Northwest Passage: A Twin Peaks Fanedit

December 9, 2011

I love Twin Peaks and loved this edit. I was wary of watching it at first due to the 5 hour runtime but once I started I was hooked right in. Many times I would forget I was watching an edit and would have a hard time discerning Q2′s cuts vs. source cuts.

FANEDIT RATINGS
Audio/Video Quality – 10
Visual Editing – 10
Audio Editing – 10
Degree of Editing – 9

(NOTE: “Degree of Editing” is a 100% arbitrary rating that I keep in mind when reviewing edits. This is not meant to insinuate that a faneditor is lazy or not. Some fanedits require a lot more work than others and I take this into account.)

MOVIE RATINGS
Narrative – 10
Enjoyment – 10

OVERALL RATING – 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!

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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

QUALITY

Quality is decent. The cropping to 16:9 naturally means a reduced resolution.


VISUAL EDITING

The conversion to 16:9 generally works really well. Occasionally shots look a little tight, but it never felt intrusive or like it detracted from my enjoyment. It was nice to experience the series in this aspect ratio and it definitely helped in conveying a more cinematic feel.

In terms of cuts, I found a fair amount of shots to be too quick, mainly establishing shots and mostly in the first half. 1:20:20 of Part 1 I remember being especially abrupt. There's also a frame jump at 2:14:34 in Part 2 (probably a misplaced keyframe from cropping). The end credit scene has very obviously had the aspect ratio stretched and doesn't look great.


AUDIO EDITING

No doubt there were numerous cuts and trims that went by unnoticed. I did notice quite a few audio transitions though; nothing jarring, but some obvious crossfades. Again, more in the first half than the second. A minor thing, but there is also a relatively loud audio pop during the credits.


NARRATIVE

First thing's first, this is being presented as a 5-hour movie, which seems like a crazy idea. Looking at it like that, it's way too long. However, perhaps it is best viewed as a 2-part TV movie of sorts? It is presented in two 2.5 hour chunks, and this mitigates the excessive runtime considerably. Being able to view it in two screenings of a reasonable length works well, the pacing is generally good and it never feels episodic.

Unfortunately, there are narrative problems, as others have noted. There are minor(ish) things, like characters referencing something that no longer exists in this cut (Lucy mentioning seeing Bobby's parents, Donna mentioning Howard's letter), Audrey makes a single appearance that has no relevance to the plot, and then never makes another appearance again; Big Ed (a civilian) randomly tags along to a police bust (which the audience have no context for since there's no introduction to the bookhouse boys here).

And then there are more significant things, like having Doc's heart attack and Leo's shooting offscreen. If these characters were entirely relegated to the background, that could work at a push, but because this edit isn't 100% focused on the perspective of the police and FBI, and we do have deviations where we focus on these minor characters, it feels odd to have something so massive happen to them and then only get the info dropped in with a single line of dialogue. We also have no context for why Doc has his heart attack, nor is anything ever said about him having the other half of the heart necklace, in spite of it still being emphasised on camera when he's listening to Laura's tapes. Plus, to have a murder, a heart attack and two other attempted murders all on the same night is crazy - the series acknowledges this and has an explanation; this edit does not. I could keep the list going, but I don't want to labour the point. Suffice to say, the narrative is far from perfect here.

On a related note, there are some general effects that an edit like this has on the feel and flow, which are really just a byproduct of the concept and can't be helped. The first part of the edit feels very dry overall, since there is a lot of procedural stuff and info-driven dialogue, without much of the quirky character moments to break things apart and make it more digestible. There is also less of a mystery in one sense; since we spend less time and see less of the townsfolk, we're therefore limited to a smaller set of suspects, making it easy for the audience to put the pieces together and draw conclusions based on where the narrative is focusing. On the other hand, whereas the original series reveals to the audience who the killer is before their capture, Q2 decides to keep the audience in the dark with the police; I think this was a smart move and it worked well for the narrative.

Some have noted the absence of the black lodge plot, and while I like that plot and am sad it couldn't be included, it wouldn't have worked for a filmic narrative and would have made things feel far more episodic. Unfortunately, its absence does make one of the giant's clues superfluous: "the owls are not what they seem". It is worth bearing in mind that Q2 makes the interesting decision to include part of the trippy stuff related to the black lodge and insert it within the climax of the edit. I thought this was well-executed, although I'm not sure what value it added to the narrative, personally.


ENJOYMENT

Issues aside, across its 5-hour runtime the edit nicely condenses the main initial narrative thrust of the series, with a few tweaks to make the experience a little different this time around. I really enjoyed being able to re-consume the series in a much shorter amount of time.

There is some talk in the reviews as to who this is aimed at, and I also saw someone treating this as their first experience of the series. It seems to me that Q2's intent was an alternative spin in a cinematic format for those already familiar with the material. Because of narrative issues and the absence of some great material, I would strongly recommend people not let this be their first experience, but I think it's a good option for a revisit. I also disagree with people who think all the Lynchian-ness has been stripped away... plenty of the weirdness is left. Most of what Lynch directed of the series were climactic episodes, which are naturally retained. Plenty of opportunity was here to trim some of the awkward, drawn-out dreams and visions, but these mostly remain intact. I think any hardcore Lynch fan is probably also the sort of person to frown on any kind of edit, full stop. If one wants to speculate on the meaning of Twin Peaks and bask in the mind of Lynch, then naturally anything unsupervised by him is not going to be the way to go. But if you simply want to enjoy a different take on the material, this is a fun ride.