Watching Serenity

The movie, not the episode.  It was on TV.

Anyway, a simple observation: There needs to be a special edition which restores Inara's bow.  The bolt shooter she's given in its place is completely absurd.  Test audiences, fuck you.  Anyone who's seen the deleted scenes is familiar with the one in which she found out that the stuff she'd left behind on Serenity included the bow (packaged for storage, unstrung) and as weapons against the Reaver hordes go a bow and arrow is sort of appropriate.  The Reavers prefer their projectiles to be slower moving and larger --spikes and whatnot-- the shooting of Simon was the exception rather than the rule.

Using a similar weapon against them is sort of poetic.

The blot shooter makes nothing resembling sense.  The only format in which it makes sense is, "The video is of someone using a bow, we need to somehow make a high tech looking weapon that goes with the motions of that because the test audiences didn't like a bow."

Fuck you test audiences.

Also, never underestimate the screwdriver.

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To put the main point of this post into a more generalized form, since the move away from tapes new and different possibilities have presented themselves to us.  Previously including a scene not in the original movie (say a deleted scene you thought was better left in) would require splicing tape.  Now things are different.

It is possible to have versions of movies created by the end user.  Maybe you feel like you need the sentry guns part in Aliens because removing for the theatrical version it fucked up the pacing (it did) but you don't need the scenes of LV-426 pre-attack that the Special Edition put back in because they mess up the tone.  Previously, when it was on tape, you'd need to splice some tape to get that done.  But now that it's data you could theoretically create what you think is the perfect version of Aliens on a computer with ease.

Or any movie.  All that you need is for the raw materials to be released and then you can put them together as you see fit.  So the scenes where Inara has her bow get released alongside the scenes where it's replaced with a bolt shooter.  All the scenes, the theatrical scenes, the extended edition scenes, the director's super special edition scenes, whatever the hell the other editions would be known as scenes, and the scenes deleted from everything.

It's time that movies can be treated like mix tapes.  Put together the version you want to watch.