Northwest Passage: A Twin Peaks Fanedit

For those like myself who enjoy the absurdist murder mystery of Twin Peaks but who have less patience for the soap operatics that make up the balance of the show, this edit is a godsend. It saves the viewer the chore of watching the entire show, and lays the groundwork for the superior (and not coincidentally, more Lynch-controlled) Fire Walk With Me and The Return. The only criticism I have is, as others have pointed out, the re-framing of the Black Lodge sequences from the end of the series and therefore the truncation of Cooper's ultimate fate, which sets the stage for The Return. So a word to the wise: you may want to partake of the series finale even after watching this edit. Aside from that, a fine achievement, renewing my interest in the hermetic small town with the damn fine coffee.

On top of the morning to you, fellow enjoyers of Fanedits! If you’re reading this review to determine if Northwest Passage is something you may enjoy, here is a disclaimer: I have never seen Twin Peaks.

I just recently got the blu-rays from a buddy who loved the show as an early Christmas gift, and figured this was a perfect opportunity to watch and examine Northwest Passage as someone who knows nothing about Twin Peaks. I plan on watching the original show sometime in the near future, however if I end up really enjoying this edit, I may not actually want to! I generally have a hard time watching “older” movies and shows, so bear that in mind as well as you read my review.

Overall I liked Part 1 more than Part 2. The second half doubled down HARD on the weird factor, and more or less discarded every single side character, which left basically all of their plotlines discarded. Q2’s goal here was to do exactly that, but my enjoyment was sapped a little bit by not having any resolution for the large majority of the characters. There were a couple very minor bits where the audio faded kinda quick, but these were in Part 1 and I watched Part 1 much more critically than Part 2. Part 2 I just sat down to enjoy it, while with Part 1 I was looking for transitions and such, mostly out of my desire to learn from one of the greats though, so I’m not docking any points for them.

I’m very glad I watched, and I highly recommend this edit to everyone! Especially to those who, like me, haven’t seen Twin Peaks, and want a compressed version to get a solid story!

I like the idea to use parts of the final episode of season 2 for the Bob reveal scene at the Roadhouse, but in the end I don't feel like it worked properly. I'll probably do an edit of this fanedit just for myself where I shuffle or add a few things, but the fact that I even plan to watch this again in the first place is already high praise.
Considering the amount of story to be condensed, the pacing was also perfect. The only minor gripe I'd have is that it ended very abruptly after Leland's death. There's a scene of the cast talking about Bob outside the police station after the reveal, which I might have used to ease out the end.
I absolutely love the series but with most fanedits I watch them out of curiosity and then never again. This definately won't be my standard way of watching the show, but maybe if I just want to rush through it. Either way, phenomenal work.

That much about the editorial part, now on to the technical: stunning.
There was a single shot in part 2 that wasn't cropped right at 2:14:34 where you can see the cropped frame move at the beginning of the shot. That is pretty much the only "mistake" in the visual editing and that is a fantastic quota for a 5h project that was entirely cropped from 4:3 to 16:9.
In the audio editing there wasn't any point that stood out to me like that, but there was an overall trend to have the music just a tad louder than the dialog which could be irritating at points but damn this is a technically amazing edit.

I suppose there's not much to add to the mountain of reviews so I'll just say I agree with most positive ones.
9/10

September 20, 2011 @ 10:32 am

REVIEW (contains massive spoilers)

This edit is – for the most part – a perfectly realised murder mystery whodunit edit chronicling the investigation of the murder of Laura Palmer. The problem is that Twin Peaks was never meant to be primarily a murder mystery whodunit chronicling the investigation of the murder of Laura Palmer. Now that this story (which was only a part of Twin Peaks) has a true beginning, a middle, and an end (things the original didn’t have and didn’t intend to have), it actually makes a lot of the problems of Twin Peaks more evident, as the sprawling nature of the serial storytelling used to hide the story flaws in the complexity and wonderful detours and non-essential elements. Is this the fault of the edit? No. But also: yes. I’ll try to explain.

I’ll start with the praise: This edit tries to turn a soap opera into a film, and it succeeds admirably. Scenes are cut to preserve the sense of a focused cinematic story. The Ghostwood/Packards/Sawmill plot (a HUGE part of both seasons) is completely removed – and it doesn’t create one plothole as far as I can see. At some points, sentences are even cut in half, like when Lucy explains what happened last night to Cooper. You have to know the scene intimately to be able to tell that the scene used to be twice as long. This was a particular standout to me. Audrey is also almost completely removed from the film. While removing Audrey freakin’ Horne is obviously a deeply disappointing thing to have to do, she doesn’t really impact Laura’s story in any big way, so it’s necessary for this edit, and I applaud the kill-yer-darlings-cojones of the editor for this move.

