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Post #351481

Author
ChainsawAsh
Parent topic
Info: The Star Wars Fan Edit Great Debate Thread.
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/351481/action/topic#351481
Date created
31-Mar-2009, 1:32 AM

It depends.  If I feel a film I like has flaws, and there's a fan edit that fixes those flaws, that's great.  (AI: Super-Toys Last All Summer Long is a great example).  If I hate a film, I'll be less inclined to see a fan edit of it unless it radically changes things (Matrix: Dezionied), or if it's gotten a lot of good feedback (like T3: The Coming Storm).

The thing is, I've found very few fan edits that I consider to be good enough to watch as more than just a curiosity (the two mentioned above and Ady's ANH:R are really the only ones).  Most fan edits I see have too many technical hangups - basically, if you want it to be better than the original movie, it better not have mistakes a real movie wouldn't have (hard audio cuts and badly chopped-up dialogue are the major killers here) - such flaws have often prevented me from really liking an edit I enjoyed on a conceptual level.  Dezionized has a couple such flaws, but the overall result is so good I didn't mind it as much (for that, it's mainly truncated scenes that are still necessary from a plot standpoint).

The other thing is that there are a lot of films I see that I feel could be fixed with some good fan editing, but I have yet to see such edits materialize (X-Men: The Last Stand, Spider-Man 3, The Incredible Hulk [with Ed Norton], Red Dragon ... ), or if there are such edits I don't feel that they do enough.

Basically, I like the concept, but the goal has to be a product that feels like it wasn't edited at all, like this could be the version that was seen in theaters.  Most edits have flaws in them that many people forgive because "it's a fan edit," but to me these flaws just scream "HEY! YOU'RE WATCHING A FAN EDIT, NOT THE REAL THING!"  This is why I haven't released any fan edits - none of the ones I've finished are polished enough in my opinion to release.

In other words, I don't care how much you take out or put in or rearrange or reshoot or whatever, as long as it doesn't feel like somone with too much time on their hands cut up a real movie and rearranged it - it has to feel like a real movie.