Rebel Moon final trailer

[BloodSquirrel]

What happen with justice league had nothing to do with his filmmaking style, his daughter died and then it was changed behind his back.

Yes, but it was changed behind his back because Warner Bros. wanted to move away from his filmmaking style, part of which is that his intended cut was too long.

And, no, it wouldn't have been four hours if it was going to theaters, because it couldn't have been. But cutting it down from four hours to something that could fit in theaters is part of why the Whedon cut was such a disaster.

[gbaji]

I liked the universe, how dense and old and nasty it felt. It had strong Chronicles of Riddick vibes, which is 100% a compliment from me.

I'm also an odd duck in that I enjoy the heck out of Chronicles of Riddick as well. The difference here, is that CoR was a relatively tight story. You had a badass hero(ish) character. A small number of side characters (on various sides). And yeah, some kinda over the top bad guys, and a boat load of (very interesting to me) backstory and setting stuff.

The point is that CoR was self edited to contain only those additional characters, and backstory, and setting building, that was actually required to tell the story. You could have trimmed out a lot of that, and had a very generic "hero fights and defeats bad guy", but adding in the additional details doesn't distract or detract from that story. It builds on it, and adds "depth" to the result. It's a lot like the Conan films. We don't need to know who Thulsa Doom is, or how he's connected to Conan's past to have him be a villian for Conan to fight against, but it adds to the story (and certainly doesn't detract from it), to add those bits in.

Rebel Moon could have done with a ton of self editing. It kinda reminded me of bad fanfic, where the writer has a bunch of "cool ideas", so they toss all of them into a single story. This results in a "kitchen sink" story, that becomes a jumbled mess. You are correct that the individual bits were cool and interesting, but where I kinda disagree is that I think those things should only be included if they actually add to the story. Otherwise, we get essentially exactly what you described: A feature length presentation of individual and disconnected "cool and interesting" scenes. And we get to the end and struggle to make sense of them.

For Rebel Moon I rather suspect there's two versions because Netflix wanted a PG-13 version because action adventure space movies do well at PG-13, and Snyder wanted R because, well, just look at the movie. So they compromised at doing both.

It's not even that weird, horror movies have been doing R rated theatrical cuts and unrated DVD cuts for ever for the same reason. It lets you release a version at the most marketable rating, and another later targeting the hardcore. You get to double dip for the cost of a couple extra scenes.

Honestly? I think what this shows is Synder's inabilty to self edit his stories. The JL was such a mess precisely because he couldn't figure out how to tell a single cohesive story in a standard film length. The fact that his story "works better" when extended out to 4ish hours showcases this. He should have removed like half of the elements in the film, and would have had a good single story. Save the other cool ideas for the sequels. Whedon was left trying to stitch together the mess that was left.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's not a positive that a director can't leave editors sufficient content to make a coherent film that fits into the desired runtime. That's a huge negative. Saying "well, if you just get the massively larger directors cut, it's good", doesn't remove that criticism.

And yeah. There's a huge difference between having different cuts for rating purposes, and having to create a new longer cut just to make the story and all of the elements within it, actually make sense. That indicates a problem with the design process starting on day one. Over filling the story with too many elements will result in a story that can't be told in the target runtime. If you move foward with filming (as Synder did with JL), you leave only one option for the studiio: Release a film that isn't going to make sense because too many elements are necessary to the story, but can't be properly portrayed, and then release a "directors cut" that puts all the stuff that has to be in there to make it all make sense back in.

Hitchcock famously would write and film the scenes in such a way that the editors could not remove anything without making the story fail to make sense. He used this to "force his vision" past the studio editors. But he was a genius and actually understood how to make stories tight and complete (and really really good!). Synder does the same thing in terms of how he films scenes, but he doesn't have the same skill Hitchcock did of telling a tight coherent story. Which results in films that are more or less impossible to make work in the format intended.

And this film clearly shows that this isn't just that Synder can't tell a story in a single film length, but that given any target film/story length, he will add more stuff to it anyway (kitchen sink approach). If you have to do the same sort ot "add in extra stuff in a directors cut to make it make sense" in part 1 of a multi part film series, then you're just showing your own lack of filmmaking skill there. There's nothing clever about this. He just can't do it. That's a massive failling on his part IMO. Which, again, is sad because the actual setting and base story in RM was very very good. It's hard not to see that all of the bits that everyone is criticising it for, are the very same problems Synder has had in other film projects he's done in the past. Which... makes that a clear trend.

[EggKookoo]

I'm also an odd duck in that I enjoy the heck out of Chronicles of Riddick as well.

Huge fan of Chronicles of Riddick here. I suspect it works more for people who enjoy roleplaying games.

And this film clearly shows that this isn't just that Synder can't tell a story in a single film length, but that given any target film/story length, he will add more stuff to it anyway (kitchen sink approach). If you have to do the same sort ot "add in extra stuff in a directors cut to make it make sense" in part 1 of a multi part film series, then you're just showing your own lack of filmmaking skill there. There's nothing clever about this. He just can't do it. That's a massive failling on his part IMO. Which, again, is sad because the actual setting and base story in RM was very very good. It's hard not to see that all of the bits that everyone is criticising it for, are the very same problems Synder has had in other film projects he's done in the past. Which... makes that a clear trend.

And look at how he handled Watchmen. Now, granted, it's a fool's errand to try to make Watchmen into a 2-hour movie, so I don't blame him entirely. But it was very clear to me, sitting in the theater, that he had no idea what the heart of that story was. He was fixated on the superficials.

[warty goblin]

I'm also an odd duck in that I enjoy the heck out of Chronicles of Riddick as well. The difference here, is that CoR was a relatively tight story. You had a badass hero(ish) character. A small number of side characters (on various sides). And yeah, some kinda over the top bad guys, and a boat load of (very interesting to me) backstory and setting stuff.

The point is that CoR was self edited to contain only those additional characters, and backstory, and setting building, that was actually required to tell the story. You could have trimmed out a lot of that, and had a very generic "hero fights and defeats bad guy", but adding in the additional details doesn't distract or detract from that story. It builds on it, and adds "depth" to the result. It's a lot like the Conan films. We don't need to know who Thulsa Doom is, or how he's connected to Conan's past to have him be a villian for Conan to fight against, but it adds to the story (and certainly doesn't detract from it), to add those bits in.

Rebel Moon could have done with a ton of self editing. It kinda reminded me of bad fanfic, where the writer has a bunch of "cool ideas", so they toss all of them into a single story. This results in a "kitchen sink" story, that becomes a jumbled mess. You are correct that the individual bits were cool and interesting, but where I kinda disagree is that I think those things should only be included if they actually add to the story. Otherwise, we get essentially exactly what you described: A feature length presentation of individual and disconnected "cool and interesting" scenes. And we get to the end and struggle to make sense of them.

Yeah, Riddick is a tighter movie, but it's also basically a one character star vehicle. That cuts down on the need for stuff. And there's a substantial pleasure in a movie just doing weird stuff for the sake of having weird stuff. Very different caliber of film, but I just watched Poor Things, which is nothing but weirdness and it's a constant delight. Plot isn't the end boss of film making.

I'm also not sure what's unclear about Rebel Moon. It's honestly a pretty easy to process movie as far as I can tell. The plot is dead simple, what isn't spelled out follows pretty easily from basic visual inference. The farmers are space Amish salt of the earth. The Motherworld is a violently repressive Empire engaged in standard oppress the periphery punitive action. The various characters are standard fantasy types, the vengeful mother, the exiled prince, the general who is now a slave who is now a gladiator. The character arcs are obviously incomplete because it's half of the complete story, if it was a TV show and I'd watched 3 of 6 episodes I wouldn't find the fact that not everything had wrapped up unsatisfying.

Honestly? I think what this shows is Synder's inabilty to self edit his stories. The JL was such a mess precisely because he couldn't figure out how to tell a single cohesive story in a standard film length. The fact that his story "works better" when extended out to 4ish hours showcases this. He should have removed like half of the elements in the film, and would have had a good single story. Save the other cool ideas for the sequels. Whedon was left trying to stitch together the mess that was left.

Again, I'm not really sure what's incoherent about this. As a first part I think it does pretty much what it needs to, we get some character intros, the world and conflict are set up, but there's things left unresolved for part 2. It's not a stand alone piece, but it isn't supposed to be. I'm happy to watch a Director's Cut of this because I enjoyed it and some expansion would improve it (to say nothing of the obvious cutting to get what really wants to be a moderately hard R down to PG-13) but the currently released cut works fine for me for what it is.

And honestly I didn't find JL particularly less coherent than most Marvel movies. It's superhero nonsense, stuff happens because the plot needs it to because there's generally zero internal logic to any of these things. It's a boring, ugly version of superhero nonsense I'd only ever watch again as a drinking game, but that just puts it on par with, like, Iron Man 2. Well, the boring part, it's definitely uglier than Iron Man 2, and also videogame cutscenes from like 2009.

[gbaji]

And look at how he handled Watchmen. Now, granted, it's a fool's errand to try to make Watchmen into a 2-hour movie, so I don't blame him entirely. But it was very clear to me, sitting in the theater, that he had no idea what the heart of that story was. He was fixated on the superficials.

Honestly? I think that Watchmen was probably done about as well as you could possibly do with the story and the need to convert it to a 2-hour film format. Most of the bits that fans wail about, are not changes that Snyder did, but changes made to the screenplay well before he ever started on the project. I'm more than willing to criticise Snyder, but in this case, he wasn't really to blame for the things people most complain about with that film.

