Review Detail

This edit takes bold steps in condensing the Netflix tv series into barely fitting a feature length. It does things you may not expect or may consider blasphemous as fans of the show. The hallway fight? Interrupted. Claire? Missing entirely. The Nobu fight? Cut down (punny I know). But all this IS in service of getting the time down, so fanatics, calm down. Do we need extended single camera takes in a shortened version? No, absolutely not. After being initially surprised by some of the decisions I realized quickly they were the right call. I can't say I didn't miss anything, but what I did "miss" I didn't miss, if you get me. So that's what it is, the whole first season boiled down.

What was done really smartly was the actual editing. In the original show there may be a scene from the show where someone's eating food, and there may be a completely disconnected scene of two people talking quietly and in a static room, where the subject of conversation happened to be the person who was eating several scenes ago. In the edit, that conversation becomes voiceover we hear over the scene we see of the person being talked about, and we then associate their behaviors with what's being said. There is a lot of clever stuff like that in the edit, and it makes the work well worth your time, adding context.

There were two moments the audio stood out to me. 1- In the introductory scenes, there is a sudden drop that should have a fade out in Matt's voiceover, I think it's while he's confessing. 2- Much later, when he meets Melvin Potter the music gets a little loud and the shots of him boxing have leftover different music bleeding through.

Overall I would highly recommend this over re-watching the whole show. A first time viewer would probably be on the fence but could absolutely watch this and move on to season two without missing a beat.