Anyone else think this site and fanedit.org make people scrutinize movies too much and suck the fun out of escapist diversion?
P.S. I love it here, but seriously, that aspect of the culture, it just…
As long as people go beyond simple ‘I don’t like X’ and dig deeper to find the real issues with movies, then I think these sites are important. There are a lot of projects that aren’t too interesting from this standpoint, since they seek merely to remove elements from films deemed ‘childish’, ‘slapstick’, ‘boring’, etc. I find these edits less interesting because I often mentally edit these things out of films anyway, and going to the trouble of actually removing them doesn’t significantly alter the experience.
But edits that seek to craft whole new narratives, like some of the more ambitious Phantom Menace edits, can be viewed as different films entirely. Similarly, something like TFA Restructured can be viewed like an experiment to see how much of a difference one (major) change can have on an entire film. And of course edits which make substantial changes to the effects (Adywan) make the films quite different indeed.