I also get the sense that this was early enough in his career that he didn't yet have the pull to push for (and get) major screenplay/story changes into the project itself like he did with JL. It's unclear to me how complete a screenplay/script he was handed on JL, and how much was "broad outline, fill it in how you want". I suspect that it was a lot more of the latter though. This tends to happen more often when it's an original screenplay versus an adaptation though, so that's not surprising.

But yeah. It highlights Snyder's inability to self edit. The greater the degree of control he seems to have on the screenplay and script itself, and the more ability he has to add additional elements into the film, the more bloated and "kitchen sink" the result is. He's actually a very excellent director if you can restrict him to just directing scenes other people have written, and not modifying too many things along the way. But the moment he seems to get a "vision of the story" (and someone lets him pursue it), that's about when things fall off the rails. That's my personal option of course, but it does seem to match the pattern I've seen of his work. Give him the "look and feel" parts of the project, and it'll be fantastic. Just keep him away from the actual story itself...

[Sapphire Guard]

Justice League is pretty unique situation. It was insane of WB to demand a strict two hour runtime, espcecially mid production. Every movie starts out as a rough cut that gets whittled down, the fact that the unfinished film was long means nothing really.

The short versions of all these movies make sense just fine, except JL which was butchered after he'd left, so I don't think it says much about his style. There's no actual problem with the shorter films in general, but there is a longer director's cut if you want it.

It's not really any different from how anyone else makes films, extended director's cuts are common as dirt, it's just that these are released very very slightly differently.

Edit: If the criticism is that the short versions don't make sense, what doesn't make sense about them, JL's special circumstances aside?

[BloodSquirrel]

I'm also not sure what's unclear about Rebel Moon. It's honestly a pretty easy to process movie as far as I can tell. The plot is dead simple, what isn't spelled out follows pretty easily from basic visual inference. The farmers are space Amish salt of the earth. The Motherworld is a violently repressive Empire engaged in standard oppress the periphery punitive action. The various characters are standard fantasy types, the vengeful mother, the exiled prince, the general who is now a slave who is now a gladiator. The character arcs are obviously incomplete because it's half of the complete story, if it was a TV show and I'd watched 3 of 6 episodes I wouldn't find the fact that not everything had wrapped up unsatisfying.

It's not unclear, it's just not cohesive. It's not that the character arcs are just incomplete, for example, it's that we don't really get a sense at all for who most of these characters are.

I don't remember if I said this already, but you can have a character who has very broad motivations and a very basic character arc and have it work just fine, but your writing needs to be very focused on hitting those points and making the character distinctive through things that don't take up a lot of screentime to communicate. A good character design/costuming, well-written dialog that gets a lot across in as few lines as possible (not just mechanical plot stuff, but putting the character's voice in those lines), and a strong contrast among the cast members can all be used to define a character and make them memorable without needing tons of time.

Synder kind of does the exact opposite of all of those things. Everything he does is kind of muted- from color palette to dialog to costume design. His characters tend to look and sound the same, and he isn't good at having two characters bounce off of each other to contrast them. He's very good at "show, don't tell", but when you want to pack a lot of stuff into a movie you do actually need to pick and choose what you show and what you tell for the maximum effect. I actually really like the scene where they try to bluff the admiral about the grain. It's a great scene for building tension, developing the characters, and making the setting feel real and gritty. It's the kind of thing that makes Tarantino movies good- except that Tarantino makes movies where the plot is "A bunch of guys are in a room arguing with each other" or "Two hitmen go get a briefcase and take it back to their boss" where he can spend as much time as he wants with those character scenes and not have to worry about explaining galactic politics or to us.

Justice League is pretty unique situation. It was insane of WB to demand a strict two hour runtime, espcecially mid production. Every movie starts out as a rough cut that gets whittled down, the fact that the unfinished film was long means nothing really.

There's a big gap between "two hours" and "four hours". And the Snyder cut was the post-whittling down rough cut. It wasn't "this was every second of footage that we shot", it was "this is what I thought was essential after we finished editing". And, honestly, while a few parts felt like they should be cut just because they don't work (Martha being MM in disguise was... just weird) the Snyder cut didn't feel bloated or full of fat that needed to be trimmed. It felt like it was as tightly cut as it could be without sacrificing something important.

The short versions of all these movies make sense just fine, except JL which was butchered after he'd left, so I don't think it says much about his style. There's no actual problem with the shorter films in general, but there is a longer director's cut if you want it.

Well, no, it kind of does say something about his style, because we saw the Whedon cut and we saw the Snyder cut and it shows us what happens to his style when you try to compress it into a more standard run time. And, as I've already said, I said, Rebel Moon feels a lot like the Whedon cut in some ways. The Whedon cut's problem wasn't that it didn't make sense to the point where you couldn't follow the plot, it was that the plot points felt rushed and weren't emotionally justified. I understood Whedon but I believed Synder.

At this point, I'm really hoping we do get a Snyder cut of Rebel Moon just so that I can compare the two versions and show how "Oh, look, this is the scene that makes the movie feel more complete, even if it isn't strictly necessary to understand the plot".

It's not really any different from how anyone else makes films,

It really, really is. Most directors release a director's cut or extended edition as more of a bonus version, not a "Sorry, we need two tries to release the right movie" thing.

LotR didn't need an extended edition. Maybe the extended edition is better, or maybe it's just neat to see what else was shot, but Peter Jackson made a perfectly good movie that fit within the runtime he was allotted and became a beloved classic all on its own. Rebel Moon has been rather poorly reviewed (regardless of whether you personally liked it or not) and has some glaring problems that people are looking to a director's cut to fix.

Most of the time, it's the theatrical cut that people remember and remains the "true", iconic version of the film. Director's cuts are common, but they're usually no the definitive cut, and people don't usually come out of a movie theater saying "Well, maybe the director's cut will be better". What other major movie this year- good or bad- came out and the immediate reaction was for people to start talking about a potential director's cut?

[Saph]

Most of the time, it's the theatrical cut that people remember and remains the "true", iconic version of the film. Director's cuts are common, but they're usually no the definitive cut, and people don't usually come out of a movie theater saying "Well, maybe the director's cut will be better". What other major movie this year- good or bad- came out and the immediate reaction was for people to start talking about a potential director's cut?

Honestly, Snyder is the only filmmaker I ever hear this about. To the point that I think that in the SF/F world, I might actually hear the phrase "Snyder Cut" more often than "Director's Cut".

[Tyndmyr]

Justice League is pretty unique situation. It was insane of WB to demand a strict two hour runtime, espcecially mid production.

How so? A two hour runtime is an extremely normal length. Over the last decade or so, that would probably be pretty close to average, maybe marginally longer.

A four hour runtime is quite unusual.

The studio expecting a normal runtime length film seems quite reasonable.

[gbaji]

There's a big gap between "two hours" and "four hours". And the Snyder cut was the post-whittling down rough cut. It wasn't "this was every second of footage that we shot", it was "this is what I thought was essential after we finished editing". And, honestly, while a few parts felt like they should be cut just because they don't work (Martha being MM in disguise was... just weird) the Snyder cut didn't feel bloated or full of fat that needed to be trimmed. It felt like it was as tightly cut as it could be without sacrificing something important.



Well, no, it kind of does say something about his style, because we saw the Whedon cut and we saw the Snyder cut and it shows us what happens to his style when you try to compress it into a more standard run time. And, as I've already said, I said, Rebel Moon feels a lot like the Whedon cut in some ways. The Whedon cut's problem wasn't that it didn't make sense to the point where you couldn't follow the plot, it was that the plot points felt rushed and weren't emotionally justified. I understood Whedon but I believed Synder.

Right. I guess that question here is whether the "fault" is Synder filming JL in a way that only worked in a 4 hour long format, or the studio asking for a 2 hour long format in the first place (Yes, that's a semi rhetorical question).

The director knows going in what the target length of the film is to be. It's 100% on him to make the film "work" in that format. Snyder has shown (repeatedly), that he just can't do this. And yes, if you've filmed something with so many interlocking plot elements that it takes 4 hours of run time to make them work properly, then anyone who is required to edit that down to a 2 hour runtime is going to be forced to either chop out whole plot elements (which will likely make the resulting film incoherent) or trim down the film time for each element (which will make the resulting film feel rushed).

Most directors go into a film project knowing what the core plot is, and the key bits they need to cover. They then fill in the gaps, and may include a variety of side plots as well. But they (should) do this with a conscious eye towards making each scene potentially cutable. So the same core plot points are covered in multiple scenes, such that you can include "the scene in the kitchen" *or* "the scene in the backyard" *or* "the scene with the funny looking dog in it", and cut out any two of those scenes, and the audience still got the core plot dialog they need from that portion of the film. A bad director films like 10 different scenes, involving different locations and characters, doing a variety of different possibly unrelated things, but then scatters the core plot dialog bits across them all, such that you can't understand the plot without including at least part of all 10 scenes in the film. Worse, they may include references to those scenes in other scenes, meaning you can't remove one without removing the reference in another. That's what Synder does. So now, for the audience to understand the core plot, we must also include bits from all 10 scenes. And to make those bits make sense, we have to include any other side/sub plot stuff that associates with or references them as well. That's how you get bloat in a film. Which means that to cut it down to the alloted length, every one of those side/sub plots must be included in some way, but in such a "short" way, as to all feel rushed. And, since you are now spending this time on side/sub plots, the scenes that are actual key/core to the main plot also have to be trimmed down, making them also feel rushed.

