This week, Paramount Pictures is releasing on DVD a new cut of Star Trek II:
The Wrath of Khan. As the generally acknowledged fan-favorite of the
hugely successful Star Trek movie franchise, no doubt many are
eager to see this new version of their beloved film. But I can't
help thinking, what will happen to the version I saw as kid? Will
Star Trek II be the latest in an alarmingly long line of movies that
have been "improved" into oblivion?
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Improved Into Oblivion
Each of the movies below has been released on DVD in a cut that is
different from its original theatrical release. In a few cases,
such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the DVD includes both
the theatrical cut and the new version of the film. But in most
cases, the most recently released edition of the DVD contains
only the newer cut.
- The Abyss
- Apocalypse Now
- Blade Runner
- Conan The Barbarian
- The Exorcist
- Superman: The Movie
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
- Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
- Star Wars: A New Hope
- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
- Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi
- Terminator 2: Judgment Day
- True Romance
- The Wicker Man
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I first noticed the phenomenon with the 1977 film, Close Encounters
of the Third Kind. This was the first movie that made a big enough
impression on me that I actually paid to see it three times at the movie
theater. I still regard it as Spielberg's greatest film (perhaps tied
with Schindler's List). But Spielberg couldn't seem to leave well
enough alone. A few years later, in 1980, he released a "Special Edition"
of the film, with additional family sequences, and, in a compromise with
Columbia Pictures that he later came to regret, a tagged-on ending which
showed the central character, Roy Neary, inside the alien mothership.
The family sequences just slowed down the pacing and confused the focus
of the original cut, seriously interfering with the overwhelming sense
of single-minded obsession that Neary's character conveys so convincingly
in the original version. And even Spielberg didn't like the new ending.
I took to referring to the 1980 cut not as the "Special Edition", but as
the "Spoiled Edition" -- my favorite film, ruined. (I was a harsh critic
at fifteen.)
For almost two decades, the "Spoiled Edition" was the only version of
this film available in the US on VHS. As a result, it is the print
that the vast majority of its fans know best. Fortunately, the folks
at Criterion released the original version on laserdisc. It became the
very first laserdisc I ever purchased -- even before I owned a player --
because I feared that the "good" version of this film was destined to
disappear from the face of the earth, as indeed it has. In 1997, for
the film's 20th anniversary, Spielberg released yet another cut of
the film, this time removing the ill-advised inside-the-spaceship ending
forced on him in the "Special Edition", but leaving the rest of the film
substantially as it was in that 1980 cut. This is the only version
of the film available on DVD. To date, the far superior 1977 edition
can be seen at home only on that now out-of-print Criterion laserdisc.
It is one of a growing number of reasons I feel the need to keep my
laserdisc player, despite the DVD format's overall technical superiority.
Since then, many other films that for me were childhood favorites have
been improved into oblivion, or nearly so. This week, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
joins the list, and it appears that Paramount plans to release all of the
movies in the Star Trek franchise in "Special Edition" cuts over
the coming years. Will these new cuts live side-by-side on video retail
and rental store shelves with the original cuts, or will they force the
original versions down an Orwellian memory-hole into non-existence?
In the case of the original Star Wars trilogy, we know that
director/creator George Lucas has no intention of ever again releasing
the original cuts of these films to the home theater market. In an
interview with Scott Chernoff published in the July/August 2002 issue of
Star Wars Insider magazine, Lucas was asked point-blank if there's
any possibility of including the original versions of the films from
the classic trilogy on the forthcoming DVD releases alongside the newer
"Special Edition" reworkings. Lucas responded bluntly, "I don't think so.
I think of the film as The Special Edition. I don't think of
it as the early version, any more than I would put early rough cuts on.
I could put four or five rough cuts onto this thing and say, 'This is
how it advanced.' I consider the Special Edition as being the
final version at this point. I don't even worry about the other ones,
because it went through a lot of incarnations to get to the final stage."
In short, Lucas has decided that the original cuts of his films
should no longer exist and concerns about film history
or film preservation apparently don't enter into the equation.
Fans, however, don't necessarily agree, and a black
market in eBay-trafficked bootleg DVDs of the original cuts of these
films flourishes. The murky video quality and badly out-of-sync sound
on these illegal discs don't seem to be significantly deterring their
sale to eager Internet Star Wars fans.
Other movies that have apparently been improved into oblivion include
Superman: The Movie, Blade Runner, True Romance,
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and Star Trek: The Motion
Picture, all of whose DVD releases do not contain the original
theatrical cuts. Of these films, only Blade Runner is rumored
to have a new DVD edition in the works containing both the original and
director's versions.
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Technological Obsolescence
New versions pushing old versions out of print is not the only
concern. In some cases the newer cut of the film has been given a
much better presentation on DVD than the original, causing the
original version to suffer a kind of technological obsolescence.
A clear example
of this is Conan The Barbarian. The newer cut is released
on DVD with remastered 5.1 surround sound and an "enhanced for 16x9 TVs"
picture, whereas the original version has only a mono soundtrack with
an unenhanced letterboxed image.
As more films get released in "new
and improved" versions, it seems likely that more and more original
versions of the films will be left behind, either to lapse out of
print altogether, or to be consigned to technological obsolescence
as the technology of home theater marches forward without them.
