Mars Attacks! From Space!

It's been a while since I have seen the original Mars Attacks! and Reave's edit was a welcome excuse to revisit Burton's crazy movie. This edit is extremely well edited. The pacing is much better than the original which got dragged down by a huge ensemble of characters.

This edit was a joy - while watching i tried remembering all the scenes I found funny or scenes that stuck with me. And every time I thought Reave would cut this he found a way to incorporate it.

For example the death of Jack Black's character with the american flag. Even though he has a much bigger backstory he more or less is a one-note character and works fine as he is now - an incompetent fool who has joined the army.
Many characters who get introduced earlier in the original are still there but get introduced much quicker via throwaway lines and because almost every character is a caricature it is not important to spend too much time with them as they are mostly there to deliver punchlines

I found almost no flaws in the editing other than I expected the Byron Williams character and the DeVito character to reappear because they were introduced when the martians arrived.

other than that I loved this edit a lot and will probably rewatch it the next time i am in the mood for "ack ack ack ack ack ack"

Mars Attacks! was a movie I remember enjoying, and have been meaning to revisit - my DVD was getting dusty on the shelf, and Reave's fanedit was a good excuse to watch the film again.

As far as narrative and editing choices, Reave hit the mark pretty spot on. I get the idea of cutting side characters back to cameos, and that worked brilliantly. I would have probably excised more of the Art and Barbara Land scenes, though. Their screen time seemed to be in this awkward middle land - a bit too much for a cameo, but not enough to weave properly into the story. The only other minor complaint I had was that it seemed like the film moved too fast from the discovery of the aliens' weakness. One moment Richie and Grandma make the discovery, and the next, the military has integrated the speaker systems into their tanks. Something felt missing. Maybe it was just the loss of side plots that made it move fast. Those are pretty minor complaints though, and I don't want to focus on the negative. This was a REALLY fun watch, and Reave did a great job focusing the story

On the tech side, the cuts were invisible, the video was beautiful, and the sound was great. Again, I have two small complaints - this time about the audio. First, the sound was slightly off sync. It was a matter of milliseconds, so its was not really that distracting, but it was a bit off. I think at least one other person commented on this, so it wasn't just my system. Second, the scene where the spaceship crashes could use a bit of foley work. The music alone didn't carry it quite enough.

Anyway, awesome edit. highly recommended. Thanks Reave!

Decent edit. Biggest problem was that a lot of characters were left very underdeveloped; a lot of focus was on the White House characters, but we didn't really get to know Annette Bening or Lukas Haas that well. I think it all went by a bit too fast. But that said, it was still very entertaining and a lot of the best lines were kept in (while a lot of the bad ones were removed).

Also, was I the only one who couldn't hear everything all that clearly? There was a slight delay between the audio and video, and sometimes the music was so loud it made some of the dialogue inaudible.