> Beyond Star Wars, an illicit cottage industry has sprung up to patch the holes in any given film’s digital representation.
I've thought about making an Oppenheimer except all scenes are in chronological order and the cringe ones are gone Edition
I've thought about making an Oppenheimer except all scenes are in chronological order and the cringe ones are gone Edition
The icing on the cake was how popular this edition was.
When I heard, later, that the film was going to be a three parter instead, I thought "Uh oh. There's plenty of material for two films, but three? Filler City, here we come."
My wife and I saw the movies in the cinema, and while we enjoyed them overall, I found that I was right about the filler. I was particularly annoyed by the barrels-down-the-river scene, where the film turned what should have been a moment of quiet drama into a sort of rails shooter on the screen. That scene threw me out of my immersion; the whole time, I was thinking "The only reason for this scene to exist is to be made into a video-game level." As a video game level, it would kind of work: you're in the barrels floating downstream, and you have to shoot enough orcs with the bow you somehow have (or flatten them with your barrel that has been inexplicably launched out of the water) to stop them from killing your friends. (Or perhaps the video game level would make more sense if you play as the elf on the shore, killing the orc archers before they can shoot the fish^H^H^H^H dwarves in a barrel).
Regardless of how that scene would work as a video game, the problem with it is that while watching it, I was laughing at how ridiculous it was, instead of on the edge of my seat with excitement. That is NOT what the audience should be experiencing, and it means that someone — director, producer, screenwriter, editor, who knows — made some very poor choices in putting that scene on-screen.
So yes, I'm not at all surprised that a fan edit of The Hobbit which removed all the filler would be wildly popular. In my case, I would rather buy a 4.5 hour version of the film than the officially-released version. If only that version was for sale legally.
P.S. Not all the filler material in the Hobbit film trilogy was bad. Some of the scenes that weren't technically in the original book, such as Gandalf and Galadriel discussing the threat of The Necromancer, were a positive addition and helped link the Hobbit film to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If Jackson had stopped there it would have been fine. I have never watched the fan-made "Tolkien Edit" recut version of the Hobbit film(s) so I don't know if that scene was included or not — but in my opinion, that one would fit into a "Tolkien Edit" even if it wasn't technically part of the original book.
I can recommend the old BBC series as it's well produced and prioritises accuracy over dramatisation as far as I can tell. It's obviously a bit slower than a movie but well worth a watch if you're interested in the topic.
I watched it a few months before watching the Oppenheimer film and it did spoil the film a bit for me. I've got mixed feelings about Nolan films - I really like a lot of his work, but find that it can be a bit superficial at times. e.g. I enjoyed Interstellar but found the ending unsatisfying and a bit hand wavy. However, when I watched it, I wasn't aware of the all the Jesus links in the story, so I was approaching it as a hard scifi film.
The ending of Interstellar almost ruined it for me. Even ignoring physics, it's a lazy plot device. I liked the rest of it so much that it was forgivable, but that involved mentally black-holing the end, like I forgot about it until rewatching recently.
But his weird sound mixing philosophy (experience over clear dialog / dialog as sound effects) makes me nuts. So fix those too, please.
The movie is bad cause nobody can tell what is going on, or they can but it's a chore without reward. "3 weeks earlier" kind of crap every 30 seconds in the movie. Even the big plot twist is, "this scene with Einstein that you thought happened early in the timeline actually happened at the end, wow." But maybe it can be fixed.
I personally liked Oppenheimer fine as it was (except the crappy explosion), but I can see why others might not.
I also enjoyed that old Paul Newman, John Cusack, etc one that focused less on Oppenheimer. Fat Man and Little Boy.
Interstellar's plot is about messing with universe time, but the movie isn't jumping around points in story time. There's just the astronaut and Earth storylines with a little crossover, and each mostly moves forwards only. I liked that part a lot actually.
Imagine the first third of The Matrix was cut and you just start with Morpheus explaining it all to Neo. That's Inception. And on top of that, it's not even a particular complicated idea: it's just Russian doll dreams.
This honestly reads like you don't watch a lot of movies, which is fine! The audio was really bad, which makes it nearly impossible to follow without subtitles. But with subtitles, this film is very middle of the road in terms of timeline ambiguity. I also don't think an ambiguous timeline is bad, if it recontextualizes a scene.
I mean in that Einstein scene, they are cutting footage of RDJ telling Oppenheimer he's a patriot who ran the Manhattan project with footage of him as a bumbling student people made fun of. That was definitely not a "big plot twist," they are explicitly saying it was after the war, even if it was momentarily confusing because so much is going on. I thought it was a pretty rewarding film to pay attention to.
The twist I'm referring to is Lewis Strauss overhearing the conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein at the beginning, which at the end they clarify actually happened later in the timeline.