When DVDs are ultimately supplanted by a high-definition format,
how many of the original theatrically-released versions of these
films will survive the transition?
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I find this trend toward film revisionism to be a bit alarming. Films
are such an important part of so many people's childhood that when a
director decides to reshape a film after an audience has had a chance
to love it, it feels like he's reaching into our minds and altering
our collective memories. Generations have shared the pleasure of film
classics like The Wizard of Oz or Gone With The Wind
or Casablanca. Will current and future generations have the
joy of sharing their enthusiasm for the films of their childhood with
their children? If this trend continues, perhaps not.
As a society, we tend to think of artists as uniquely gifted, individual
geniuses. As a result, we grant these auteurs a wide latitude in making
artistic decisions and tend to assume that they know what is best for
their films. But the slew of "Director's Cuts" and "Special Editions"
released in the home video market over the past couple of decades tells
a different story. For one thing, director's cuts tend to be longer, and
though it is fun to see extra scenes with our favorite characters, these
longer cuts of the films often make them slow, ponderous, and bloated.
Indeed, it is the rare extended edition that is actually an improvement.
Extended editions often over-explain things, too, taking away some of the
mystery of the original editions, and the literal-mindedness
of these additions can have the side-effect of invalidating a favorite
interpretation of the film. I've always viewed The Abyss in
mythic terms: both the hero and the heroine visit the "underworld",
die and return from the dead in the classic hero-myth formula, and in
this context, the aliens (accompanied by Alan Silvestri's religious-hued
choral music on the underscore) read naturally as mythic creatures --
angels who grant Ed Harris's character entry into "Heaven" after he
is redeemed by the power of love. In the extended cut, though, the
aliens are too threatening and mean-spirited to be convincingly read
as angels. The extended cut reduces them to a rehash of the Gort role
in a second-rate retelling of The Day The Earth Stood Still.
I'm not the only one who thinks "less" is often "more". When George
Lucas released Star Wars: The Phantom Menace on DVD, he did not
release the original theatrical cut, but instead gave us a slightly
longer, extended cut. Fans had other ideas about this film, though.
Through the power of desktop video editing and the distribution reach of
the Internet, one fan's personal "Viewer's Cut" of the film, dubbed The
Phantom Edit, took the Net by storm. Tightening the film's pacing
by ruthlessly removing scenes that failed to drive the story forward,
The Phantom Edit arrived at a cut of the film that many fans felt
was better than the original.
Perhaps as desktop video tools become more widely available, we'll see
more such "Viewer's Cuts". I, for one, would love to see a "Viewer's
Cut" of Twelve Monkeys that ends with Bruce Willis's last scene
in the airport, instead of continuing on past that obvious point of
artistic closure. A "Viewer's Cut" version of Unbreakable which
removes the text-cards that explain what happens to the characters at
the end would also be high on my list. Or how about a drastically shortened
Star Trek: The Motion Picture to remove the endless tedium of the
V'Ger cloud traversal? As a one-hour episode, it might actually gain more
fans!
In the March/April 2002 issue of The
Perfect Vision, Jonathan Valin ends his review of the Apocalypse Now: Redux DVD with a similar
sentiment: "But truly satisfying the film isn't and will never be, no
matter what gets added. What is wrong with Apocalypse can only be cured
by subtraction." I suspect Valin's claim is true of more films than
directors would generally care to acknowledge. Indeed, without much
effort, we could probably name dozens of films that would benefit from
a little judicious subtraction.
Back in 1980, when Spielberg was releasing the "Special Edition"
of Close Encounters, special editions seemed like a marketing
ploy designed to bring people back into the theaters to see a film
they'd already seen. What would tempt someone to see a movie in the
theater again? Well, what if it were a different version of the film, so
that in fact, the audience hadn't seen exactly this film before?
For a popular medium like film, this is sheer marketing genius because
pop-culture consumers are generally frightened off by anything too new.
What could be safer than a "new" version of a comfortably predigested
movie we'd already (mostly) seen?
More recently, as the DVD format rocketed up the home entertainment
chain to the top, studios competing for consumer home entertainment
dollars needed to find a way to entice consumers to rent/buy DVDs of
movies they might already have seen in the movie theaters. And again,
the "Special Edition" cut seems tailor-made for such a task. What better
way to convince someone to see a movie again than to tell him or her that
it isn't the same movie? Consumers will have to pay again, just to see
what's "new" about the new cut.
But if this trend continues, I predict that the balance will shift
again, taking us full-circle back to the movie theater. We seem
to be approaching a time when the archival, readily available home
video versions of films are mostly modified, extended-cut products.
Paradoxically, this could again drive people back to the theaters.
We'll feel compelled to see the theatrical release of films because we
know that that will be our only chance. Once the film gets to DVD,
it will be modified, recut, extended. In effect, this will make the
theatrical cut the rare, "special" edition, and the "Special Edition"
DVD release the mundane, every-day accessible version! Perhaps then
we can begin the cycle anew, with special DVD releases proudly touting
"Original Theatrical Cut! Shorter Runtime! Extra Scenes Removed!"
I look forward to the day.
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