Obi-Wan Kenobi's six episodes have been edited down to a 2.5-hour movie, and it improves on the show's original presentation in a number of key ways. Considering the show was originally supposed to be a movie, the re-edit could be a glimpse at what could have been.
Star Wars is no stranger to fan edits, especially thanks to the divisive reception of the prequel films, but even the Disney era has its share of highly publicized re-edits such as versions of Star Wars: The Last Jedi that remove all the jokes or reduce the role of female characters. Star Wars has always had a particularly active fan edit community, but Obi-Wan Kenobi's 2.5-hour edit is the first edit for a Star Wars show to get so much attention.
It's hard for fan edits to really compete with the production value of official movies and shows, but they can often be an interesting experiment to show an alternate version of a Star Wars movie or show. Of course, a fan edit can never really "fix" a movie or show since the original edits or studio-sanctioned alternate edits will always be the official versions, but the fan edit sandbox does give an interesting outlet for alternate takes and creative re-interpretations of officially released materials.
Less Distracting Filler Gives Obi-Wan's Story Gets a Bigger Focus
Obviously, the Obi-Wan Kenobi series is about Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), so he has a full character arc in the show as well, but thanks to a number of extra characters and side plots, Obi-Wan himself gets a little lost in the shuffle, especially in the earlier episodes. The first episode of the show reveals Obi-Wan's life in exile, but it also sets up the inquisitors, Reva's (Moses Ingram) quest to find Obi-Wan, Own Lars' (Joel Edgerton) confrontation with Reva, Leia's (Vivien Lyra Blair) rebellious attitude about formal events, and more. The presentation in the show is so busy that it doesn't fully communicate Obi-Wan's state since he's just one of a number of major plot threads being set up.
The 2.5-hour movie edit fixes this by removing a lot of the extraneous plot threads and heavy exposition, reframing the opening scenes solely on Obi-Wan. The story doesn't lose much from the cut scenes, since most of them were exposition-heavy moments to set up character or story elements explained later anyway, but the extra breathing room allows the scenes of Obi-Wan's exile to truly linger and show the dull, lonely life he lives and his guilt and torment over his failure with Anakin without constantly cutting back and forth with other fast-developing plot threads.
Reva's Arc Is Smaller But More Impactful
The edit trims a lot of unnecessary scenes, but keeps the same general plot, with Reva being the biggest exception. While Reva survives to the end of the show, the 2.5 hour edit leaves her presumed dead after she's stabbed by Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen). The edit removes the early dialogue about her obsession with Obi-Wan and removes the Order 66 flashbacks telegraphing her backstory twist.
Despite less screen time and exposition, her arc as a villain is more mysterious, which actually makes her feel more dangerous, and therefore makes the reveal of her tragic backstory more impactful. The changes made in the 2.5-hour movie edit don't necessarily mean she was killed off - after all, the show presented the Grand Inquisitor's (Rupert Friend) fake-out death the same way - but it does leave her fate up in the air since her entire scene on Tatooine is removed in the finale. While that may have been important for her arc in the show, positioning it after Vader and Obi-Wan's climactic duel felt tacked on, particularly since her arc was ancillary to Obi-Wan's, and was likely included to set up her own future story, not because it was important for Obi-Wan or Vader's journey.
The New Music Improves Thematic Skywalker Saga Ties
Obi-Wan Kenobi's music was well written by composer Natalie Holt, but the show's proximity to the original six Skywalker Saga movies, scored by John Williams, and the continuation of Anakin and Obi-Wan's prequel trilogy conflict without the same Williams motifs introduced in previous stories was a major missed opportunity.
While some of the replacement music is a little on-the-nose since it's mostly comprised of existing Star Wars songs, and the sound mixing isn't as smooth since it has to be mixed over an already edited and scored scene, the added thematic punch and operatic flair from the replacement music adds drama and makes the story feel more like a proper continuation of the prequels and a smart lead-in to the original trilogy. It's hard to say the edit is scored better than the original show, but it does reveal where the show's approach to music was lacking.
Scenes Are Better Paced and Edits Improve Story Flow
By the nature of Obi-Wan Kenobi's creation as a six-episode series instead of a movie as originally planned, simply slapping the episodes together back-to-back isn't going to create a well-paced movie, but the story as a whole really benefits from the more condensed format. A big part of this improvement comes from the removal of filler scenes to speed up the pacing of some moments, or allowing others to breathe, making an overall better flow from start to finish.
Many individual scenes are also greatly benefitted. Stuff like Leia's chase through the woods on Alderaan, which was thoroughly mocked for its awkward editing and odd blocking, or Reva's parkour run across the rooftops of Daiyu, which contained multiple confusingly pointless flips and spins and a number of major continuity errors in the edit, were almost completely removed. Despite the loss of action, the increased pace of the story actually made the stakes feel higher as events were unfolding more quickly on screen.
Numerous odd continuity errors or awkward editing moments are also fixed or removed, such as on Mapuzo when the stormtroopers riding with Obi-Wan and Leia say Obi-Wan has a long time to tell them about his (fake) backstory only to immediately announce they'd reached their stop once Obi-Wan's story finishes. Minor editing issues like this are prevalent throughout the show, and simply removing them is usually an immediate no-consequence fix.
Darth Vader is a Better Main Villain
One of the most improved scenes is Obi-Wan and Vader's first duel on Mapuzo. The original duel suffered from clunky editing, compounded by the way Vader seemingly teleported around a mostly open battlefield where there wasn't a clear way to hide. The new edit shortens the encounter, removing awkward edits and the teleporting Vader, while retaining dialogue such that now the battle is more logistically sensible and Vader's defeat of Obi-Wan is much swifter, making him a much more imposing threat.
It's not just the first duel that makes Vader scarier, but reducing the focus on the Inquisitors also balances Vader's relative screen time and returns him to the sort of unstoppable threat he is in Star Wars Rebels or Rogue One: A Star Wars Story instead of feeling like backup for the Inquisitors. Since the core story is about Obi-Wan and Anakin/Vader, repositioning their second duel as the only climax gives more prominence to their final exchange, elevating both characters without the protracted addendum of Reva's attack on the Lars homestead
Overall, it may not be possible to retain the same production value as the show since the edit only has the published show materials to work with, but even that's a limiting factor given awkward VFX, obvious LED wall shots, and other technical issues such as the irreversible error in the blue lighting of Obi-Wan's lightsaber, there are some things that are simply impossible to fix with a fan edit.
While the fan edit can't be as good as a proper movie version of this story could have been, it does work as a phenomenal proof of concept to show how an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie could have been vastly superior to the show. Lucasfilm is known for hiring artists who provided fixes to technical issues with other shows like the YouTuber who improved the look of the CGI Luke Skywalker from The Mandalorian, so hopefully, the creative energy behind this edit can contribute to a similarly productive result instead of simply being leveraged against Star Wars as a form of negative criticism, particularly as the franchise is struggling to return to the big screen.