Smallville Destiny

I watched this last night and wasn't blown away to be honest.

I'm intrigued as to why the decision was made to anchor this edit in its television roots rather than go for a streamlined 'smallville the movie' experience. To me that idea has the potential to craft something more engaging and intentional - whereas this edit felt a bit meandering and aimless to me at times.

Without a doubt, the episodes that LS chose to focus on were some of the best moments from Season 1. The fortune telling old lady and the Ryan story really grappled with that theme of destiny, and I understood what LS was trying to do there. Those themes are certainly present, and come through loud and clear. But we also have many scenes of Lana, Chloe, Witney etc, and these stories just aren't as interesting to me.

One of the major problems of constructing an engaging narrative from cobbled together episodes of a tv show is finding a strong throughline that can anchor the whole thing together. I'm sorry to say, I didn't feel like this edit achieved that successfully overall. Yes, removing the villain of the week did put more emphasis on the drama, but the drama as performed in smallville is arguably not all that compelling. It's pitched squarely at teenage angst, and sitting through scene after scene of that tone and sentiment was difficult to stomach after a while - like bold and the beautful: the teenage years.

What I would love to see from a smallville edit would be to focus almost exclusively on the relationship between Clark/Lex, and their respective parents. I realise those aspects are front and centre in this edit, but by including all the minor stories of the peripheral characters, that focus is lost a bit along the way. I do think there is a strong story in here to be drawn out, but perhaps by limiting it to 90 minutes max, and including the arc from seasons 1 and 2 of the show, you get to end the 'movie' with that wonderful scene with Christopher Reeve, and have a fitting and emotional climax to the story, pointing towards his great destiny. In a perfect world, I would also add elements of the Williams sound track throughout to point the way.

Technically, the edit was fine. I watched the AVI, so the picture quality wasn't perfect, but the audio and video editing work was great, and did not distract in anyway, save for only a couple of noticable changes.

My lasting feeling is that perhaps LS started out with the intention to craft a tight and focussed movie length adaptation, but ended up getting too attached to various storylines along the way, and went for the tv mineseries approach instead. If you want to relive the key relationship moments between all major characters from the first season of smallville, then I would recommend this edit for you. On the other hand, if you want a tightly paced and plotted look at the origins and destiny of two huge characters in pop culture mythology, unfortunately I would have to say this doesn't quite hit the mark.

Wow. Who would've thunk that a Supes serial with almost no physical conflict and almost no superhuman stunts would be more fun to watch than the Boy of Steel dodging bullets and tossing people around?

By removing the freaks-o'-the-week, a lot of the action is gone as well, but therein lies this fanedit's strength: the fine character moments are pretty much all that remain. You get to see not only Clark Kent's growing pains, but those of his friends. And his earthly parents aren't the abstractions they were in the comic books and most of the theatrical versions.

A fault of the series itself and not of the fanedit: Lex and Clark know each other rather well, which means that their future selves should recognize each other, allowing Lex to blow Supe's cover.

LastSurvivor's edit is really entertaining, the best Superman experience I've had since watching Christopher Reeve in the theaters.

I started watching Smallville when it first came out. I loved the show. Although I would get the occasional ribbing from friends (but i had the perfect retort “What guy doesn’t wish they were Superman? What guy wouldn’t want to date Lana Lang?!”). Anyway, I stopped watching around Season 3 or 4 and then periodically tuned in every now and then when Green Arrow showed up etc. But I really did enjoy the early episodes of the series so I was excited to hear about LastSurvivor’s fanedit.

DVD Design: I really liked the DVD Menu Design. Music, Animated Scene Selection Menus. Great Job!

The Edit: I really have to applaud LastSurvivor’s efforts on this edit. I can’t begin to imagine what a huge undertaking this was. To sift through 20+ (or however many) episodes and distill it into a coherent and entertaining story. Although knocking out the majority of the “Freak of the Week” storylines was a major part of the edit, the decisions of the storylines to keep in were more interesting (and i imagine the harder part of the edit to do). I liked the choices that LastSurvivor made (the elderly woman who was psychic, Ryan’s storyline – a nice way to end part 1 btw!). The merge of the Season 1 finale and Season 2 premiere was very well done too. And wrapped up with a nice ending. This was an extremely enjoyable fanedit! Great job.

Technical: The video editing was well done but what really stood out to me was the audio editing. In my opinion it was nearly flawless. And I always read on the forums, or read about rejected edits and it almost always has to do with shoddy audio editing. Audio editing is arguably the most difficult part about fanedits. So great job on that!

Excellent firstling! I look forward to LastSurvivor’s future fanedits.