Brevity may be the soul of wit, but can brevity find the soul in -- well, you know where the rhyme was going.

Topher Grace has inexplicably edited the Star Wars prequels into a single 85-minute movie. This whittled down version of the prequel trilogy uses footage from all three films (almost seven hours of material), a little footage from the original trilogy, and even includes an original text crawl for the condensed story. What were the results?

According to /Film, not too shabby. Here is a brief summation from Peter Sciretta:

What's better is that the character motivations are even more clear and identifiable, a real character arc not bogged down by podraces, galactic senates, Jar Jar Binks, politics, or most of the needless parts of the Star Wars prequels. It not only clarifies the story, but makes the film a lot more action-packed.

Titled Star Wars: Episode III.5: The Editor Strikes Back, the film was screened privately in Hollywood for select guests. So how does the movie start? In media res: the Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, Darth Maul duel that ended The Phantom Menace. ("In media res" is of course Latin for "balls deep.")

Read the full rundown over at /Film to find out what was kept in and what was left out. It even mentions another potential Topher Grace film remix/recut: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. While this prequel distillation is interesting, I agree with Sciretta that Close Encounters doesn't need anything removed or replaced or rearranged -- that movie is pretty much perfect.

[Via /Film]