u/Fanedit895

Like the Rocky V edit, this is an HD recreation of an already existing edit, one by Uncanny Antman. Just like Rocky V, I will make the distinction between what Uncanny Antman did and what BaileyEdits added.

Just the opening alone was enough to hook me in. The camera moving from the water, to the skyship and the Terminators dropping down, cutting to John Connor's face as he wakes up is such an effective tone-setter. It does its job MUCH better than the actual intro to the movie, which might as well have John go up to the camera and go "yeah, all that stuff about fate being what we make for ourselves was total horseshit". In general, toning down the Judgement Day/fate is inevitable stuff was for the better, as there is actual tension now when the heroes try to stop Skynet from happening, while John and Kate's relationship isn't hamstrung by the suggestion them getting together is destiny's doing. Besides those, there was quite a lot that Uncanny Antman removed, most of which I can't say I miss. Both Terminators have had their lines trimmed to make them colder, which I like. The TX is more threatening, while Arnold's more subdued demeanor works for this movie since this version of him had successfully killed John in the future so even before the reveal there's something "off" about him. In some cases, the edit manages to be funnier than the original scene. When Arnold is locking up Kate in the car, the fact he just shuts the door after getting the information he wanted is infinitely funnier than him spelling out "I lied" for the audience's benefit. Between those and some good scene rearrangements, T3 is made better. BaileyEdits kept some lines in that Uncanny Antman cut, which I like and agree don't harm the movie.

I'm mixed about downplaying John's attachment to Arnold. While I agree that John should know the difference between his Arnold and the one here, I can't say I miss those scenes, something does feel lost when T3!Arnold reveals he was the one that killed Future!John. It's the conclusion of a story arc that never started in this version, seemingly a pointless detail now. At least two instances, Bailey (and maybe Antman) employed slow-motion to get around specific scenes. The TX shooting Barrera could be forgiven, but at 19:38-19:43, it's odd that John's footage is slow while Arnold is walking normally... maybe if both were in slow motion it would look better? While the video and audio quality is good, there are times where a scene is cut/trimmed where you can hear the music cut off for the next part (10:10 and 39:16 come to mind). Strictly in terms of adapting Antman's work, there's mention of vfx work done in the original that Bailey was unable to replicate. I don't think it's a problem to the recreation but felt like pointing it out.

While I have quibbles, The Coming Storm is honestly a solid movie. Not on the level of 1 and 2, but the work done by Antman and Bailey elevate it being at least a stronger follow up that closes the loop more effectively than the original. In addition, the ending is a whole lot better without the voice-over, the music and visuals conveying the horrifically bittersweet sentiment of Skynet having succeeded, but John Connor is ready to lead the charge against them. Good stuff.

Is StraightCutsNoChaser great or the greatest? No Time to Die is another banger, going hand in hand with their edit of Spectre. It's now a (near) perfect duology.

Just the slight increase in brightness/saturation is so pleasing on the eyes in addition to being consistent with its predecessor. It is so bizarre watching this and remembering that no, the scene in Italy was NOT the actual opening of this movie. It efficiently sets up the story and is a perfect lead in from Spectre, the real opening flashback now comes off useless even without the change to Safin's character. The opening song was remixed with parts from several different versions. It sounds freaking amazing with that drumbeat, comparing it to the original it feels missing without it. The edits make No Time to Die way more straightforward thanks to removing the bloat- trimming lingering shots like with Spectre, no more repeating the same exposition of Heracles so that it can actually be built up over the runtime, not even the non-mystery with Madeline's child. The result is a well-oiled machine, twenty minutes shorter has the parts move story with efficiency. Extra points for simplifying the climax so we can pay more attention to the action.

For a first, there is one thing in this edit I didn't like. Namely, the flashback at the 1:04:44 mark. There's a rather awkward fade-in to the scene, with bits from Spectre to make it clear this was the story Madeline was telling Bond. While having the narration makes sense, the Spectre clips feel clumsy in the scene. Perhaps a better way to enter might be to let Madeline open the box, see her reaction, then hardcut to the flashback of Safin breaking into her house. I do at least like it cuts away after Young Madeline shoots Safin, he comes off creepier since we don't see him save Madeline or without his mask off.

