Jackson Saved From Himself
A shortened monochrome re-edit of Peter Jackson‘s King Kong by a guy named “geKKo” was posted in the summer of 2007. It’s 38 minutes shorter and an absolute improvement. It’s what King Kong might have been if the Universal suits had stood up to Jackson and told him that a nearly three-hour-long tribute to a 1933 film that ran 105 minutes was an exercise in self-mockery.
Other movies regarded as overly indulgent and/or too long have presumably been recut and posted online in similar fashion. This is how it should be now and forever. Other films could surely benefit from this process, but which?
Here are the geKKO re-edit boilerplate notes:
Original film name: King Kong
New film name: King Kong (Vintage Edition)
Film studio name: Universal
Edit crew name: geKKo
Date Original Film Was Released: December 14, 2005
Date Edit Was Released: July 18, 2007
Original Runtime: 2 hours, 57 minutes sans credits
New Runtime: 2 hours, 19 minutes.
Amount of time Cut/Added: 38 minutes
Video: 854 x 480 (16:9). H.264, 1900kbps
Audio: 48kHz, AAC, 128kbps, Stereo
Cuts removed/added/extended :
* Removed Vaudeville and great depression scenes.
* Trimmed dialogue between minor characters.
* Denham is less slapstick, more serious.
* Less sailing around in circles.
* Removed choppy slow-motion shots.
* Removed voiceover by Hayes.
* Shortened dinosaur stampede scene. No raptors.
* Removed falling rock that hits Kong.
* Deleted attack of the giant bugs.
* Removed CG juggling for Kong, who looked just as unimpressed by it as I was.
* Shortened scene with Kong on ice pond.
* Lots of other minor cuts to improve pacing. In total, over 90 cuts!
* Converted to black and white. (Oddly enough the DP at one point suggested to PJ that they shoot the film in black-and-white.)
* Added hair, dust, scratches to simulate old film.
* Added “Vintage Edition” under the main title, and re-editor credit at the end.
* Universal logo changes from color to b&w
* Added chapter markers and metadata info for Quicktime/iTunes/AppleTV.
Comments:
“I actually like Peter Jackson’s King Kong a lot. But at nearly 3 hours long, the plot feels laborious at times. By cutting out a lot of exposition about the island before they find it, it actually makes the island more mysterious once they arrive. And although the CG animation to bring Kong to life is impressive, the green screen visual effects of people running with the dinosaurs looked a bit subpar. Not only that, it was really hard to believe that people could run around underneath dinosaurs and not get trampled upon. Furthermore, having raptors in the movie just made it feel too much like Jurassic Park, so that entire chase sequence was trimmed down considerably.
“The other big CG sequence that was cut is when the giant bugs start attacking. This scene was actually supposed to be in the original King Kong movie (1933) but was cut for being too scary. In the 2005 version, the purpose of this scene was to kill off some minor characters, give Jamie Bell something to do, and make Baxter look heroic by having him swoop down on a rope shooting giant arachnids with his machine gun. But in the end, it did nothing to move the story forward. We really don’t care if Baxter is a hero or not because his story doesn’t go anywhere from there. Also the bug attack came right after the big Kong vs T-Rex battle, so it seemed like an undercard fight right after the main event. Basically, I think WETA wanted to show off their CG skills by having a giant weta bug suck on Adrien Brody‘s face.
“Overall, King Kong is quite the visual effects achievement and a pretty good movie overall. It’s got a solid cast, dramatic moments, a poetic score, intense action sequences, and a little bit of comedy. I would not have re-edited it if it wasn’t a movie I liked. I have to give Peter Jackson a lot of credit for re-making this classic and for introducing the eighth wonder of the world to a new generation.”
*sigh*
You want to get this one down to 2:20? Lose 70% of the boat trip. Cutting “extraneous” monster scenes from any version of King Kong is missing the damn point – it’s like handing Donen and Kelly an edit note of “the audience GETS that he’s happy again, do we really NEED to see him dance in the puddles for almost 4 minutes?”
If there’s one thing that truly hacks me off about “my people” (film geeks) it’s the prevalence of “if I’D directed it!” stuff like this. If this fella did this project as some kind of skill show for a portfolio or something… great, good for him, hope he got some work off it.
But damn, if he’s really just “critiquing via re-edit” what a bloody waste of time and talent. If the guy’s so sure he knows what makes a better monster movie than Jackson did, the time/money spent on this could’ve gone into a low-budget project (or a short!) of his own – something he could get real cred off, take to Sundance (or wherever) instead of Pirate Bay and maybe even sell. “District 9″ exists because Neil Blomkamp and his buddies made a budget alien movie in their backyard.
There’s a cut of TPM without Jar Jar.
The bloated running time wasn’t entirely Jackson’s fault. Universal had staked out a holiday release date and refused to budge. Everyone knew they were rushing things in the edit to make that deadline. And, sure enough, when the film was released, it was widely criticized for being baggy and bloated.
I personally asked some folks at WETA how many times PJ had been able to screen the entire film to get a sense of the overall pacing. The answer: Zero. Jackson only had time to screen and approve each reel separately.