Again, the very fact that you need a 4 hour directors cut for the film to actually make sense and not feel rushed, is strong evidence that Snyder isn't doing a good job of directing. His job isn't to write the film. It's to direct the filming. If he wants to make a 4 hour film, he needs to get a studio to approve and fund a 4 hour film. Honestly though? I suspect that if a studio green-lit a 4 hour film project for Snyder to direct, we'd still get a film that felt rushed and incomplete, and now need a 6-8 hour directors cut to make it work. Rebel Moon somewhat proves that point. He's doing just part 1 of a three part series, and still can't keep the darn thing tight.

LotR didn't need an extended edition. Maybe the extended edition is better, or maybe it's just neat to see what else was shot, but Peter Jackson made a perfectly good movie that fit within the runtime he was allotted and became a beloved classic all on its own. Rebel Moon has been rather poorly reviewed (regardless of whether you personally liked it or not) and has some glaring problems that people are looking to a director's cut to fix.

LotR's extended cut adds in a few extra details, which are nice, but absolutely not necessary to follow and enjoy the film(s).

Honestly, I think a big part of the problem with Rebel Moon (aside from some of the story elements), is that they felt the need to have each character have a fairly long and drawn out "introduction" scene. So we get the (otherwise unnecessary) shoot out sequence in the bar, which introduces them to the pilot guy (somewhat randomly). I mean, could have had him just show up and say "I'm a pilot" (cause they're looking for a ship to take them elsewhere), right? They have this long and unnecessary sequence with the griffon taming/riding. Sure. Looks great. Serves zero purpose in the plot. They have a long and unnecessary fight sequence between sword wielding woman and the drow thing. Why? Did that fight have anything to do with her decision to help our heroes? Nope. Could have had like 1-2 minutes of dialogue (in which you could explain/advance the plot) instead. Some monster we don't know anything about and don't really care about, on a world we know nothing about and also don't care about, gets killed. And we spend like 10-12 minutes on that sequence. Why? At least the general guy's recruitment was somewhat quick (they just scooped him up while he was passed out drunk). I wouldn't be surprised if the "Snyder cut" includes a long scene of him fighting someone/thing in the arena, winning, then partying and passing out, but blessedly that scene didn't actually include the other characters, nor any plot important bits, so it was cut out entirely. Honestly, the only intro scene that was at least pretty much done correctly and with good pacing/dialog was the actual rebel leader guy. It was relatively quick, established the rebels and their brother/sister leaders, showed some internal conflict in terms of what they wanted/needed to do, and actually advanced the plot a fair bit (and yeah, tied into the scene on the other planet with the guy who was supplying the rebels getting curb stomped). Presuambly, that bit sets up some future bits with the sister and the remaining rebels going into the next film. Detailing that group was "necessary". All the other stuff in the various intros? Not necessary at all.

Spend less time on individual scenes and more time on scenes with the whole group together. That way you can actually build up, in the audience's minds, why this group is actually forming, what their motivations are, and what their plan is. But because so much time was spent on unnecessary (cool looking, but still unnecessary) stuff, we didn't get enough of the "why are we all doing this in the first place again?" bits. Imagine how much more we could have learned about and from the characters by having more screen time of the entire group working/talking together, instead of each individual going through their own personal action sequence? But... that's not how it was filmed, so that's not how it could appear on the screen.

And yeah. There's some core story/plot stuff that I have an issue with as well, but that's a bit of a side issue from the direction of the film itself. There's a core pacing/story problem in that the first film basically spends the entire film just on introduction and formation of the team. They don't actually do anything significant together until the very very end of the film (and it's not something they planned). The pacing of a team-up story just tends to work better if you spent less time getting the team together, then show them doing something together, and *then* show something going horribly wrong and them barely getting out of it. This film just kinda cut the middle part of that plot progression out entirely. Leaving us kinda dangling with a sense of: "Um... They are together, kinda, but not really, cause they haven't actually done anything but narrowly avoid all getting captured and killed together". That's not really the team building excerise that most people expect.

But to be fair, the problem there is with the story itself. Our heroes don't seem to have any mission except "somehow attack and defeat a space cruiser coming to threaten the village". The literally never even get to the "what is our plan?" point in the entire film. They're still kinda scrambling from one place to another gathering people and things for an still not discussed <something>, when the final conflict in the film occurs. So when people come out of watching it feeling like it's an incomplete film, that's a big part of it. And yeah, maybe that was the core screenplay/script that was just bad. Or maybe things went off the rails during filming. Can't say for sure. But something definitely went wrong with this somewhere along the line.

[BloodSquirrel]

Most directors go into a film project knowing what the core plot is, and the key bits they need to cover. They then fill in the gaps, and may include a variety of side plots as well. But they (should) do this with a conscious eye towards making each scene potentially cutable. So the same core plot points are covered in multiple scenes, such that you can include "the scene in the kitchen" *or* "the scene in the backyard" *or* "the scene with the funny looking dog in it", and cut out any two of those scenes, and the audience still got the core plot dialog they need from that portion of the film.

That sounds like a very specific (and rather dysfunctional) MCU "hire a director-writer and tell them how the movie has to fit in the metaplot" thing. Usually, you either have a mostly complete script that you hire a director to film or the director is the driver behind the whole project and it's his plot.

Either way, you should know what scenes are core to your story before filming. You don't film 20 scenes and then figure out how to cut them down to 10, you film 12 scenes and realize that the movie works well enough without 2 of them. Making each scene potentially cutable means that you're building fat into your movie where you don't need to. A good writer/director shouldn't need to do that because they should know about how long the script will be once shot, with some parts that can be stretched or compressed as needed. If you really need to, you can do a few minor reshoots or ADR a line of dialog to fix something after principle filming.

The "film twice as many scenes as you need" style came from mismanagement at Disney where they rush into production and can't figure out what they want to do until the 3rd round of reshoots/test audiences. That's not how movies are usually made, especially not expensive action blockbusters.

[gbaji]

That sounds like a very specific (and rather dysfunctional) MCU "hire a director-writer and tell them how the movie has to fit in the metaplot" thing. Usually, you either have a mostly complete script that you hire a director to film or the director is the driver behind the whole project and it's his plot.

Sure. There's a range in there. Kinda the point. Different projects will have different degrees to which the director has a free hand in the process from outline, to script, to screenplay.

I'm not making any point at all as to whether more or less "free hand" is good or bad inherently, but merely that Snyder has shown a marked inability to reign in said projects in direct proportion to how much of that free hand he's given.

Either way, you should know what scenes are core to your story before filming. You don't film 20 scenes and then figure out how to cut them down to 10, you film 12 scenes and realize that the movie works well enough without 2 of them. Making each scene potentially cutable means that you're building fat into your movie where you don't need to. A good writer/director shouldn't need to do that because they should know about how long the script will be once shot, with some parts that can be stretched or compressed as needed. If you really need to, you can do a few minor reshoots or ADR a line of dialog to fix something after principle filming.

There are a few different approaches to directing. Yes, obviously, you want to minimize the amount of work you did (and paid for!) that never ends up in the finished product. But also, you want to leave yourself enough editorial wiggle room, so you can make adjustments after the fact. Once you've paid the overhead for the actors, the set, the crew, etc, for any given shooting session, the actual film (well, digital bits now), is cheap. Film tons of stuff. Film from as many angles as possible. Change the dialog up as many different ways as possible as well. That's what I'm talking about. It costs 10x more to reshoot a scene, than if you'd shot more at the time you had everyone on set and ready to go in the first place. Doing more takes, and variations on the scene itself, is always worth doing right then if you can. You are correct if "scene" means "set built/dressed for a specifc purpose, filmed at, and then never used elsewhere". But that's not exclusively what I was talking about above.

I guess my (kinda counter) point is that Snyder is not just filming 20 scenes and then trimming it down to 10, he's filming 20 scenes that are interconnected and all required to tell the story, in a film that only has enough duration for 10 scenes, forcing some poor editing team to have to cut it down. Then he wails that someone "edited my vision away" when the film (predicably) bombs, and says "but if you watch my directors cut that's twice as long, it'll be great!". When, as you just said, the correct answer is to plan for making the film work in the correct number of scenes to tell the story in the time alloted (whatever that number actually is).

Clearly, no matter how we interpret things, Snyder is doing something wrong here.

The "film twice as many scenes as you need" style came from mismanagement at Disney where they rush into production and can't figure out what they want to do until the 3rd round of reshoots/test audiences. That's not how movies are usually made, especially not expensive action blockbusters.

Sure. But if you *are* going to film twice as many scenes as needed, you really need to make sure the scenes are disconnected enough that you can cut half of them and still make a coherent story. While the Disney method may be terrible, and result in cost bloat, the Snyder method costs just as much but also makes the resulting film incoherent, and requires a "directors cut" that is twice as long to make it work. Both are ineffient ways to make a film, but only Snyder's method actually guarantees that the theatrical release will be complete garbage no matter what is done in editing and post production.

[Sapphire Guard]

Honestly, Snyder is the only filmmaker I ever hear this about. To the point that I think that in the SF/F world, I might actually hear the phrase "Snyder Cut" more often than "Director's Cut".

You think that might have something to do with the one very famous Snyder cut for JL being talked about a lot? I mean, for Rebel Moon, I don't hear anything about extended cut except people offended that it exists for no apparent reason.

