Editing is where a movie is made or broken. Because editing cannot save already bad movies (see Suicide Squad and The Snowman for proper examples), it can cause a previously good film to be even better. Take the shots from a master artisan and put them into the hands of an equally powerful editor, like Thelma Schoonmaker or Walter Murch, you’ve got the makings of a masterpiece of cinema. On the other hand, if you hand over that same footage to some guy who puts together music videos for his brother's band, you might want to pull back your expectations a bit.
Here are my picks for the best and worst editing of 2017.
Best Editing:
Wonder Woman
In addition to being an overall excellent movie, and the only sound DC movie in recent memory I might add, this has the best looking editing I have seen all year. Especially in the action scenes. With modern action movies, there is a tendency to use what I call “Rapid Fire Editing,” which is when an action scene is cut in a hyperactive fashion to make the scene feel more visceral when all that does is leave the audience with a severe headache. Wonder Woman, on the other hand, doesn’t have any of that. Every cut is precise and adequately timed, every shot is utilized at the appropriate moment, and every action scene leaves you with a sense of accomplishment and, no pun intended, wonder. The best example is the scene where Wonder Woman walks out of the trenches and marches straight into enemy fire taking down the bad guys and liberating a village in the process. That whole scene is edited so gracefully that I wish that films editor could work on all action movies. There are many reasons to watch and enjoy Wonder Woman, and the editing makes it all even more beautiful.
Worst Editing:
Transformers: The Last Knight
I have never really been a fan of the Michael Bay Transformers movies except for the first one, which wasn’t awful but still wasn’t worth any praises for many reasons. As each sequel continued to make money and repeat the same story, characters, lousy jokes, ugly designs, boring action scenes, and horrendous misogyny over and over and over again, I just got more and more frustrated with this series. While I am happy to report that I have never given any of the sequels my box office cash, I have rented one or two of them on-demand, purely out of curiosity. Which is why I can talk about this one today, and proclaim, without a doubt, this is the stupidest, laziest, and most unprofessional editing I have ever seen. First, once again, the movie spends way too much time with human characters we don’t care about as evidenced by the editing choosing to put all focus on them rather than the giant fighting robots. Next, just like all other Transformers movies that came before it, every action scene is choppy, incomprehensible, and has no tension to it despite the “epic” stuff happening. Finally, and this is the most annoying part, the aspect ratio continually changes. I don’t mean it changes from scene to scene, I mean it varies from shot to shot. One shot it will be full, then next it will be square, next it will be a massive rectangle, then back to wide again, and so on and so forth. I fail to understand how a movie could have had six editors (yes, that’s right, six editors) and not one of them thought to tell the director to pick a single aspect ratio. This movie is garbage from shot one, and the editing only exemplifies its awfulness.
Next up: Best & Worst Director
Ladies & gentleman, I am TheNorm, thank you for reading.
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