Review Detail

I'd been looking forward to this one after being impressed with Agent9's editing skills on Prometheus and his overall sense of presentation and professionalism with his Prometheus Special Edition.c

I didn't think he could better himself after that edit... but he has surpassed himself in my opinion.

I read some of the comments in his "work in progress" forum thread but I resisted commenting until I'd seen the finished product. What I think is worth baring in mind are twofold:

1) what did he attempt to do?

2) did he achieve it?

Whether or not I think this film is helped by removing Hans Zimmer's wonderful score is irrelevant. That was Agent9's intent and I think he succeeded in a way that I haven't seen any other faneditor come close to, including my own meagre efforts at replacing an original score.

Secondly, his aim was to remove the dreary colour timing from the original and make it more vibrant and he was mostly successful as much as anyone without access to the original materials could be. Sometimes a scene or two looks a little too magenta but that is very occasional and I'm prepared to accept that because of all the wonderful work he did in making this look like a Superman film.

Both the colour timing and music replacement gave me goosebumps when I watched it for the first time. I actually believe the film looks better with a more natural palette than that horrible sickly green, over processed look that Zach Snyder released it in. It'll be interesting to see if Snyder dials it back a bit for BvS.

I can't imagine how much work went into doing all of that and if he'd just done that and not edited the movie I would still be applauding his efforts.

But here is where I believe the hidden star of this particular show is... the editing.

The re-structuring of the original story has been done brilliantly! I read a lot of criticism about how in the released version Lois was lazily dropped into the story whenever they needed her to stumble across something and I've agreed with that criticism. Also some of the other things, like the treatment of Pa Kent has also made me side with the internet critics. Agent 9, much like he did with the terrible character motivations in Prometheus and with that contentious rolling derelict, has made Lois make more sense in the story to me. After Krypton explodes, she becomes the dramatic thrust of the story, searching for the enigmatic saviour she's heard stories of. The re-structuring involved here lets us follow Lois's discoveries and that's how we meet Supes. The added bonus of this is that we lose a lot of superflous stuff that the rambling original flashback structure didn't need and inflated the run time to make the final act harder to sit through.

All the stuff cut, I don't miss. All the re-ordering of scenes are inspired. And all in all this is a triumph of editing! The best I've seen after all these years of downloading superb fan works from this community.

The only minor quibble I have is that it's not clear to me why Krypton exploded when it did or how many years have passed when we pick up the story but that's pretty pedantic of me as we all know this story well.

From top to bottom with it's adept colour re-imagining, it's maestro like sound editing and the creating of new titles and effects and editing makes this for me one of the greatest fan edits I've had the pleasure to watch.

Highly recommended.