I actually really like the scene where they try to bluff the admiral about the grain. It's a great scene for building tension, developing the characters, and making the setting feel real and gritty. It's the kind of thing that makes Tarantino movies good- except that Tarantino makes movies where the plot is "A bunch of guys are in a room arguing with each other" or "Two hitmen go get a briefcase and take it back to their boss" where he can spend as much time as he wants with those character scenes and not have to worry about explaining galactic politics or to us.

The obvious parallel is Hans Landa on that French farm, which certainly had more plot than that, yet it still worked well.

There's a big gap between "two hours" and "four hours". And the Snyder cut was the post-whittling down rough cut. It wasn't "this was every second of footage that we shot", it was "this is what I thought was essential after we finished editing". There's a big gap between "two hours" and "four hours". And the Snyder cut was the post-whittling down rough cut. It wasn't "this was every second of footage that we shot", it was "this is what I thought was essential after we finished editing"

You know this how exactly?

He was still working on it before he left, it seems pretty obvious it was going to be trimmed further for a theatrical release in ways that were no longer necessary once it was only home release. I mean, that might not be true, but it seems pretty unlikely.

Well, no, it kind of does say something about his style, because we saw the Whedon cut and we saw the Snyder cut and it shows us what happens to his style when you try to compress it into a more standard run time. And, as I've already said, I said, Rebel Moon feels a lot like the Whedon cut in some ways. The Whedon cut's problem wasn't that it didn't make sense to the point where you couldn't follow the plot, it was that the plot points felt rushed and weren't emotionally justified. I understood Whedon but I believed Synder.

Whedon's cut isn't just a compressed version of Snyder's story. There were new scenes, new plot points. The music was changed, the colour grading was changed. That's the whole point, it wasn't just a compressed version of Snyder's story, it was a different story, which is why people wanted the Snyder cut to begin with.

https://www.indiewire.com/features/g...ge-1202194549/

It really, really is. Most directors release a director's cut or extended edition as more of a bonus version, not a "Sorry, we need two tries to release the right movie" thing.

LotR didn't need an extended edition. Maybe the extended edition is better, or maybe it's just neat to see what else was shot, but Peter Jackson made a perfectly good movie that fit within the runtime he was allotted and became a beloved classic all on its own. Rebel Moon has been rather poorly reviewed (regardless of whether you personally liked it or not) and has some glaring problems that people are looking to a director's cut to fix.

I mean, that is what the extended cut is. No one said it was going to fix anything unless they already didn't like it, it's just more content for people who might be interested in that. If you already didn't like the film, more of it isn't going to change that for you.

LOTR had a difficult time being made, because Peter Jackson had a lot of trouble convincing studios that he needed more than two hours. If you tried to make the LOTR trilogy in a single two hour movie, it would inevitably be butchered, because that's not enough time.

How so? A two hour runtime is an extremely normal length. Over the last decade or so, that would probably be pretty close to average, maybe marginally longer.

A four hour runtime is quite unusual.

There's no chance of a theatrical release of JL was ever going to be four hours, if your assumption is that Snyder originally planned a four hour movie, then you're relying on a faulty assumption.

A two hour movie in itself isn't unusual, but if you suddenly impose that near the end of production of a longer movie you're going to run into problems. If halfway through production of LOTR Peter Jackson was suddenly told 'by the way, this has to be under two hours' it would be very difficult to salvage.

Right. I guess that question here is whether the "fault" is Synder filming JL in a way that only worked in a 4 hour long format, or the studio asking for a 2 hour long format in the first place (Yes, that's a semi rhetorical question).

The director knows going in what the target length of the film is to be. It's 100% on him to make the film "work" in that format. Snyder has shown (repeatedly), that he just can't do this. And yes, if you've filmed something with so many interlocking plot elements that it takes 4 hours of run time to make them work properly, then anyone who is required to edit that down to a 2 hour runtime is going to be forced to either chop out whole plot elements (which will likely make the resulting film incoherent) or trim down the film time for each element (which will make the resulting film feel rushed).

It's the same faulty assumption that the two hour runtime limit was there from the beginning. It wasn't, it was suddenly dropped on them near the end of the production after most of it was done.

Edit:

I guess my (kinda counter) point is that Snyder is not just filming 20 scenes and then trimming it down to 10, he's filming 20 scenes that are interconnected and all required to tell the story, in a film that only has enough duration for 10 scenes, forcing some poor editing team to have to cut it down. Then he wails that someone "edited my vision away" when the film (predicably) bombs, and says "but if you watch my directors cut that's twice as long, it'll be great!". When, as you just said, the correct answer is to plan for making the film work in the correct number of scenes to tell the story in the time alloted (whatever that number actually is).

And this happened... when?

[Tyndmyr]

There's no chance of a theatrical release of JL was ever going to be four hours, if your assumption is that Snyder originally planned a four hour movie, then you're relying on a faulty assumption.

That's what he made, so if it isn't what he planned, then that failure's on him.

A two hour movie in itself isn't unusual, but if you suddenly impose that near the end of production of a longer movie you're going to run into problems. If halfway through production of LOTR Peter Jackson was suddenly told 'by the way, this has to be under two hours' it would be very difficult to salvage.

Not even vaguely. Length requirements are one of the most normal requirements. 2 hours gives a great deal of cushion, and almost every popular film is under two hours in length. Consider the data at https://towardsdatascience.com/are-n...o-a35356b2ca5b ...120 minutes is not even within the normal range for any decade, and all decades show the most popular lengths to be a bit over 100 minutes.

This shouldn't be surprising. Extremely long films cause issues for theaters. Fewer showings can be scheduled per day, and that makes it harder to get more people, and to have a decent number of available times. Viewers, also, can complain when shows are too long. They find they need to take bathroom breaks midshow, grow hungry, or even bored.

Being surprised by such a requirement is like being shocked that your movie is expected to have dialog. Yes, rare exceptions exist. The studio not wanting you to make a wild outlier from the norm is not a strange or crippling exception. If you are shocked by the need for a commercially successful film from a major studio, then you are, frankly, incompetent as a director.

It's the same faulty assumption that the two hour runtime limit was there from the beginning. It wasn't, it was suddenly dropped on them near the end of the production after most of it was done.

If you showed up with a movie in the can, and you didn't have a soundtrack, you would also have the requirement for a soundtrack imposed in most cases. That's a expectation so standard that it may not be verbalized explicitly, but if you fail to account for that in advance, and when confronted with it, become precious and start ranting about your artistic vision, you....are not good at your job, and should probably not make movies until you recognize and learn where you went wrong.

There is no default expectation that directors should be able to film and put out four hour movies. Or movies so long that a cut down to two makes them nonsensical. If Snyder expected that, then what you are saying is that Snyder is an utterly incompetent idiot who does not understand the very basics of the industry he is in.

[gbaji]

He was still working on it before he left, it seems pretty obvious it was going to be trimmed further for a theatrical release in ways that were no longer necessary once it was only home release. I mean, that might not be true, but it seems pretty unlikely.

That's the rub though. We assume that his objective (and presumed studio requirement) was a theatrical release length film (which is about 2 hours). But we have no way to know what that actual release version would look like, since what Snyder actually put together was four hours in length. So the Snyder Cut doesn't answer the question as to whether Whedon butchered Snyder's "vision" for the film and made it awful, or if Snyder's initial film was so horribly done that there was simply no way to salvage it and make it presentable in a 2 hour format, and Whedon just did the best he could with what he had to work with.

Whedon's cut isn't just a compressed version of Snyder's story. There were new scenes, new plot points. The music was changed, the colour grading was changed. That's the whole point, it wasn't just a compressed version of Snyder's story, it was a different story, which is why people wanted the Snyder cut to begin with.

https://www.indiewire.com/features/g...ge-1202194549/

Relevant point from the link. The canisters showed a cut of the film that was 214 minutes long (just over three and a half hours). The writer of the article speculates that it was an "assembly cut", which presumes it would have then been pared down to a 2 hour length. The clear claim in that article by the original folks working on the project is that, if only they'd been allowed to finish the project "their way", it would have been much much better than what was actually released in theaters.

But the 4 hour Synder cut doesn't actually support that claim. It only tells us that you could take the film Snyder and co did back then, and add another ~30 minutes to it, you could make an Ok fiilm with the resulting 4 hours of run time. I mean, we could assume that Snyder *could* have made a great 2 hour film out of that, which was much better than Whedon's, but that's not actually what he did.

I think that's still reasonable support for the argument that Snyder has difficulty making good films in a standard theatrical release length. Which I think is what most of us are actually saying here.

LOTR had a difficult time being made, because Peter Jackson had a lot of trouble convincing studios that he needed more than two hours. If you tried to make the LOTR trilogy in a single two hour movie, it would inevitably be butchered, because that's not enough time.

Right. The difference being that LotR was an already written and established story, taking up three books. Justice League was an original script and screenplay. So, while you can't re-write LotR to make it fit into a 2 hour film format, the Justice League absolutely *should* have been written to fit into that format.

The argument myself, and many others, are making is that Snyder's original story which he wrote, directed, and shot, knowing the studio expected a 2 hour theatrical film, could not actually fit into a 2 hour theatrical format. And guess what? The fact that the Snyder Cut is 4 hours long, actually sorta supports that argument.

There's no chance of a theatrical release of JL was ever going to be four hours, if your assumption is that Snyder originally planned a four hour movie, then you're relying on a faulty assumption.