Aside from that, this is still a great effort from StraightCutsNoChaser, who seems to specialize in "wait, this isn't the theatrical version?" type edits. Check it and their cut of Spectre when you can.

Additional Notes:

• Because of Bond's looser attitude in this film, he and Waltz had a more enjoyable chemistry compared to Spectre. It got to a point I actually hated the fact Blofeld got killed off in his one scene. My thoughts on the family connection? Meh. I vibe with it better in Chaser's edits because the presentation wasn't nearly so dour and pretentious as to be unfitting, but it still feels underdeveloped with one movie and an extra scene in the next.
• Not about the edit, but the movie itself. Lashana Lynch is awesome and I hope she gets an action movie all to herself.

Spence said in a comment his edit of TPM was a version of the movie he was happy with. Okay, challenge accepted. I finished watching it just now.

The prequel trilogy infamously have a slow, stilted feeling that makes watching them a chore to sit through. Spence's idea for this and the trilogy as a whole is to edit the moment-to-moment action. Obvious stuff like Jar Jar antics and Midichlorians are cut down, but every scene is touched up or trimmed in some way to improve the pacing. Palpatine ordering to attack the Jedi, and it immediately cutting to the ship being destroyed seems like such a no brainer in retrospect. The scene where Qui Gon and Obi Wan meet Boss Nass, it's frightening how just two small changes– removing Nass' tics and the explanation of the planet's core– just make that scene morre tolerable and interesting to sit through. Nute Gunray and his lackey are never going to be anything resembling good villains, but they feel just a tiny bit more dignified in the edit since they're not complaining about the two Sith Lords this time. Let me lay this out: in the theatrical cut, the heroes arrive on Coruscant by the 1:22:36 mark. By that same time in Spence's edit, they're taking off to Naboo to beat the Trade Federation. This is even with the addition of (admittedly minor but still good) deleted scenes in the mix. I could list every change made, all of them for the better, but for the sake of the review I'll just say that it's a bit easier to see why Spence says TPM has "the best shape" in its theatrical form.

My gripes with the edit itself are fairly minor. Qui Gon's line about Jar Jar nearly getting them both killed doesn't make as much sense since Qui Gon saved his life rather than Jar Jar jumping on him. 28:58 has an odd cut made to remove an unfunny Jar Jar joke, which hey I'm not complaining about but it's worth noting. I question if Spence could cut the scene in 1:03:49 to have Maul just reappear to attack Qui Gon and Anakin during their escape attempt. While Coruscant is better in this version, the podracing and final battle feel interminally long though I'm not going to knock points from there. Spence didn't rock the boat too much with this one, so i think even people who like TPM as it is will like what he did with the edit.

Do I like the film better thanks to Spence? Not really, most of my other problems with TPM are still here and I'd like to not see this movie again if I can. But Spence did a decent job and I was (at least initially) happier watching this than the original. The quality is as good as usual and faster pacing did make a significant difference in this case.

Additional Note: I wish the other Prequels kept using film instead of switching to digital.

A video was posted earlier in the subreddit displaying the ending for their cut of the 2003 movie tying it into The Incredible Hulk. The idea they presented was actually really clever– basically, they reframed the incident at Culver University to be an attempt to cure Banner that went wrong. This could be used not only to explain Ross' growing animosity towards Bruce in the 2008 movie but also why Hulk is much weaker in that film when compared to the size changes he does in 2003. If it can be done, it could be a good addition

The big superhero game adaptations, namely the Batman: Arkham series and the Insomniac Spider-Man games seem to get a lot of mileage from setting their stories at the end of an era, or at least the new phase of the character's life. Arkham City kills off the Joker, Arkham Knight kills a shit load of Batman villains and the man himself, while Insomniac Spider-Man killed off Aunt May in 1 and killed more villains in 2. If Hulk gets his own dedicated games, might that approach be interesting? What would work as a suitable big game-changing event to make the story about?

First time I've ever seen Afro Samurai. It's a pretty cool show, a man named Afro Samurai, played by Samuel L. Jackson, wears the Number 2 headband, which causes many challengers to try to kill him. He's on a quest to avenge his father by killing the one wearing the Number 1 headband, Justice, a cowboy played by Ron Perlman. It's mainly an excuse for cool fight scenes, which look impressive. BlindUchiha edits both the main series and the Resurrection sequel movie to add songs and cut out certain characters. These edits are named The Path to No.1 and Son of the Damned.

