Entertainment
The Worst Director’s Cut Ever Made Is Now Streaming For Free
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
As a movie lover, there’s one phrase that always gets my blood pumping: “director’s cut.” We all know that studios often make changes that can absolutely ruin a movie, like when they added those awful voiceover narrations to Blade Runner. As soon as he could, Ridley Scott released a version without those voice-overs that is infinitely better.
While Scott might have gone a bit overboard in releasing so many different edits over the years, the point stands: a director’s cut is usually a way of improving a movie. Every now and then, though, a director comes along and does his best to ruin a classic.
One such man is Richard Kelly, best known as the director of Donnie Darko. The original film stalled out at the box office, but it’s now considered a cult hit due to its heady mixture of violence, time travel, and coming-of-age teen hijinks, complete with the creepiest bunny ever put on film.
The most compelling thing about the movie is that it refuses to explain most of its craziest events, forcing you to think about what the heck you just watched long after the credits roll. Unfortunately, Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut ruins everything cool and mysterious about the original by painfully explaining everything in excruciating detail.
Not All Director’s Cuts Are Created Equal
If you loved Donnie Darko in 2001, then the arrival of the Director’s Cut in 2004 probably seemed like a big deal. This new cut promised over 20 minutes of new footage, new special effects, and improved sound quality. Sounds great, right?
Unfortunately, the new footage mostly comes from deleted scenes awkwardly shoehorned back into the movie, without any concern for pacing or characterization. The result is an overly lengthy film; while the original Donnie Darko was a comparatively svelte 113 minutes, the Director’s Cut’s 134 minutes makes it feel like a bloated, plodding mess.
There are some other unnecessary changes here, including tweaks to the soundtrack. For another film, such changes might not be a big deal. However, Donnie Darko had an absolutely perfect soundtrack, one which used a series of quirky bangers to set the scene for the surreal events of the film.
The original needle drops made everything feel hazy and dreamlike, so any changes to them (even minor changes, like replacing “The Killing Moon” with “Never Tear Us Apart”) feel like cinematic blasphemy that is as offensive as it is completely unnecessary.
A Frank Examination
The main reason the Donnie Darko director’s cut sucks, though, is that director Richard Kelly forgot the quintessential rule of sci-fi storytelling: less is more. The original movie presented plenty of time-tripping mysteries, including how (spoilers, sweetie!) the title character traveled into his own past, ensuring that he’d die when a jet engine inexplicably fell into his bedroom.
Donnie laughs right before he dies, secure in the knowledge that he is fixing a doomed timeline and saving someone he loves. As the credits roll, first-time viewers are always struck by the same question: “What the heck just happened?”
Unfortunately, the Director’s Cut answers that question in the most literal and boring way. You see, in the original cut, Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) takes an interest in time travel and receives a book, The Philosophy of Time Travel, written by a now-retired science teacher. But we don’t get much actual wisdom from the book and must figure out the timey-wimey narrative on our own.
In the Director’s Cut, we get pages from this book literally superimposed on the screen. Thanks to all this dreadfully boring exposition, we finally know what happened in the movie, and it’s pretty wild!
Ruining The Greatest Trip In Cinema
Apparently, the moment the jet engine landed in Donnie’s bedroom, it created a Tangent Universe. The young man is a Living Receiver who gains bizarre superpowers, including telekinesis and premonition, and has a seemingly impossible job: to return the jet engine to the Primary Universe, the only way to prevent the destruction of the entire universe.
By the end of the film, a traumatized Donnie creates a time portal and rips a jet engine off the plane that his mother and younger sister are in. He sends that engine and himself into the past, killing himself and closing the tangent universe while he laughs, knowing his sacrifice will save those he loved.
Is it a neat explanation? Maybe. But the one that you came up with in your head was probably way, way cooler. Unfortunately, this is the nature of science fiction: being handed the truth (like what the Smoke Monster is in Lost and what the Upside Down is in Stranger Things) is never as satisfying as trying to figure everything out on your own.
Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut hands you every boring explanation on a plate, sapping the mystery from a movie it already ruined with new scenes and a botched soundtrack. If you want to watch the worst director’s cut ever made, though, it’s now streaming for free on Tubi.
Trust me, though: after seeing it, you’ll want to escape your new Tangent Universe and return to the timeline where you never watched this cinematic abomination!