It's not about what he planned to make, it's what could actually be made out of what he filmed. Lots of people "plan" to get to work on time, but consistently fail to do so. That's kinda the point. You are correct that he almost certainly "planned" on making a standard 2 hourish long film. The question is: With what he filmed, could it have actually been trimmed to 2 hours and been watchable?

A two hour movie in itself isn't unusual, but if you suddenly impose that near the end of production of a longer movie you're going to run into problems. If halfway through production of LOTR Peter Jackson was suddenly told 'by the way, this has to be under two hours' it would be very difficult to salvage.

That's odd, since you previously stated that "it was going to be trimmed down for theatrical release", and that Snyder "never originally planned a four hour movie" (and the link you posted seems to clearly state an expecation that the cut in the cannisters was intended to be futher trimmed as well).

But now you're claiming that the studio never intended from the start for a 2 hour film length, and that this was imposed on them "near the end of production"? Huh? Where the heck is that coming from? Barring any source or evidence to the contrary, I'm going with the sensible and reasonable assumption that the studio asked for a 2 hour feature length film, and expected to get a 2 hour feature length film, and that Snyder always knew this through the entire point, from script, to screenplay, to filming.

You seem to be trying to claim that it's somehow not Snyder's fault that he filmed it in a way that couldn't be trimmed to 2 hours, because he didn't know that was a requirement? Which is it? That he knew this all along, and of course he could have done this if desired, but choose to release a 4 hour version instead because he was no longer constrained by that time limit? Or that the time limit never existed in the first place? Because both can't be true.

All we know for certain is that while we could speculate about whether Snyder could have taken his work and created a masterful 2 hour theatrical release out of it, and it would have been much better than the actual realease (which is what the link seems to hope for), but we have no evidence to support that speculation. We only know that he could make a decent film out of his work, if put into a 4 hour format instead. Which, to me, actually suggests that he *couldn't* do it in 2 hours and make it work. He wrote and filmed a story that took 4 hours to tell properly. Now, maybe he added a ton of stuff that he originally intended to cut. But the point is that he didn't film anything more and add to it, so... what the heck would have been in our hypothetical 2 hour Snyder Cut?

It's the same faulty assumption that the two hour runtime limit was there from the beginning. It wasn't, it was suddenly dropped on them near the end of the production after most of it was done.

Again. I have no clue where you are getting this. Do you have a source to support this? From say, someone on the studio side of things? I find it very hard to believe that the studio initially said "make is as long as you want", and then later changed their mind. Studio's dont tend to do that, for precisely the reason that it's self sabotage to do so, and it practically guarantees that their money will go down the drain.

I'm not saying that this could not have happened (I've heard stranger things), but it seems odd that the studio would apply this limit to Whedon, coming in after the fact to finish the project, but not on the folks initially doing the screenplay and filming in the first place.

And this happened... when?

What is the "this" in your question? If you're talking about my assessment of Snyder's reaction to poor reviews of a film in which he's credited as director, but didn't actually have control over the final version, I'm reasonably sure that "wailed about it" is pretty accurate.

He was very much upset that his name was on a film that wasn't what his "vision" for the film actually was. I'm not sure we can interpret the whole "he sent a picture of a film canister showing his cut of the film" as anything other than hiim responding to criticisms of the released film by saying "that's not the film I made". Also, it's reasonable to interpret the fact that the Snyder Cut exists in the first place, as his attempt to showcase "what my vision actually was".

Which is why it's perfectly valid to point out, that if that cut actually represents his vision of the project, that it takes up twice as much time as the theatrical release time frame he was (again, barring some source confirming otherwise) expected to actually release it in.

If that was his response to critics, then the question still remains: Ok. What exactly would the actual film you were asked to release have looked like? That is *not* answered with the cut he made after the fact.


If you were talking about something else entirely, them maybe restate your question in a more clear format?

[wilphe]

Not even vaguely. Length requirements are one of the most normal requirements. 2 hours gives a great deal of cushion, and almost every popular film is under two hours in length. Consider the data at https://towardsdatascience.com/are-n...o-a35356b2ca5b ...120 minutes is not even within the normal range for any decade, and all decades show the most popular lengths to be a bit over 100 minutes.

Yes but the theatre experience has changed over the years

These days you go to see a film and that is it

Whereas traditionally you get an entire evening's entertainment with a B-movie, a cartoon, a news-real as well as the headline picture

[gbaji]

Yes but the theatre experience has changed over the years

These days you go to see a film and that is it

Whereas traditionally you get an entire evening's entertainment with a B-movie, a cartoon, a news-real as well as the headline picture

Honestly? Unless you're talking about small indie theaters, the whole "you go to see a film and that is it" has been the norm for like 40 years now. Ever since the introduction of the indoor multiplex theaters (late 70s though mid 80s), the vast majority of films shown in theaters have fit into a "120 minutes or less" format (most being closer to 90 minutes than 120).

Different formats are used, of course (double feature showings still exist out there... somewhere), but that's by far the exception and not the rule, and certainly does not drive the industry in terms of "first run showings", and what studios aim for with those in term of feature length. Long films really have to be justified. They cost more to show in theaters.

Although... I could seem more of that old time format coming back, especially with the rise of "luxury theaters". Maybe. Especially with more and more people spending their money on streaming services and home theaters instead, so they need "something more" to bring folks into the theater in the first place. But that's all somewhat ironic given that this topic started with a discussion of a streaming based release of a feature film. Hmm...

[Sapphire Guard]

I mean, Zack said very little about it for two years. I imagine he had bigger concerns since his daughter had just died. The whole 'release the Snyder cut' thing was initially mostly fan driven, the idea that he was wailing about his lost vision is extremely unfair.

The idea that he can't make short films is also extremely implausible, given that Sucker Punch, 300 and Dawn of the Dead are all under 2 hours. Rebel Moon itself is only 2 hours 13 mins, and the others tend to be about 2 hours 30.

The two hour mandate source is appear to be a Wall Street Journal article that is now behind a pay wall, so I can't confirm it.

Per the Hollywood reporter, before he left he had already cut it down to 2 hours 20 minutes.

Then Joss Whedon took over, and his version didn't just compress what was there. There were new scenes, new plot points, he changed the composer. Apparently he wrote up to 80 pages of script. If it was purely a matter of compressing for time, he could have done things made the WW scene at the start a montage
or cut it entirely(it doesn't directly affect the plot), or not bother with mystery Russian family. But he didn't.

We haven't seen the shorter Snyder cut, so whether it would have worked or not is just speculation. There was a four hour cut that was always intended to be cut down, whether it could or couldn't have been made is something we don't know.

Assuming he couldn't from incomplete work that was derailed by his daughter killing herself seems an extraordinarily harsh take, though.

[wilphe]

Honestly? Unless you're talking about small indie theaters, the whole "you go to see a film and that is it" has been the norm for like 40 years now. Ever since the introduction of the indoor multiplex theaters (late 70s though mid 80s), the vast majority of films shown in theaters have fit into a "120 minutes or less" format (most being closer to 90 minutes than 120).

Yes, but the data set cited was using movies as far back as the 20s and 30s which you cannot compare with later movies designed for a different paradigm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_feature

For example, 9/9/39 there was a double bill at the Fox Theatre of Hawaiian Nights (65 minutes) and Beau Geste (112 minutes)

Except that instead of Beau Geste they announced a surprise screening of something else

That something else was a rough cut of Gone with the Wind running at 4 hours 25 minutes

So that evening probably stretched to about 6 hours

Something else I remember though is that longer movies tended to have intermissions and I don't think that happens anymore

[warty goblin]

Regardless of what they were doing in days of Yore, in the 2010s two hours is really short for a major capstone/crossover genre film. Planning for a 3ish hour runtime in that field seems completely reasonable, so a 3 1/2 hour early cut seems about right.

And having the Director's Cut be seen as authoritative is not exactly unusual. Blade Runner is an obvious example, I suspect that one of the fifteen zillion versions of Alexander is preferred over the theatrical cut. The four hour Director's Cut of Kingdom of Heaven is vastly superior to the original and in my opinion should be treated as the definitive version, Scott also has a 4 hour cut of Napoleon in the works which might turn it into a functional movie. I will absolutely go to bat for the DC of Avatar, which expands and rounds things out very nicely.

As for LoTR, yes the theatrical cuts work, but again the extended versions are tremendous improvements. Return of the King in particular is much improved in the EE, indeed I think there are parts of the theatrical cut that just don't work. They pretty much completely replace the theatrical cuts in my mind, and I've never met anybody doesn't basically think this. This isn't exactly new either, there's stuff in the theatrical cut of Two Towers that only appears in the extended cut of Fellowship.

Bottom line, it isn't exactly uncommon for big, ambitious movies to be improved when liberated from the exceedingly tight constraints of the modern theater. One of the (many) regrettable things about the move to streaming is that the Director's Cut seems a lot less common than it was ten years ago.

[DaedalusMkV]

Something else I remember though is that longer movies tended to have intermissions and I don't think that happens anymore

Speaking of which, who do I have to write to reinstate intermissions on movies longer than 2 hours? I've been to plays with 2 hour runtimes and an intermission, but movie theatres simple seem to expect me to sit in my seat and like it for 200+ minutes. Darn it, give me a chance to use the washroom, maybe grab a drink or a snack that I didn't think I needed when this movie started but now I very much do. Adding 10 minutes to the runtime on these endurance matches shouldn't massively impact anything, but it would sure improve my enjoyment of the film to not have to worry about rupturing my bladder because I dared to actually hydrate at some point during the day I went to see the movie.