The Path to No.1 condenses five episodes into an hour and twenty-odd minute movie. I can say that I didn't feel lost in the plot, so BlindUchiha did a good job on making it coherent and understandable. BlindUchiha has a good ear for songs, as I noticed in their edit for War Machine, mixing soft guitars and rock tracks into the movie in ways that mostly make sense. You can still hear parts of the original OST in there (like after the Afro-Droid fight as an example), plus there seems to be a repeat credits (the beginning and seventeen minutes into this movie) that could have been cut, but the story is good. Something in both this and Son of the Damned is that there's occasionally a change in aspect ratio, which seems to be done to get rid of a certain character. Don't know enough about that character to know if that's a bad thing, but the movie works fine as it is without him.

BlindUchiha makes improvements to their work each project. I can proudly say Son of the Damned is pretty dang good. The songs are integrated well without issues relating to the OG BGM bleeding through, instead serving to create an alternate vibe that matches the movie's tone. The cuts aren't noticeable, it looks good, only really having a watermark (7:08-8:24, 10:37-12:08) as an issue. Watching these back to back, you get the complete story of the Samurai laying waste to thousands of lives, including his old friends, leaving you wondering if his quest was ever righteous (spoiler: it isn't, he seems like a huge dickhead). I like the effort and look forward to see where BlindUchiha goes from here.

Batman + Black and White = Winner, it seems.

I can't in good conscience call this better than the actual Batman and Robin, since I love that utter trashfire, but this is a solid effort in making it a more serious movie for those who don't enjoy it. Schumacher's aesthetic lends itself to naturally to black and white, disguising a lot of his gaudy, neon-light aesthetic to show a Gotham whose architecture is chaotic, unwieldly, as unreal as Tim Burton's but in a different direction. It's rather pleasing on the eyes. The music has been mostly replaced from the ground up. Parts of the original score are still there, but there's more music from the Arkham games in this edit. There's some disconnect between the mixing of those songs, but not as noticeable as you might think. There's a particular part where it works extremely well, when Bruce is hallucinating Ivy while making out with Julie Madison. The scene genuinely comes off eerie and creepy in MusicEd921's version of events compared to the original, nice touch. Visuals and audio are great around the board.

MusicEd921 knew what to cut. Poison Ivy's origin is gone, instead we're introduced to Pamela during the unveiling of Bruce's telescope, which works well (with a clever edit to the dialogue that Bruce shut down Ivy's South America lab due to a "conflict of ideologies"). All of Bane's scenes are cut, and while that did mean some odd slowed-down footage at points to cover it up, it's welcome since he didn't really add anything to the story. Batman and Robin's arguments are trimmed so that they only really start bickering when Ivy uses her pheromones on them, good. I like how much of the dialogue is cut, particularly between Batgirl and Ivy in their fight where the only remnant is Ivy's admission of killing Freeze's wife. I love the ending with Mr. Freeze watching the doll of his wife dancing in the glass, perfect way to close out his character. Most of the sillyness is trimmed, though not all of it could. The dialogue still has Arnold making those amazing puns (which especially made me laugh during the beginning six minutes, after the credits try to work their magic to sell a serious tone and trim the Museum fight, Freeze says "CAN YOU BE COOL BATMAN?").

This is still Batman and Robin at the core. By the editor's admission, though, the goal wasn't to polish it up into a Nolan movie but to have something more in the tone of a Batman: The Animated Series episode, dark but appropriate for children. It's a good effort that I enjoyed.

When faced with years of stories and adaptations mixing things up, often creators will try to reset the clock in an effort to tell fresh new stories with specific characters. Spider-Man in particular is infamous for One More Day erasing twenty years of his marriage to Mary Jane in an effort to go back to college-era antics that, while successful for a while, led to diminishing returns over time. Newer adaptations strictly focus on Peter's high school years, with only the Spider-Verse films and Insomniac's games depicting an adult Peter Parker from the get go ). It can be tempting to write everything off as creators being afraid of change, which is definitely a factor in most of those cases.