While pretty much all the transitions work brilliantly from a technical standpoint, there are a few story transitions that seem a bit wonky, like the Harold sequence and the Jacoby sequence. The Harold sequence is the only sequence that seems truly rushed and barely makes sense as recut. Since Donna tries to steal the diary pretty much immediately, it creates a plothole when she later tells Harry that Harold read to her from the diary. It also makes no sense that Harold trusted a total stranger when the long sequence where he lets Donna into his life is missing. This is one of the parts where the recutting hurts the film.

A couple of times, though, transitions are wonky from a technical viewpoint. I’m thinking mainly of the occasional abrupt crossfading, a few music volume fluctuations (which could have been fixed through painstaking audio editing, although I imagine it would have been extremely hard), and some weird edits. I’m thinking mostly about the scene where the camera pans from Maddy to Hank Jennings, which cuts mid-pan, and the really weird scene where Audrey is about to open the door to the Sheriff’s conference room and Harry is there instead. Now, of course I only know it’s supposed to be Audrey because I’ve seen TP 10 times, but the transition is really weird either way. The weird full moon insert in the middle of the Diary Heist sequence is another example. There are limitations in the source material, sure, but these scenes take you out of the film. Could it be fixed? I don’t know. Probably some, probably not all. Did it annoy in the grand scheme of things? Not really, as they take up a minuscule amount of the 5 hour runtime.

Audio quality is stellar, apart from occasional weirdness mentioned. Video quality is mostly perfect, with the occasional washed-out skin tone in high-light scenes. I haven’t seen the itunes hd version this is based on, so I don’t know if it’s present there, but I would doubt it since I can’t remember it from the gold box dvd. More likely, it’s from the zooming/upsampling due to the reframing. The 16:9 reframing I was REALLY skeptical to, but it worked surprisingly well. The occasional missing head of hair from the top and missing hand at the bottom of the picture only occasionally annoys, like the “meanwhile” in the red room.

Now to the conclusion: Do I recommend this edit? Yes and no.

Yes because it does an extremely good job of restructuring the series into a film, and because it contains a lot of the best scenes of the series while being 5 instead of 25 hours long. No because it was never meant to BE a film, and the impact of the story suffers from the restructuring. An example: from late in the first season Audrey is at One-Eyed Jacks on a personal, risky stakeout. The One-Eyed Jacks sequence with Cooper and Big Ed in episode 7 of the series is a really tense sequence. Not because it’s particularly tense to begin with, but because we know what Cooper doesn’t – namely that Audrey (who Cooper is also looking for) is in the same damned building! The scenes in the edit flow beautifully, but the edit is robbed of this tension. Also, in this edit, it’s necessary to go into the drug angle because Jacques is so necessary to the flow of the story. However, in the series we already know that Ben is the bank behind the drug operations, and Ben is ALSO at One-Eyed Jacks! In this edit, there’s only Ed and Cooper (and Jacques) – not the great confluence of crazy events that made Twin Peaks so unique.

But my main gripe with this story is with the ending. Not only does the excising of Dick Tremayne make a climactic event come out of the blue instead of being explained, but the actual ending is one of the cheapest and worst scenes of the series, in my opinion, and not worthy of being a Twin Peaks ending. On the show, this tremendous disappointment was softened by the fact that the episode contained a cliffhanger that opened up the door to this not being the end of Bob at all. A much better (open) ending was eventually provided, but this had to do with Cooper’s own past, not Laura’s. While the red room sequence as featured in the edit is expertly recut and re-inserted to provide some closure and background, it still feels weirdly out of place with the eventual ending. (Note of praise: cutting Windom Earle entirely from this worked really well, although the Coop doppelgänger is a bit of a head-scratcher without Hawk’s monologue.)