Plus, it would probably be good for concession revenues. And you could play trailers or ads or something during the break. We all win.

I've never lived in an era where movies had intermissions... But I hope one day that will change.

[gbaji]

I mean, Zack said very little about it for two years. I imagine he had bigger concerns since his daughter had just died. The whole 'release the Snyder cut' thing was initially mostly fan driven, the idea that he was wailing about his lost vision is extremely unfair.

The idea that he can't make short films is also extremely implausible, given that Sucker Punch, 300 and Dawn of the Dead are all under 2 hours. Rebel Moon itself is only 2 hours 13 mins, and the others tend to be about 2 hours 30.

In the link you provided it talks about " Snyder fed into the movement by occasionally teasing images from his movie or storyboards on social media, in some ways only stoking the hot embers.". So yeah, the idea that he was just this passive observer, who had no opinion on the subject, and wasn't feeding into it at all, and was just as surprised as anyone when WB called him up to make a new cut, is just plain silly.

Also, while I can't say for certain that Snyder cannot make a sub 2 hour film, my point was that he has a difficult time doing so, and that difficulty seems to be in direct proportion to how much control he has directly over the actual script and screenplay. If he's handed a script and told to make a film out of it, he'll do a great job. But as his clout has grown, he's been handed more control, and that's where his projects have tended to go off the rails.

The two hour mandate source is appear to be a Wall Street Journal article that is now behind a pay wall, so I can't confirm it.

Per the Hollywood reporter, before he left he had already cut it down to 2 hours 20 minutes.

Er... It's also in the same paragraph you just referenced, in the same article you just linked:

"In January 2017, Snyder had what he considered his optimal version of Justice League, almost four hours long, although he knew it was something the studio would not release. Warners wanted a cut in the two-hour range, and he delivered a rough version with an approximate two-hour, 20-minute running time."

So can we agree that the studio specifically asked him for a 2 hour cut? This isn't something that was made up, or false, or a rummor. It was the length of film he was asked to make. His "optimal vision" was of a 4 hour cut. He delivered a 2:20 cut that was "rough" and "needed much work". It's unclear if that work would result in increasing or decreasing the runtime to make it work though (which is more than a small bit of detail that we don't have).

Then Joss Whedon took over, and his version didn't just compress what was there. There were new scenes, new plot points, he changed the composer. Apparently he wrote up to 80 pages of script. If it was purely a matter of compressing for time, he could have done things made the WW scene at the start a montage or cut it entirely(it doesn't directly affect the plot), or not bother with mystery Russian family. But he didn't.

Sure. No one's disputing this fact. The question is whether that was a result of Whedon being an evil jerk who just felt like totally changing Snyder's "vision" to something else entirely, or if what Whedon was handed was not something that could actually be trimmed into the 2 hour time frame the studio wanted and remain even reasonably coherent, so he was forced to reshoot whole scenes, change the script, and essentially remake the film in a new direction.

I don't know which is which. I mean, it's possible for either to be true. But... my starting assumption after Snyder left is that the studio wanted the film to be finished. They brought Whedon in to do that. I'm reasonably certaiin that if there was sufficient existing film to make a complete 2 hour film right there in front of them, they would have simply edited the film and reelased it. I doubt the stuidio authorised (and paid for) Whedon to do all of this additional work, just to stroke his own ego and let him do his "vision" instead. I mean, it's possible, but I don't see the monetary motivation for WB allowing this.

So yeah, my default assumtion is that WB didn't approve all that extra work (and cost) just for kicks. It was done because they felt that it was necessary to make the film work in the time alloted.

Now. I'd be perfectly willing to change that assessment, if Snyder actually took the original film he shot and edited and post produced into a 2 hour theatrical release, and it was actually better than the original film.

But that's not what he did, so we'll never know for sure if he could have done that. Which is kind of my point.

We haven't seen the shorter Snyder cut, so whether it would have worked or not is just speculation. There was a four hour cut that was always intended to be cut down, whether it could or couldn't have been made is something we don't know.

Correct. Which means that the existence of the longer cut doesn't tell us anything in terms of whether Whedon just did a terrible job with a gold mine of great material, or Whedon literally did the best he could with a steaming pile of gargage he was handed. We just dont know. Again though, as I said above, my default is to assume that the studio isn't going to authorize additional work and cost unless they feel they have no other choice. So either Whedon managed to pull the greatest snow job over the studio like ever, or there were some really serious problems with the original footage such that it simply could not be made into a feature film of the correct length without massive reshooting (and yeah, at that point Whedon almost certainly decided to take it in another direction anyway, cause why not).

Assuming he couldn't from incomplete work that was derailed by his daughter killing herself seems an extraordinarily harsh take, though.

I assume nothing in relation to his daughter killing herself. I just don't assume that, in the absence of that event, we would have gotten an outstanding 2 hour feature length film out of Snyder either. One has nothing to do with the other. The film that was in the can was the film that was in the can at that point. In theory, he was supposed to be in editing and post production ramp up phase. Which, if that was actually true, should have made for a trivial easy final edit and post process, and Whedon's work would have been perfunctory.

Again. We can speculate that Whedon was just being an egotistical jerk and somehow managed to get the studio to appease his egojerkness *or* we can may speculate that perhaps what Snyder left them to work with just wasn't complete and usable.

And yeah, we can also speculate that Snyder's "genius" would have made it all work, if only he'd been at the helm. Maybe. I just don't see any actual evidence that supports that particular speculation, and a lot that suggests the opposite.

[Sapphire Guard]

In the link you provided it talks about " Snyder fed into the movement by occasionally teasing images from his movie or storyboards on social media, in some ways only stoking the hot embers.". So yeah, the idea that he was just this passive observer, who had no opinion on the subject, and wasn't feeding into it at all, and was just as surprised as anyone when WB called him up to make a new cut, is just plain silly.

That is very different from 'wailing about his lost vision', and confirming that the cut exists over two years after the original release with one social media post.

Do you know anything about other posts to that effect before then, or is that just an assumption? What was said in them?

lso, while I can't say for certain that Snyder cannot make a sub 2 hour film, my point was that he has a difficult time doing so, and that difficulty seems to be in direct proportion to how much control he has directly over the actual script and screenplay. If he's handed a script and told to make a film out of it, he'll do a great job. But as his clout has grown, he's been handed more control, and that's where his projects have tended to go off the rails.

But what is this perception based on? He has made 3 films under two hours, Watchmen was long (of course it was, it's a vast, complex story), and otherwise we have Man of Steel, which comes in at 2 hours 30 mins, which over two hours but nothing unusual. BVS is also 2 hours 30. Rebel Moon is 2 hours 13 mins.

The exception is Justice League, where it is fairly clear he didn't have full control. What project are you referring to where he had more control and went of the rails?

The two hour mandate is a thing, but it was done when the process was already begun. Zack delivered a unfinished 2 hours 20 cut, which WB rejected for unknown reasons. Whether you think that was justified or not depends on how much faith you have in WB execs. You appear to have more faith in them than I do.

No one said the original cut was genius, but the perception that he can't make coherent films under 2 hours is pretty silly given that has previously made 3.

The idea that he made a film where all the scenes were interconnected and couldn't be cut doesn't especially ring true either, considering WW's intro was left in despite the fact that it was totally possible to cut it. That wasn't 'we need to cut everything for time', it was just a bad creative choice in the 2017 version. The 2017 version's Russian family scenes could have been cut, but weren't, and that's not because of the failures of the original cut, it's just an outright bad creative choice.

'He makes everything interconnected so scenes can't be cut' doesn't really make much sense as a criticism, because scenes that could have been cut were left in the 2017 version.

[gbaji]

That is very different from 'wailing about his lost vision', and confirming that the cut exists over two years after the original release with one social media post.

Do you know anything about other posts to that effect before then, or is that just an assumption? What was said in them?

I'm not going to go scouring the internet. I don't tend to spend time on fan sites, so I can't speak directly to it. What I can base this on is my own perception based on friends of mine that I have that *do* spend time on fan sites, and are much more active in the "current gossip about <whatever>", than I am, and my own recollection of repeatedly hearing about Snyder being upset that the film was released with his name as director, when it wasn't "his vision", and repeatedly hearing about how Snyder had said that if they'd used his original plan for the film it would have been so much better, etc, etc, ad nausium. So yeah, any source showing that he spent effort "fanning the flames" of that position on the film, is (for me anyway) plenty suffient to support a perception of his actions and motivations that I've held all along. Call that confirmation bias if you want, but there is it.

The fact that we then see him spend the time and effort to make a "Synder Cut" does not seem like the actions of a disinterested party, who was fine with moving on, but rather someone somewhat obsessed with making "his vision" of the film. That could very well be me reading into his motivations a fair amount. Whatever.

The two hour mandate is a thing, but it was done when the process was already begun. Zack delivered a unfinished 2 hours 20 cut, which WB rejected for unknown reasons. Whether you think that was justified or not depends on how much faith you have in WB execs. You appear to have more faith in them than I do.

Not sure what you are saying, or asking here. The cut he delivered was a very rought cut. It's unclear how much more needed to be taken away or added to it, to make it into a workable film.

All we do know, is that when he had the opportunity to do the film exactly how he wanted to, it was 4 hours long.

Which, you know, supports my original point:

Also, while I can't say for certain that Snyder cannot make a sub 2 hour film, my point was that he has a difficult time doing so, and that difficulty seems to be in direct proportion to how much control he has directly over the actual script and screenplay. If he's handed a script and told to make a film out of it, he'll do a great job. But as his clout has grown, he's been handed more control, and that's where his projects have tended to go off the rails.

