IFDB Review: Clone Wars - Episode I: Army Of The Republic, The:

A lot has been said about this, pretty much all of it good and with good reason. This is a very well-executed edit. This pretty much works as a film. There's a touch of jumpiness which is inherent in almost all TV-to-movie edits but Smudger has done a great job plotting a narrative throughline. The visual editing was topnotch, nothing stood out or threw me off. The musical additions (only watched the show once so I don't think I picked them all up) that I noticed were really great. All of the battles sounded and felt great. I read after that there was a lot of sound replacement. You did a great job because nothing sounded thin or was noticeable. My only real criticism (and it's minor) is a couple audio transitions. The one after Heavy, Fives and Echo meet Captain Rex and Cody stood out, and at 1:48:45 there's an odd transition where the music transitions with the video and swells up but then cuts off kind of abruptly. Just as a preference, I would have preferred cutting the joke about how "Heavy really did hate that place" - it took away from the emotion of the moment in my opinion. Overall, the editing on both fronts is fantastic. This is absolutely my preferred way to revisit the series. Smudger has taken pretty much all of the annoying stuff out (both plots and jokes) which gives it a more serious tone. Still light and Star Wars-y but much better. If you hated the show, you probably won't like this. But if you enjoyed the show but were annoyed by some elements of it then this will take it from good to great. Nice work.

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