Review Detail

Maybe I was more impressed than I should’ve been when I first watched this last month. Maybe I should’ve waited longer before revisiting it, after finishing up with the book just earlier today. Either way, the initial watch was ultimately better than this one for me. Zemeckis has such a wit to his editing (e.g. using match cuts both in a literal and thematic sense) that anything not in-line with it felt kind of jarring. That doesn’t mean I noticed every cut made in this fanedit, certainly not, but enough to never keep me fully immersed. Furthermore, while I do agree that the tone of some stuff removed in this edit was far too sappy, cliche, and otherwise just downright silly, and cutting it out was definitely a wise decision, it strangely feels like doing so has achieved quite the opposite of the intended effect. Without those hyper-filmic, borderline parodic moments for the rest of the film to contrast against, it all ends up feeling less grounded as a whole. The highest Peaks of Ridiculousness are gone, sure but a lot of the movie wasn’t exactly residing in Earnest Valley to begin with. To me this edit actually felt a lot less tangible. Even moreso because of the nearly elusive pace introduced. Sixteen minutes were cut, which sounded reasonable to me beforehand, but in hindsight I think the original was a lot more careful than I realized. All the same story beats are here, just without the same impact. However, I seem to be the exception on all this, and both in terms of the narrative and technical aspects, this edit certainly still “works”.