As an aside, I decided to actually re-watch both cuts of JL this weekend (yeah, I'm a sucker, but to be honest, I'd forgotten a lot of details). I intentionally watched the Snyder Cut first then the Whedon Cut (reverse from how I originally watched them, and you know.. not 3+ years apart).

Let's just say that it was eye opening which bits were in one and also in the other, and how they played out. I'm not a huge fan of either, but oddly enough, I actually still enjoyed the Whedon Cut more. It was a more coherent story, focused more on the actual objectives and action going on, and had far fewer of the "this makes no sense" stuff that tends to bother me.

One example of this. In the Snyder Cut, there are two areas where Batman instructs the team to function a specific way ("he has a plan"). Once when they rescue the folks from the underwater lair near Metropolis, and again when they assault the main base near the end. In the Snyder Cut, Batman says to do one thing ("lets wait and act as a group" and "I'll draw them off while you asault the base"), and everyone else literally does the exact opposite. This is never mentioned in any way, nor does Batman make note of it. It's left as this odd "why did they all do the exact opposite, but he said nothing about it". It's just left as a "dangling plot/whatever issue". Snyder seems to care more about dramatic action sequences (blowing lots and lots of things up) than the actual decisions that lead to them make any sense. In contrast, the Whedon cut still includes Cyborg jumping the gun in the first fight, but actually cuts out the initial Batman statement entirely (so there is no conflict or disagreement on how to act in the first place). Later, Batman does decide to lead all the demons off to allow the team to attack (and actually includes a more sensible method and reason for that to work, which is just missing from the longer cut), and the team does ignore him, but there's actual dialogue explaining why ("we should all work as a team and not have a loner sacrificing himself"). It actually works much much better in the Whedon cut. Also doesn't hurt that the portion of the film detailing the combat outside the tower is much much much shorter in the Whedon cut, making it feel more like they are fighting their way into the tower, as opposed to like 20 minutes of gratuitous and repetitive violence (again, outside, which is not where they're trying to get to) in the Snyder cut.

So yeah. That, and several other similar "less is actually more" bits I actually preferred in the Whedon Cut. Go figure!

[Tyndmyr]

Huge fan of Chronicles of Riddick here. I suspect it works more for people who enjoy roleplaying games.

Riddick was amazing. Maybe in some alternate universe, that became the giant franchise instead of Fast and the Furious. I wouldn't have minded that.

And look at how he handled Watchmen. Now, granted, it's a fool's errand to try to make Watchmen into a 2-hour movie, so I don't blame him entirely. But it was very clear to me, sitting in the theater, that he had no idea what the heart of that story was. He was fixated on the superficials.

Watchmen ends up remaining still a fairly good movie, IMO. The reason for this is simple...the graphic novel is basically a detailed shooting script. You have utterly consistent backgrounds, settings, etc. Snyder didn't do any of that, he just shot it as is. Many sequences are literally shot for shot. This keeps the whole affair relatively tight.

Are there things to quibble about? Like the ending? Yeah. Sure. Still, it at least mostly makes sense, it didn't become a bloated four hour monstrosity, and the aesthetic is dark enough to fit Snyder's lighting preferences. Watchmen's not actually all that bad as a movie.

Yes but the theatre experience has changed over the years

These days you go to see a film and that is it

Whereas traditionally you get an entire evening's entertainment with a B-movie, a cartoon, a news-real as well as the headline picture

Outside of the couple of drive in theaters still hanging on, this model's been dead for about sixty years. As an explanation of Snyder's style, I don't think it works. It stopped being a thing before he was even born, even as a kid he wouldn't really have been influenced by this expectation, let alone expected it would be normal in the modern era.

In the modern era, a two hour film is normal, and slightly higher than average. There hasn't ever really been a time when four hour films are normal. Yeah, weird offbeat films exist that break pretty much any rule you can think of at least once, but there's a normal expectation that one goes to the theater and watches a movie for about two hours, plus maybe some trailers beforehand.

But what is this perception based on? He has made 3 films under two hours, Watchmen was long (of course it was, it's a vast, complex story), and otherwise we have Man of Steel, which comes in at 2 hours 30 mins, which over two hours but nothing unusual. BVS is also 2 hours 30. Rebel Moon is 2 hours 13 mins.

Army of the dead was also about 2.5 hours, and suffers from some of the same problems. Really cool basic idea, but ends up kinda bloated, every good idea is stuffed in, and most of them feel unfinished.

Of his ten movies, four are under two hours, and they are his first four movies. He hasn't kept a film under two hours in over a decade.

That's a pretty notable trend towards length as he gained fame and latitude.

[Sapphire Guard]

Sorry for delay, it was one part mustering the will to care, one part playing Project Zero 3.

I'm not going to go scouring the internet. I don't tend to spend time on fan sites, so I can't speak directly to it. What I can base this on is my own perception based on friends of mine that I have that *do* spend time on fan sites, and are much more active in the "current gossip about <whatever>", than I am, and my own recollection of repeatedly hearing about Snyder being upset that the film was released with his name as director, when it wasn't "his vision", and repeatedly hearing about how Snyder had said that if they'd used his original plan for the film it would have been so much better, etc, etc, ad nausium. So yeah, any source showing that he spent effort "fanning the flames" of that position on the film, is (for me anyway) plenty suffient to support a perception of his actions and motivations that I've held all along. Call that confirmation bias if you want, but there is it.

The fact that we then see him spend the time and effort to make a "Synder Cut" does not seem like the actions of a disinterested party, who was fine with moving on, but rather someone somewhat obsessed with making "his vision" of the film. That could very well be me reading into his motivations a fair amount. Whatever.

I mean, no one expects academic rigour from everyone watching any given movie, but to decide that a real person is some kind of entitled whiner wailing about his lost vision, I would hope that that would actually be based on something concrete. Fan narratives make judgements about people a lot of the time without good information, and so are frequently incorrect.

There was a big fan movement around the Snyder cut and a good deal of discourse about it, so it would be natural to hear about it a lot, but given how he had bigger concerns at the time, I think the fandom perception may very well not be accurate. I would suspect he was too busy dealing with the fallout from his dead daughter to be waste time teasing the fandom. He didn't even confirm it existed until two years later.

I didn't watch the JLs (meant to, but never got around to it), but I do remember liking Bruce's 'Save One' scene. It's not like everything was terrible, but for a two hour movie, it holds on to a lot of unnecessary scenes and cuts some more necessary ones (why the Mother boxes are waking up, it wouldn't have taken much time.), which makes me doubt that it was just cutting stuff (why change the composer, that doesn't affect the runtime). There was more at play than ' we need to cut this for time.'
'

Army of the dead was also about 2.5 hours, and suffers from some of the same problems. Really cool basic idea, but ends up kinda bloated, every good idea is stuffed in, and most of them feel unfinished.

Of his ten movies, four are under two hours, and they are his first four movies. He hasn't kept a film under two hours in over a decade.

That's a pretty notable trend towards length as he gained fame and latitude.

It's a pretty natural progression to bigger budgets and more complicated stories with larger casts. But the idea that he can't make films under two hours runs into a bit of an obstacle in the fact that he has in fact made four of ten.

MOS and BVS are 2 hours thirty, which is not particularly unreasonable in length. JL was four hours because it was released on stream and not limited to theater length, it was a unique situation that people are taking as the norm for... some reason?

Army of the Dead (haven't seen it) went back to two hours 30, it's not like he can't make films shorter than that, because he repeatedly has.

The whole 'how much control he has' is a tricksy thing, because it is very difficult to tell how much control someone has. It's very easy to fall into confirmation bias where the bits you like are just assumed to be out of the person's control and the bits you don't like are assumed to be the parts they had control over, because almost all of them you don't ever actually know.

Rebel Moon is only 2 hours 13 mins, how much latitude do you think he had on that?

It's just... the extent of the Snyder hate is strange. Extended Director cuts are ridiculously common, it's not some kind of rare or strange thing, but the level of resistance this gets is as though it's some great crime against cinema, instead of something in every DVD.

[wilphe]

Outside of the couple of drive in theaters still hanging on, this model's been dead for about sixty years. As an explanation of Snyder's style, I don't think it works. It stopped being a thing before he was even born, even as a kid he wouldn't really have been influenced by this expectation, let alone expected it would be normal in the modern era.

I am aware that model is dead

I raised that point because someone was comparing movie lengths across the history of the medium, and my argument was you can't compare a 100 minute movie from 1930 and one from 2020 and say that film length hasn't changed when they are made to fit different models

[Tyndmyr]

I am aware that model is dead

I raised that point because someone was comparing movie lengths across the history of the medium, and my argument was you can't compare a 100 minute movie from 1930 and one from 2020 and say that film length hasn't changed when they are made to fit different models

That person was me, and I most definitely was not making any argument that models haven't changed. Snyder's style doesn't fit any model, including bog standard modern films. The 1930s are not particularly relevant, though, and I hadn't focused on that at all.

[gbaji]

I mean, no one expects academic rigour from everyone watching any given movie, but to decide that a real person is some kind of entitled whiner wailing about his lost vision, I would hope that that would actually be based on something concrete. Fan narratives make judgements about people a lot of the time without good information, and so are frequently incorrect.

