The age of DVD and Blu-ray have given us access to beautiful looking renditions of all kinds of movies (sure, go ahead and buy a Blu-ray of School for Scoundrels, you masochist), but at the same time it’s encouraged directors and studios to release, repackage and resell an endless stream of alternate versions – director’s cuts, ‘lost’ cuts, restored editions, you name it. Some recuts are marked improvements. Some are thoughtless butchery, either by studios or directors who should just leave well enough alone. And some have mixed results.
Here are my top best, worst, and hmmm… recut movies of all time.
Best
Blade Runner: The Final Cut. I’ll admit it: I’m a fan. I owned a ratty VHS copy of the original theatrical release, I went to midnight showings of the spooky, slow-paced directors cut, and I own the DVD boxed set of five versions of the film, complete with booklet and die-cut origami unicorn figure. But there’s no question that Ridley Scott’s fiddling with Blade Runner has paid off over the course of the last 28 years. Blade Runner: The Final Cut removes the hammy voice over and happy ending (both of which were originally removed for the 1992 ‘director’s cut’ version), trims a number of scenes, adds some atmospheric street footage and cleans up a number of clunky special effects from the original. If you’re a purist, you may prefer the ‘workprint’ version, which does not have the infamous sequence featuring Deckard’s unicorn dream.
Aliens. The original version of Aliens is one of the most tense and creepy films I’ve ever seen. I spent an entire summer in 1987 renting this film out and being scared shitless every time. The extended version slows things down a bit, inserts more quiet moments and adds in scenes with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) discovering that her daughter has died of old age during Ripley’s long space coma. Sad. Then monsters! Then quiet for a few moments, and then OMG monsters! and so on.
Touch of Evil. When Orson Welles saw the theatrical cut of his film, he sent a 58-page memo to the studio detailing the changes that he felt would turn the film from a truncated mess into an entertaining movie. Sound designer Walter Murch re-edited the film in the 1990s according to Welles’ wishes. I can’t say it’s a perfect film – parts of the second act are as baggy and drooping as Welles’ trousers in the film – but the redesign of the opening 3 1/2-minute tracking shot, in which the brassy Mancini score is replaced by ambient street sounds, turns an impressive shot into a thing of sheer beauty. Oddly enough, the film was recropped from a 4×3 ratio to a more theatrical looking 1.85:1. I suppose this was done to make the recut look more theatrical, and as far as I can tell it really doesn’t hurt the film.
The New World. Terence Malick actually made three different cuts of this film. My favourite (although I haven’t seen the first 150-minute cut) is the Extended Version, a very long, very beautiful tale of Pocahontas and her relationships with John Smith and John Rolfe. But it’s also about colonialism, humanity’s relationship to nature, competing visions of civilization, waving grasses on the water and anything else you care to imagine.
Worst
Brazil. In some ways, making a film is a bit like building a house. The footage is like lumber, and there are any number of ways you can sand and cut and nail and treat planks of wood. If you want a concrete example to buttress my wooden simile, watch the various versions of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. A few similar versions exist, but without a doubt the worst of all is the version cut for television, which hacks into Gilliam’s film so badly that it’s barely recognizable. Known as the “Love Conquers All” version, discarded footage is reinserted to create an embarrassingly silly happy ending (some of that footage, strangely enough, shows up in the happy ending of Blade Runner and the opening credits of The Shining).
Lord of the Rings. Blah blah blah. If there’s no Tom Bombadil or the Scouring of the Shire, there’s no adequate movie version of LoTR. In the screen time allotted to Viggo Mortensen singing and hobbits bouncing on the bed, Jackson could have inserted – something. YouTube footage of monkeys whacking off. That fat marmot eating a cracker. Anything but hobbits bouncing on a bed, then more hobbits flooding in to bounce on beds. Gah. The end.
Star Wars: A New Hope: The Super-Duper Lucasy Cut. Where to start? The charm of the original Star Wars, the movie that I saw in theatres at the age of six, lay in how rough-hewn and lived-in the world of the film looked. Tatooine looked like a lousy place to live. Mos Eisley was a piece-of-shit port town, a wretched hive of scum (and villainy). Dumping a bunch of screen-filling CGI ruined the atmosphere. The insertion of the scene between Han Solo and Jabba the Hutt is such a bad choice that I can only conclude that Lucas regards his films as toys, his to play with and break at will. Anyway, it’s all coming out on Blu-ray soon enough – and yeah, Greedo still shoots first. Bo-ring.
E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. Re-edited and sanitized for today’s youth, the rerelease of E.T. only proves that our culture is moving backwards. A casual reference to terrorists is removed lest it unwittingly offend, and policemen have guns CGI’d out of their hands – because guns are scary? Apparently Spielberg didn’t like the sight of police brandishing guns as they chased after children. Recall that the children are running away with an alien that looks like an adorable scrotum. You’d think the guns make sense within an escaped scrotum-beyond-the-stars context.
Donnie Darko. Often, the value of a work of art rests in its refusal to give you everything you want. Answers are held in reserve, which grants audiences the unspeakable pleasure of attempting to work it out for themselves. Art is softcore, essentially. It looks like Richard Kelly couldn’t hold back, going the full monte with a director’s cut of his debut film. The new version of Donnie Darko takes time out to resolve the basic weirdness of his film and offer a lame religious explanation. As far as I could tell from the director’s cut, God loves His children. He also works in not just mysterious but ludicrously overdetermined but half-baked ways.
Hmmmm…
Apocalpyse Now Redux. Did you ever wonder what the characters in Apocalypse Now did when they weren’t sailing upriver and getting attacked with spears? Me neither, but Francis Ford Coppola believed that someone out there was curious. Apocalypse Now Redux includes a whopping 49 extra minutes of material. Some of the scenes feel like padding – for example, a sequence at an Indonesian plantation that could have stayed in the edit suite – but much of it deepens the film and adds some depth to the secondary characters. This one’s for the fans.
Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut. Any comic book geek knows the story of Richard Donner and his trials at the hands of Darkseid his producers. Donner wanted to make a dark and gritty version of Superman II, the studio wanted something lighter and campy. In the middle of production, Richard Lester came on board, reshot much of Donner’s material, and the negligible but entertaining Superman II was born. Since then, a restored cut of Donner’s version has appeared, but it’s not quite a masterpiece. Some of the footage contains perfunctory special effects, and while it’s certainly a better version of Superman II than the theatrical release, I’m not running out of the house in my underwear to buy a copy. Side note: I’m writing this post in my underwear.
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