Review Detail

A great edit that gives the movie a very different narrative compared to the original, and achieves what it set out to do in streamlining the plot and restoring continuity with the earlier movies in the series.

The edits are of a very high technical standard, and extremely impressive considering that DonkeyKonga only had the retail material to work with.

The only scene that didn’t work for me was the final interaction between Sandman and Spider-man. With the uncle Ben plot now gone, the viewer is left wondering why Spider-man is so emotional and ignoring Harry’s predicament, while the whole forgiveness aspect is now out of context.

I had hoped the edit would cut out the silly dance in the street scene, but alas it survived. In my opinion, we don’t need Dr Conners to spell out the obvious about the symbiote’s nature – it’s clear for all to see! So for me, it makes that whole segment with the dance, Dr Conners phone call and Ursula’s cookies an easy choice for removal. Anyhow, it’s not a deal breaker, as I removed it myself. So, now it goes from the fade out following the explosion on Harry, to Sandman’s daughter on the bench.

On the audio/visual side of things, the video quality is excellent and encoded at a high bitrate. The audio, however, was lacking for me. Being fortunate to have a high-end home cinema setup, I really missed the lossless soundtrack, especially with subwoofer activity. I realise licensing constraints mean encoding the audio in lossless Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA is not possible, but I’d happily take the lossless sound in raw PCM or FLAC format. It could even be offered as a standalone extra, requiring users to mux the audio themselves.

Overall, I really enjoyed this cut and was thoroughly impressed by its technical merits. Well done to DonkeyKonga and thank you very much for your efforts.