Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/12/22/see-46-shots-that-were-cut-fro.html
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I read a bit of an interview with the director, Gareth Edwards, about how different the finished film was compared to the trailers. He essentially said that as they were doing reshoots of the final battle sequences, the marketing folks went through existing footage and chose a bunch of shots to edit into a trailer. He warned them that the vast majority of the shots they’d chosen weren’t in his work-in-progress final edit, and they said that’s OK, they’ll look good as a trailer.
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“That’s OK. It’s only false advertising.”
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I believe it’s called “post-truth advertising”, these days.
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Personally I’m glad that most of those trailer shots weren’t in the finished film. They’re fine as split-second establishing shots and explanatory dialog, but the equivalent moments in the actual movie were a lot more naturalistic.
I think this is less a case of “a disaster of a movie was salvaged by clever editing” and more a case of careful, Pixar-like iteration.
I was actually wondering if the marketing folks were setting up a bit of a red herring here.
When I saw the trailer, it certainly seems to hint at a plot for Jyn where she’s turned to the Empire or led to the Dark Side, possibly ends up as a traitor to the Rebellion.
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Yeah, and that all seemed pretty awesome. Too bad it got diluted by the 100s of corporate wizards at Disney.
Alt-Truth?
I, for one, am glad that they cut the “I rebel” and the snarky “yes sir” lines.
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I think there’s a big difference between diluting something and having a completely different story to tell than you expected, which is the case here. They didn’t remove a storyline, it was never there to begin with. If anything, from what the director’s said, they encouraged him to push it further, and he said he was amazed by how little they interfered or suggested any changes.
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That makes sense to me. Like the giant Jedi statue, in the trailer it’s like “HEY LOOK HOW IMPRESSIVE THIS THING IS!” and in the finished movie it’s an awesome thing that just so happens to be in the background of the story.
The trailers make me feel like they softened jyn’s personality somewhat and that would be regrettable if they did so as not to anger the gamergate man babies. Emily asher-perrin of tor.com goes into it here. The trailers give a hint of a much stronger lead before the marketing lot got a hold of it. We’re told about her rebellious streak and standing up to authority but we never see it, that’s the cut i want to see.
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Seeing the scenes of younger Saw makes me think there was time spent to expanding on the nebulous period between when Jyn was initially rescued and when she was in jail. That’s unfortunate as that had the potential to add some much needed back-story.
I also agree with @politeruin that it felt like Jyn’s personality was softened considerably. I had been intentionally avoiding most anything Rogue One related because I didn’t want any spoilers. However, I had seen a couple of unavoidable trailers in theaters prior and even with having only seen that the final movie definitely had a different feel than I was expecting.
Of course, trailers are notorious for twisting movies and showing scenes that aren’t representative of the final cut. I don’t just mean movies being completely different than presented in the trailer (e.g. Jarhead, Iron Man 3, Cabin in the Woods, Age of Ultron) – but things like special effects not finished, dialog changes, scenes cut, scenes presented from different camera angles, or even scenes entirely reshot
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I like the idea of having a trailer that features material not seen in the main film. It gives the idea that, as with a true story, parts are being left out and the events are not limited to those presented on screen.
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Ah, so now I know where they left the great movie: on the cutting-room floor. (a phrase that no longer applies in the digital world.) Hmm…“in the editing bay” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
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On the flash drive?
You’re right. This is hard.
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Nah, I saw it in the theater.
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She beats up the guys rescuing her from the prison transport, acquires a gun through illicit means at a rebel base, more or less tells the rebel alliance to go screw themselves about half a dozen times and eventually leads a splinter group of rebels to steal an impounded Imperial shuttle from the Alliance and embark on a mission that had been expressly rejected by high command.
But she didn’t actually SAY the words “I rebel” in this cut so yeah, I guess she just comes off as a pushover.
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But what about the massive gap between when she was a child meeting saw for the first time and the next scene when she’s in an imperial jail? It feels to me like there’s an extended version with scenes showing how she got there and they cut them, i assumed at some point there’d be flashbacks to this and training with saw but we never got to see them unfortunately.
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I feel like that isn’t the story they were telling in this movie. Rogue One isn’t the story of Jyn’s upbringing and training, it’s the story of a scrappy band of outcasts getting together to pull off something the Rebellion is too chickenshit to attempt. We don’t see her getting trained, but we see the results of her training when she destroys a whole group of Stormtroopers single-handedly. That seems like much more efficient storytelling to me.
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