Another problem: after being told for a couple of episodes that this is a possession story, the extremely grisly murder scene of the series blurred the line between Bob and his “host” considerably. Fire Walk with Me went even further in this regard. The (really well done) editing of the murder scene and removal of all scenes up until the end that pointed out the killer, redraws the line between Bob and his host, making it more of an Exorcist-like possession story. This was, to me, never what Twin Peaks was about, and the “happy” ending of this edit ruins the complexity and makes the line clearly defined. This isn’t the edit’s fault per se. All the scenes are in the show. But the show, thankfully and interestingly, contradicted itself on more than one occasion making the story more complex. This was to the show’s credit, imo, and I’m sad to see it more focused and streamlined – usually positive traits, not so in this case.

The murder scenes (in the series, not this version) and FWwM make it unclear when the “host” is Bob and when he’s simply himself. There’s also the scene (cut from this edit) where the killer is driving around carelessly. Is he Bob there? I’m not sure, and that’s the beauty of it. The ending of episode 16, on the other hand, made this line fine and crisp, the killer “innocent”, and it even contradicts Mike’s words that Bob feeds on fear. What was the killer really afraid of in Laura? What did he fear? The answer is unpleasant in the extreme, but the series didn’t really dwell on that question at all. Instead the killer sees the light and is greeted by Laura in the afterlife. Give me a break. Thankfully, the series continued from there, went through some major speedbumps (Little Nicky and Malcolm Marsh – ouch!), but ended gloriously with darkness engulfing even the infallible Special Agent. Intense. Crazy. A blurred line between spirit world and real world. Dream Souls that Wander, like Hawk says. This edit stops where the spirit world gets interesting. It’s not the fault of the edit, the show was that way – and yet it is the edit’s fault, because it stops.

I’m also a bit unsure about how wise it was to cut so many Donna and James scenes. While there’s obviously a lot of filler, A LOT of their scenes are investigative. The Harold sequence could have been longer (or maybe it could have been cut entirely?), and the Dr. Jacoby sequence (with Maddy and wig) would have worked in this edit too because it investigates the same thing Cooper investigates from a different angle (while the half-heart is mostly cut from this edit, it could still have had a place). Also, I love, love, LOVE “Just You (and I)” – generally considered an insane sentiment, I know – and would have loved to see it included, especially since Maddy subsequently seeing Bob doesn’t have the same impact without it.

If you want a fresh Twin Peaks ride, I can recommend this. If you, like me, feel that Audrey and Major Briggs are as important as Laura Palmer, you might want to watch it anyway, but with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you, unlike me, loved the resolution of the Laura Palmer case on the show, then this edit is DEFINITELY for you.

Another good reason to see this is that it makes a GREAT companion piece to Fire Walk with Me. FWwM being all nuance, all mystery, all craziness – the yin to this edit’s yang. Watching FWwM after this would actually fix most of this edit’s inherent flaws. Kinda like: “That was one ending – here’s another, better one”. One that doesn’t contradict the first one, but expands on it. If Fire Walk with Me is watched right after Northwest Passage, I don’t think I would even have a problem with this ending.

It’s a credit to the tremendous quality of this edit that you can go into a rant about how you dislike how story points were handled. A bad edit doesn’t provide that opportunity. Try if this makes sense: I enjoyed every second of this edit, even the seconds I hated.

Scorecard:
Storytelling: 9/10 “objective” score (a few minor quibbles, including the fact that Harold’s story doesn’t really make sense, but the sheer kill-yer-darlings efficiency of what’s cut and what’s necessary and technical difficulty of some of the cuts make it a clear 9 all the same); 6/10 subjective score (I hate the ending)
Audio editing: 9/10 (occasional volume fluctuations)
Video editing: 9/10 (weird skintones in a couple of scenes)
Presentation: n/a (the AVCHD menu didn’t work for me, but that’s probably I played it from hard drive or because I don’t have proper proprietary bluray drivers installed on my computer; I don’t care about menus anyway; the chapters worked, though)
Total: 9/10

Second time watching through the original series for me, quite a different perspective when one has prior knowledge. This is an interesting take on the material, a very accomplished distillation of Laura Palmer's story but not without the occasional issues that other reviewers have mentioned (mainly orphaned references that could confuse new viewers). A few favourite moments of mine are lost, but that is hardly a valid complaint when considering the stated aim of the project.

Something that also occurred to me is that, in tone and focus at least, the edit more resembles Fire Walk with Me. With each part similar in runtime to the theatrical cut, one could almost consider the works as a trilogy with two main parts followed by a prologue, barring the few elements in the prequel (most noticeably Annie) that were introduced in the second half of Season 2.

Well-deserved wins for Q2, thank you for going to all the trouble putting this together!