Bright, or The Movie Sadly Not Titled "Orc Cops"

What's wrong with the editing?

Also yeah, the Monster Decay was egregious. Then again, nearly every action movie does it to some extent or another. I watched POTC Dead Men Tell No Tales last night, and it wasn't much better.

edited 16th Jan '18 6:28:23 PM by storyyeller

"Not Much Worse Than the Latest Pirates Of The Caribbean" might be the saddest case of Damning With Faint Praise I've ever heard.

Transitions were so blunt I got whiplash from them, scenes just seemed to sort of stop and start incredibly abruptly, and the fight scenes were chopped to hell that between the darkness and everything it was damn hard to tell what was going on. And this is from someone who had no difficulties with the Transformers movies.

The editing style is disturbingly similar to Suicide Squad. I’ll give it some credit, in that Bright is less likely to set up a joke and forget the joke existed, but Bright is still really incompetent when it comes to editing.

It makes you wonder what’s going on with David Ayer. Is he not shooting enough footage from enough angles? What’s going on with the B unit? Does Ayer think this is his new signature style? Because it’s not a very good one.

And even if you don’t notice the editing, bad editing is still an issue. Anyone who watches enough movies has internalized film language to a degree (even if you aren’t aware of it) and bad editing garbles it. What this ultimately boils down to is that good editing can add layers to a movie. Arrival was like that. You can’t piece together the timeline until the very end and the blunt, abrupt cuts help with that. And that’s the point. Bad editing, on the other hand, can actually strip layers from the movie. In the fight scenes, for example, unless literally your entire point is “fights are confusing” iffy fight choreography combined with incoherent editing means that the fight scenes lose most of their impact beyond “a fight happened. It was six minutes long.”

edited 17th Jan '18 10:04:17 AM by Zendervai

I can tell you the editing on the commercials was pretty bad, in a "why did they pick this particular set of scenes?" kind of way. Watching those, it gives you the impression that they're saying, "if you were in our shoes, you'd be exactly the same" to black people, what with the only one we see being a cop, and the orcs all acting like your stereotypical scary minority folks.

It turned me off of the movie because I don't want to bother with outright racist propaganda shit.

The editing for Suicide Squad happened because they had two separate cuts with overall different tones and were cannibalizing from both to create the theatrical cut. It would stand to reason something similar might have happened here, multiple sources insisting on certain sequences while also removing what set them up earlier in the story. The biggest jump for me was at the end, where we see Nick and Ward together in literally the previous shot and then Nick walks out of the burning warehouse and realizes they got separated, so he goes back in to rescue him. It might have worked had the film established they got separated, or at least jump to Nick inside searching for him, but having him reach safety and then go back inside didn't add much to the story.

A lot of the action sequences didn't work, but there were glimpses of it working alright. While it did fall under Lowered Monster Difficulty (a friend of mine saw it happening as the elves were no scoping the SWAT team), the final fight against them managed to be somewhat engaging.

In any case, while there is only so much you can do with the material you are given, a good editor knows how to make it work even if it is only mediocre. That's their entire job.

edited 17th Jan '18 10:53:59 AM by KJMackley

Yes, a lot of things get clearer if you read either of the two leaked scripts. For example, in the script Nick was supposed to save Tikka, then realize that Ward didn't follow him and run back, just in time for the Fogteeth to roll up and gawk.

Another artifact like this is Ward's wife out on a ladies' night - the scripts had entirely different motivation for Ward leaving his daughter at her grandma's, and Ayer apparently had no idea what to do with it after all the rewrites.

Also, the scripts had Kandomere just as combat capable as the evil elves, single-handedly defeating an entire crooked SWAT squad (this was rewritten into the evil elves cutting through a FBI response team in the movie).