I hate it when movies edit for time and subplots endings wind up on the cutting room floor and they leave you wondering what the heck happened. Then new Pirates of the Caribbean movie has a major example of this. Now don’t worry, no spoilers here. This plot is a major part of the story line and it branches off into a subplot and they could have edited other things and left the end of this in or they could have edited it out sooner and it would have made more sense then the cliffhanger they leave you with which really sucks. I felt cheated out on the ending of the movie. They left me hanging going “wait, what about them?” It frustrates me when that happens.
Take the movie Alien. This was based on an extremely scary book of the same name and the movie followed the book pretty much verbatim until it came time to edit it. For people like me that had read the book before seeing the movie, we were left going “what the heck!” The scenes that were edited were put in the sequel Aliens and were put back in the director’s cut of Alien. It was the scenes that explained why the aliens were taking some of the people instead of killing them, that they were being cocooned and used for incubators. This is a major plot point that was left out.
What dropped subplot drove you crazy?
June 6, 2011
delaney55
2 responses to “dropped storylines”
DarcKnyt
June 7th, 2011 at 07:11
Delaney, I’m with you all the way on this one. (One correction: the movie Alien was a movie script first. The two writers developed it as a movie. The novelization came after but saw wide release nationally while the movie was more slowly distributed. I made the same mistake until I started looking it up. And like you, I read Alien before seeing the movie.)
The incubation/maggot scene in Alien was critical and shouldn’t have been edited out, but I don’t get to make those decisions. And that also would have meant the movie Aliens (not as good in my opinion) wouldn’t have been able to use a “queen” or wasp system. So that’s the best example I can think of where something important gets left on the cutting room floor when it should be in the movie.
Sorry to hear you got rooked on that one. It’s always disappointing when that happens.
delaney55
June 7th, 2011 at 13:40
I hated that that scene was cut in Alien and felt cheated. The movie just made more sense with it intact. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting that glaring of a gap from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.