Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen) stabbed her. The edit removes early dialogue about her obsession with Obi-Wan and removes Order 66 memories telegraphing her backstory.
Despite less screen time and exposure, her villain arc is more mysterious, which actually makes her feel more dangerous and therefore makes revealing her tragic backstory more impressive. The changes made to the 2.5-hour editing of the film do not necessarily mean that she was murdered — after all, the series similarly presents the fake death of the Grand Inquisitor (Rupert Friend) — but it leaves her fate unknown. aired, as her entire scene on Tatooine is deleted in the finale. While this may have been important for her arch in the series, positioning her after the decisive duel of Vader and Obi-Wan seemed wrong, especially because her arch was auxiliary to Obi-Wan’s arch and was probably included to create her own future story, not because it It was important for Obi-Wan or Vader’s journey.
New music improves the thematic connections of the Skywalker saga
Obi-Wan Kenobi’s music was well written by composer Natalie Holt, but the show’s proximity to the original six Skywalker Saga films, voiced by John Williams, and the continuation of the Anakin and Obi-Wan prequel trilogy conflict without the same Williams motifs presented in the previous stories were a big missed opportunity.
Despite the fact that some of the replacement music is a bit intrusive, since it mainly consists of existing “Star Wars” songs, and the sound mixing is not so smooth, since it needs to be mixed on top of an already edited and recorded scene, the added thematic pressure and operatic talent of the replacement music add drama and make the story more like a proper continuation prequels and a clever introduction to the original trilogy. It’s hard to say that the edit got a better score than the original show, but it shows what the show’s approach to music lacked.