Sure. It's why I don't spend time on fan sites, and don't put a lot of stock in anything on them. However... when the actions of the person in question match up with the stuff I do hear about from fans? That's a degree of confirmation that puts more weight on what was said than otherwise.

So yeah. If even I (who, again, do not spend time on fan sites, present site excepted I suppose) hear stuff like "Snyder is really upset about the Whedon cut, how it destroyed his vision, etc", and then a few years later Synder spends the time and effort to make his own Synder Cut of the same film, I'm going to tend to accept that the folks were probably right. At least, in the absence of any other data suggesting otherwise.

There was a big fan movement around the Snyder cut and a good deal of discourse about it, so it would be natural to hear about it a lot, but given how he had bigger concerns at the time, I think the fandom perception may very well not be accurate. I would suspect he was too busy dealing with the fallout from his dead daughter to be waste time teasing the fandom. He didn't even confirm it existed until two years later.

Again though. I'm reasonably certain he would not have bothered if he personally didn't feel as though he could have done a better job with the material and story. There are a huge number of film projects with fans screaming that "if only it had been done this way, or that way, or <some other director/editor/whatever> was running things, it would be so much better". Yet, this is pretty much the only time I've *ever* seen someone actually follow through on it and release an alternate cut like this. Sure, there are often directors cuts, but those are usually just slightly longer versions released right along with the original, and merely include some additional content that had to be cut from the theatrical release. That's not the same thing here. Not even close.

I didn't watch the JLs (meant to, but never got around to it), but I do remember liking Bruce's 'Save One' scene. It's not like everything was terrible, but for a two hour movie, it holds on to a lot of unnecessary scenes and cuts some more necessary ones (why the Mother boxes are waking up, it wouldn't have taken much time.), which makes me doubt that it was just cutting stuff (why change the composer, that doesn't affect the runtime). There was more at play than ' we need to cut this for time.

Having just watched both films more or less back to back, I can say that both include the exact same information regarding the mother boxes waking up (it's because superman died). In fact, the major plot points and beats were identical in both films. In both, the mother boxes wake up and call out to the bad guys due to superman dying. In both films Batman is trying to build a team and has the same sequence of events occur along the way. In both films Steppenwolf attacks the Amazons and takes their box. In both films he attacks the Atlanteans and takes their box. In both films they figure out they have the last box, and Cyborg has it. In both films they figure out that they are waking up because superman is dead, and decide to use the box to resurrect him. In both films the last box is stolen while they are dealing with superman. In both films there is a climactic battle to defeat the bad guys and prevent the worlds destruction/conquest.

The differences? The Snyder version stretches out many of the scenes well past that needed to impart the information needed for the story to work. Snyder does have much more stuff going on between Cyborg and his father (and has a whole sequence where dad dies in a pretty silly way to be honest). Synder also inserts a lot more detail into the bad guys and their interaction, actually showing us two other villains (Darkseid and whatshisname). But that additional stuff, while intersting maybe for fans of the source material, has zero impact or effect on the actual story. It also makes the main bad guy they are fighting against into a sniveling wimp sort of character.

Oh. And the Snyder cut includes additional stuff about the anti-life formula (which again, doesn't actually change the action nor import of that action one bit for the actual story). But despite having more time, and providing more information, it actually kinda steps on itself as well. The mother boxes were lost when the bad guys attack 5k years ago and were driven off, right? They are now calling out to them, which is why they are returning. This is also the only world that has ever resisted their attacks ever. Yet, when Steppenwolf has his vision showing him the anti-life formula on earth, it's like this huge revelation to him. Which, ok, maybe the motherboxes discovered this while they've been locked up here since the original attack (heck of a coincidence though!). Um... but then there's multiple sets of dialogue as each of the bad guys basically says like "OMG! This is the world where we were defeated long ago. It's the one world we failed to conquer! We must not fail again!". Um... How did you not already know this? It's the world with the freaking mother boxes. Steppenwolf certainly seemed to know exactly who the amazons and the atlanteans were earlier in the film, so presumably knew these were the same folks who defeated them last time, and thus presumably knew this was the same world where they were defeated and lost the mother boxes in the first place. Yet, it's presented as though this is new information somehow, about 2/3rds of the way through the film.

Yeah. So more runtime, and just created a complete headscratcher moment for me there. Makes zero sense. Which really just makes the entire actions and even inclusion of the other villains completely unnecessary and irrelevant to the story and its resolution (which is presumably why Whedon cut them out entirely). If you do a sequel, you can follow up by having Darkseid revealed to be the main big bad behind it all, and go on with said new story. But including him in this film, but having him actually do nothing at all that affects anything at all in the film itself is just wasted time in the film. Outside of a small number of fanboys squeeing over seeing Darkseid in the film, it buys you nothing at all. Whedon was absolutely correct to just cut all of that nonsense out. Leave it for the sequel (if there is one).

Snyder also goes in a much more dark direction with superman (which seems to be a thing for him, to be honest). The scene with Superman's resurrection cuts directly from him flying out of the ship to the scene at the monument site and his fight with the JL (triggered by Cyborg's body kinda reacting to him on it's own, which is the same in both films). But the Snyder cut has this long drawn out gratuitously violent sequence of Superman flying up, then hovering around and blasting the heck out of everyone in the area, blowing up police cars, destroying military vehicles, etc, for... um... no real purpose at all. And yeah, puts a really dark spin on Superman, since it suggests that his goodness isn't something innate about his personality or whatever, but just a learned behavior, so showing up disoriented, his natural inclincation is to just wantonly destroy everything around him. I guess.

And presumably the composer change was also about changing the feel of the characters as well, from less dark to more "heroic". Same deal with the color change for Superman's outfit.

There was honestly a heck of a lot of that in the Snyder Cut, which was completely unnecessary to tell the story, but put incredibly violent and dark spins on the supposed heroes of the story. And even more stuff that was just long and drawn out scenes, that served zero purpose, except to just be longer. I found myself constantly thinking "Ok, let's get on with the story" while watching long lingering scenes of people's facial expressions or something. Heck. The whole "Bruce travels over the mountains" scene in his cut is like 10x longer. Whedon shows like 5 seconds of mountain, then Bruce walking into the bar. Snyder shows us like 2 minutes of long distance scenes of desolate snowy mountain top, and someone traveling over it with a mule or something. Like... really? The whole film was that. Over and over.

It was something I didn't really notice the first time, but when watching it, and then immediately watching the Whedon cut, it really stood out. While watching the Whedon cut, I'd see the same scene start, then end in a much shorter time, but while transferring the exact same amout of information to the viewer. It was just more efficient use of screen time.

Longer for the sake of longer doesn't actually make the film any better. And, again, the actual extra stuff in the film (story bits, not just longer drawn out scenes of the same things), not only didn't add anything to the story, but tended to distract and detract from it. Whedon managed to get across Cyborg's disastifaction with what has happened to him, and with his dad, in like one 30 second scene, while Synder had to keep coming back to the same thing, spending much much more time on it, but not actually getting any more depth out of the character as a result.


Which ties back into my earlier comments and observations about Rebel Moon. It had the same problem of spending 5x more time showing us characters doing and saying things that were really unnecessary to give us the information we need to know what the characters are doing, and why they are doing it. And that goes right back to my first observation: That Snyder has a hard time self editing. He likes scenes so he puts them in. Even if they don't actually add anything to the finished product. I pointed out several such scenes in Rebel Moon in my earlier posts in this thread, and having re-watched his JL cut, I can see the same thing there now.
'

It's just... the extent of the Snyder hate is strange. Extended Director cuts are ridiculously common, it's not some kind of rare or strange thing, but the level of resistance this gets is as though it's some great crime against cinema, instead of something in every DVD.

It's not Snyder hate. I don't start out liking or disliking a person. I look at the work, and I assess it on its own merits. If, as a result of that, I spot a pattern of "things I don't like" that happens to align with a specific director, then that's not about my feelings about that person. It's about liking or disliking specific things about films, and noticing that this one director has a habit of doing things that I dislike.

I'm trying to restrict this to the work itself, and not the person. And let me be clear. I've loved some of his work in the past. The entire WW1 sequence in Sucker Punch is like my favorite film sequence of all time. It's just freaking beautiful.

But yeah. I've noticed that, as he's become a bigger director, and (presumably) had more creative control over the project he works on, the work has suffered as a result. And ironically, it's many of the things I really like about his earlier work (mostly the way he shoots scenes) that become detractors when that's so obviously being focused on at the cost of the story and plot working well. And yeah, I think at least part of it is also that he tends to really excel at dark and gritty scenes in his films, which is great if that's what the audience expects from the film. That's not typically what people are looking for in a Justice League film though.

He should stick to filming other people's screenplays. Might be a bit of Peter Principle going on here.

[BloodSquirrel]

It's just... the extent of the Snyder hate is strange. Extended Director cuts are ridiculously common, it's not some kind of rare or strange thing, but the level of resistance this gets is as though it's some great crime against cinema, instead of something in every DVD.

It's not hate. I liked the Synder cut of Justice League. I'm interested in seeing if a similarly extended cut of Rebel Moon improves it in the same way. Nobody is just bashing Synder here for the sake of bashing him. I like his "true artistic vision" more than what they keep getting edited down to.

"Snyder has trouble keeping his projects in scope" is a very specific criticism, and a very actionable one. "Get it right on the first try" is not an unreasonable ask.

I've also yet to see you give an example where a bad movie was forgiven because of a director's cut. Any movie that needs a director's cut to save it was, as originally released, a failure.