If you go back to the early Lee/Ditko stories, or even including the Romita stuff, you're able to understand why it's tempting to go back to that era of Peter's life. There's a period of growth where Peter gains, loses, learns humility and to make difficult sacrifices for his aunt, a vulnerability that's not as easy to capture in an adult Spider-Man. Brian Michael Bendis in his Ultimate Spider-Man reimagined those teenage years for an early 2000s audience, framing Peter's paranoia and angst as a reaction to the corrupt world around him and how much injustice is swept under the rug. Even Raimi felt the need to include Peter getting his powers as a teenager even if there's a timeskip directly to college. Spider-Man is fundamentally about growth, and because of that, I think there's a genuine value in going back to Peter's teenage years to show that development (even if it's been overused).

Superman has gone through much evolution as a character, to the point where each era is its own distinct universe. Golden Age Superman, the Champion of the Oppressed willing to shove managers into a cave with coal miners, isn't the same as Silver Age Superman, a deputized member of the law who performs elaborate hoaxes on criminals and his friends, nor is the Post-Crisis Superman who died to Doomsday is the same as the New 52 version who dated Wonder Woman. The type of stories were different in each era, with their own cast of characters (Inspector Henderson and George Taylor are pretty much Golden Age exclusive characters). When a writer is sufficiently inspired to go back to a previous era instead of treating them as joke fodder, there is a genuinely distinct status quo in each of these worlds that can be built upon for future stories. In Spider-Man and Superman, we can see specific reasons why they would benefit from revisiting the roots like Bendis, Grant Morrison or Mark Waid would.

I don't think it works for other characters, however. It's common knowledge that the Golden Age Batman was a grim avenger of the night who took mobsters and killed his villains. What isn't known is that this status quo only lasted twelve issues, in which Robin became a mainstay for decades since. The muted reaction to Bruce Timm's Caped Crusader compared to his previous work on Batman: The Animated Series shows why that status quo wasn't sustainable. It's not just that you lose a lot of the supporting cast and villains accumulated over time, the end result is a Batman who's a flatter character. His relationship to Robin raised him to be more than just a thug in a cape, but a parental figure and more compassionate hero. Without the humanity he gained from his later experience, Golden Age/Caped Crusader Batman ends up the least interesting character in his own show, even with the tiny threadbare of character development he got at the end of the season. There's a reason even The Batman (2022) had the good sense to have Batman's development be to grow out of this phase of his life, why Frank Miller's Batman: Year One went out of its way to establish the modern Batman is a caring hero with ambitions to save Gotham beyond killing people.

In my opinion, I think the Hulk is another character who isn't served by going back to his earlier concepts. Sure, the Hulk is a monster story and nothing will change that. But re-reading the early Lee/Ditko stuff, you can tell they were struggling to come up with ideas for where to take the character. The first issue does a great job establishing the Hulk and Bruce Banner's dynamic, only to have him mostly fight communists and aliens. It took some time for the classic "Bruce is on the run, turns into Classic Hulk to smash" status quo to set in, and even then writers like Bill Mantlo toyed with the idea that Hulk was a manisfestation of childhood trauma, something that Peter David built upon when he canonized Bruce's Disassociate Identity Disorder. Even when Gray Hulk came back and could only manifest under the moon's light, Peter David made him a distinct character by giving him a name, a suit and connection to the mob. Greg Pak made the Green Scar a famous mainstay through Planet Hulk and World War Hulk, having Hulk as the protagonist of a John Carter-esque fantasy who loves, loses, and unleashes his wrath upon his would-be enemies. To say anything of Immortal Hulk's popularity, Hulk is seemingly better with the added baggage than without. Attempts by writers like Mark Millar in Ultimates, John Byrne and Bruce Jones to go back to the monster only serve to show why it doesn't work (though Bruce Jones' run is also incredibly gross with the sexual violence, don't read that).

Tl;dr, some characters can be served by revisiting the roots behind their concepts, because there's characterization and era-specific material to draw upon, others don't, because their original concept is too bare-bones to have been sustainable in the first place. The most recent Wuthering Heights inspired this train of thought, since the main criticism behind that film was how much it deviated from the novel. Maybe the best thing for Wuthering Heights would be to just adapt the book in its entirety.