- Time
- (Edited)
- Post link
SALT is a 2010 film directed by Phillip Noyce. It’s a pretty standard spy movie, except for 1 thing: there’s 3 cuts: The theatrical cut, the extended cut and the director’s cut. I’ll go over the differences quickly.
Theatrical: Pretty light on the violence, boyfriend is killed by being shot, Orlov is killed on the boat, the president stays alive and Salt escapes from a helicopter to set-up a sequel.
Director’s: Heavier on the violence, boyfirend is killed by drowning, Orlov is killed on the boat, the president is killed, and Salt escapes from a helicopter to set-up a sequel, while a voice-over implies the new-president is a Russian sleeper agent. There’s also a few light scene extensions and more flashbacks.
Extended: Same as Director’s except Orlov does not die on the boat, instead, Salt escapes from a hospital rather than a helicopter, goes to where she was trained as a child, kills Orlov there and blows up the building, meaning their’s no sequel set-up.
From my reaserch, the extended cut was the original before they did reshoots to set-up a sequel. But it’s 10 years and it looks like that isn’t happening, so I want to avoid the sequel tease.
My version (The Hybrid Closure Cut), starts of with theatrical and stays with it until Salt kills Orlov. This is because I didn’t think much of the scene extensions and new flashbacks (with the exception of Salt saying she needed a pee, as it explains how she gets out of the intergation room).
When Salt kills Orlov, we switch to director’s cut because of the extra violence (even if it meant having to replace a shot of the boyfriend being drowned with the one of him dead on the floor for pacing reasons) and stay with it until we get to the point of Ted pointing the gun at the president.
At this point, we switch back to theatrical beccause it means the president only gets knocked out (and make the sequel set-up less likey, because the president could prove that Ted was a bad guy and clear Salt’s name). That and I couldn’t be bothered to switch between the different cuts to keep the president alive and include the extra violence (which was about an extra second so it wasn’t worth it.
Once the theatrical cut ends, we switch to the Extended ending before the theatrical credits roll with a simple fade and we include the establishing shot of the school and the children being trained in it, before cutting to the school exploding (since I couldn’t include the stuff with Orlov because he was killed on the boat because it would be easier for Salt to get her name cleared and avoid a sequel set-up) and credits.
It also brings the runtime to 1 hour, 40 minutes and 47 seconds, 47 seconds longer than theatrical, 17 seconds shorter than extended and 4 minutes shorter than director’s cut.
That and if I ever need a sequence of Angelina Jolie killing while dressed as a nun, and escaping from a hospital/interragtion, that will be useful.