My guess is that Universal lost at least $100 million dollars in potential revenue by sticking so hard to their release date. If they had given Jackson another six months to screen it before an audience and feel out the soft spots — as geKKo has helpfully done — the film could have been a worthy re-make. Instead, the studio wouldn’t or couldn’t change their marketing plan, and the result is, IMO, a sub-par movie.
This is partly about self-indulgent filmmakers, but it’s also about the behind-the-scenes power struggle between filmmakers and the marketing department. 95% of the time, filmmakers lose, and the films suffer accordingly — both artistically and (I would argue) at the box office.
Remember that Titanic was supposed to be a summer release, and JC missed the date so that he could spank down the movie in the editing. That turned out all right for Fox. You think there would have been the same result if JC had lost that fight and Titanic was rushed into the summer release spot? It would have been a marketing-department-induced, self-inflicted disaster.
I commend geKKo for taking the time to show that (arguably) a decent movie exists inside the overblown, baggy, rush-edit version that Universal dumped into theaters.
Now what I really want is for someone to take the two KILL BILL movies and distill them into the most fast-paced, mind-blowing 90 minute action film ever.
There’s a site dedicated to these fan-edits. I think it’s FanEdit.org, but I could be wrong.
There was one other King Kong edit that got me more interested: some guy cut out nearly 100 minutes of the film, so it could match with the 1933 version. This is just out of curiosity, of course, as I believe there is NO way you can decrease a film’s running time in half and still make it a decent picture. A part of me wants to be proven wrong, though.
There was a fanedit I’ve seen of Terminator 3 with most of the unnecessary humor removed and it was remarkably good. It was 87 minutes and it moved blazingly fast. The faneditor even managed to remove most of the film’s continuity errors.
I’ve also seen The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones fanedits and the latter was a big improvement.
There’s even a fanedit where Spielberg’s AI loses the sentimental robot-alien ending.
The problem — well, sure, there’s a bunch, so let’s say, the obvious limitation — of this website is that you can’t actually re-cut the movie. You can only choose to keep in the exact shots they used or remove them. Okay, ‘King Kong’, you’ve got 10 extra minutes of deleted scenes, and maybe you can snag something out of the “making of” stuff to cover a cut… you could maybe even digitally zoom the shot in to make it a close-up instead of a two-shot…. but what happens when you want to cut out to a wide shot?
On top of all that, specific to ‘Kong’, I feel the opposite of Jeff. I don’t see any point in remaking a movie like ‘Kong’ unless you’re going to go at least 50% bigger than the original.
THEMovieBob wrote:
If there’s one thing that truly hacks me off about “my people” (film geeks) it’s the prevalence of “if I’D directed it!” stuff like this. If this fella did this project as some kind of skill show for a portfolio or something… great, good for him, hope he got some work off it.
Having read that Steven Soderbergh did his own recut of HEAVEN’S GATE, I’d like to see that–probably superior to Cimino’s own short version from 1981.
“I don’t see any point in remaking a movie like ‘Kong’ unless you’re going to go at least 50% bigger than the original.”
Sure, but “bigger” doesn’t necessarily mean “longer.”
@701
Here ya go: http://remixedbyjorge.blogspot.com/2008/02/kill-bill-x-remixed-by-jorge.html.
The ending of A.I. isn’t really all that sentimental, and there are no aliens in it.
When Watt’s Ann Darrow finally, FINALLY, got to the damned boat, put one foot (slowly) forward… and then drew it back – I lost it and screamed, “GET ON THE FUCKING BOAT” (very loud, sort of a Sam Kinison thing). Not to encourage in-theater heckling, but I got a huge laugh, a smattering of applause and only one “shut the fuck up”.
When do they get to the boat in this picture? How close to the one hour mark?
I have pondered recutting Braveheart, in my darker moments. I think there’s a good 105 minute movie in there.
“The ending of A.I. isn’t really all that sentimental, and there are no aliens in it.”
Huh?
“There’s even a fanedit where Spielberg’s AI loses the sentimental robot-alien ending”
Many people mistook the robots at the end of the film for aliens, and only read the surface, “happy” conclusion. That’s not really David’s mother, it’s a replica manufactured by machines like him. He doesn’t care what life his mother actually had; he doesn’t care that the human race is extinct. All he understands is the gratification he gets from something that was made to be used briefly, then discarded.
The ending is the best part of AI. The problem I’ve always had is that I think Spielberg misidentifies the important conflict in the story. It’s not the difference between the robot boy and his human brother. It’s the difference, if any, between the robot boy and the toy bear.
That and the fact that there’s no intellectual dilemma that a robot boy can’t steal a helicopter and fly out of ….
TimDG…… I’m still astounded at how many people missed that. At the time I felt like the only person who realized they were ultra-modern robots, (patterned after the company logo!)
“There’s a cut of TPM without Jar Jar. ” which is lameo due to plot construction. How can Amidala request the help of Jar Jar which she and her planet desperately needed – could not have won that battle w/o Jar Jar’s assistance. Jedi couldn’t help, her planet has no army….. Only Jar Jar came through, although I do agree with some reduction of his screen time but not his entire elimination. He has to be here and in the next film.
Many people will walk in and out of your life . . . But only true friends will leave footprints in your ed hardy shop heart.To handle yourself, use your head;To handle others, use your ed hardy clothing heart.
How about making a King Kong remake?
Sean